There’s a pause.
“I sold the shop too.”
I stare at him. “You what?”
“I sold it,” he repeats. His voice doesn’t break, but there’s something tight in it. “Me, Bridger, Cody. We talked about it for a long time. Decided it was time. Way past time.”
He leans back, scrubs a hand down his face, then looks at me straight. “I don’t want anything to do with Cross and Sons. I don’t want that his shit anywhere near me. I don’t want him touching a single thing that matters to me. And I sure as hell don’t want any of the bad shit following me into whatever this is.”
He looks at me likethisis what he means. Me. Us.
“I’m trying to cut it all off at the root before it spreads. Before it touches you. But, fuck, Lo. I think I’m too late.”
Chapter Nineteen
DAMIAN
Marlowe looks up at me with those electric blue eyes, wide and waiting. “What do you mean, you think it’s too late?”
My mouth is dry. I drag a hand down my face and it stings. The cut across my cheek pulls tight, sticky with dried blood. I don’t answer right away because the words don’t come easy. They’re stuck behind guilt and violence and the rotten truth of who I am.
This is the part where I lose her. Where she finally sees me for what I am.
I meet her eyes and my voice is low, rough. “I gave you that spa weekend with Neve so I could go to Vegas.”
Her brows pull together in confusion, and then a flicker of hurt.
“I wasn’t there partying. I was buying us all new IDs. Me. Bridger. Cody. You. I wanted options. If shit goes sideways with Clay, I need to be able to move fast. Get you out. Get us all out.”
She stares at me like she knows there’s more.Fuck. She always knows. How the hell does she always know?
Her voice is a whisper. “Keep going.”
My hands ball into fists, and when I look down, blood drips to the floor in dark red splatters from knuckles clenched too tight. I turn away and pace once, my heart racing like it’s trying to outrun the words clawing their way up my throat.
“You’re going to think I’m a fucking monster for this,” I say quietly.
“Just say it, Damian.” Her voice is shaky. She’s starting to panic—I can see it in the way her fingers twitch, the way her eyes dart around the room like she’s searching for the closest exit.
I hate this. I hate what I’m about to do to her. But not saying it would be worse. So I spit it out, fast, like ripping the pin from a grenade. “I put a contract on him.”
She jerks back, breath catching, the shock hitting her hard enough to draw the color from her face. This is it. This is the moment she walks out for good. The moment she finally sees me for what I am. Not someone she can love. Just a monster with blood on his hands and nothing good left in him.
“I used money from the shop sale. Bridger, Cody, and I talked about it. We didn’t just sell the business to get free. We did it to fund the kind of clean exit we couldn’t get any other way. Clay’s not just dangerous. He’s psychotic. He’s the kind of man who doesn’t die quietly. So I found someone. Someone who knows how to disappear problems like him.”
She stays silent, frozen, eyes locked on mine as if trying to make sense of someone she thought she knew, and coming up empty.
“You don’t have to love me. You can hate me for this. But I’m going to keep you alive, even if I burn every motherfucker who gets near you. No matter who they are,” I vow. “I will burn the fucking world down for you. Kill for you. Bleed for you. I would fucking die for you.” I lower my head and repeat what I’ve been telling her since the first night we met. “I’m not the good guy, Lo.I never have been. But I swear to you, everything I’ve done was to protect you. Even this. Especially this.”
I rake a hand through my hair, waiting to see if she’ll say anything, run from me, shout at me, but she stays quiet. So I continue. “But something went wrong. The guy I hired… he vanished. No calls. No texts. Nothing. That’s where I was last night. Trying to track him. Trying to figure out if he skipped, got paid off, or if Clay got to him first.” I exhale hard, pacing a short line across the room. “And now the bakery’s gone. The fire. The damage. The timing—it’s too perfect to be coincidence. I don’t know if Clay lit the match himself or sent someone to do it, but this… this is it starting.”
She’s just staring at me. Not blinking. Not moving. Her eyes are huge, locked on me like I just split the ground open at her feet. And fuck, it hits me low in the gut. That look. Not fear. Worse. It's the way someone looks at you when they finally realize they’re better off without you. I try to breathe in deep, but it catches in my mouth, sharp and sour. I know how she sees me now, and it makes my skin crawl. I paid to have my father killed. She doesn’t know how bad he is. To her, there will be no redemption in this, no disguise good enough to hide the thing I have become. I never wanted her to see me like this. Not the real me. Not this twisted, bloodstained version I’ve been trying to outrun.
“Fuck,” I mutter under my breath. “You don’t understand what he is, Lo. What he’s done.”
She looks down.
I step closer and lift her chin gently with my index finger. “After Laura’s accident,” I say quietly, like the walls might listen, “when I visited him in prison, he told me something. He looked me straight in the eye and said he had someone cut the brake lines on her car. Said it was my punishment. Like she was nothing more than leverage.”
