“You did that. Not me.”
His mind is reeling—I see it in his eyes. “You kept me from my baby brothers,” he says suddenly, his voice rising again. “You kept my father from his sons.”
That one lands hard enough that I flinch. I did all of that. “I didn’t know how to tell him?—”
“That’s not good enough,” he snaps.
“I was scared.”
“Of what?” he demands. “Of losing him? Of losing me?”
“Of losing everything,” I say, and now the tears are falling again, and I don’t even try to stop them. “Everything except for losing you. I couldn’t give a shit about that.”
He stares at me with something that looks almost like disgust. “You’re a mess.”
I don’t reply. There’s nothing to say. He’s right about that.
He steps closer again, looming. “You’re a monster. You sleep with my dad, you blow up my life, and then you cry about it, like you’re owed sympathy. It’s pathetic.”
“I fucked some of this up, but don’t act like you had nothing to do with it?—”
“You psycho bitch,” Jason is still mid-breath, still flushed and towering over me. His fist balls, and I brace.
But the footsteps behind him steal his attention. He turns slowly.
Damian stands in the doorway. He looks composed in a way that is dangerous. His tie is straight again. He plucks an invisible piece of lint from his sleeve. His expression is bored, except for the sharpness in his eyes.
Not composed. Not boredom. Barely controlled fury.
Jason opens his mouth first. “This isn’t what it looks like?—”
“Keep talking to your future stepmother like that,” Damian says cooly, “and I’m writing you out of the will.”
The sentence lands like a dropped glass.
Jason goes pale. “What?”
“You heard me,” Damian replies.
28
DAMIAN
The sharp trillof Jason’s phone pierces the tension. It rings once, twice, urgent and insistent, like a referee calling the end of a round.
He glares at us both before checking the screen. “Faith.” There’s something close to panic in his face now, stripped of swagger. He hesitates only half a second before turning and leaving, the door swinging shut behind him with more force than necessary. I hear his voice through the door, “Baby, hey…”
Silence rushes in. I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “Saved by the bell,” I say lightly. The words land somewhere between humor and disbelief.
Perry huffs a laugh, wiping at her eyes with the heel of her palm. “Did you just propose to me in the world’s most awkward way?”
It takes me a moment to process that. I replay what I said. I hadn’t planned on it, but there it is. I laugh then, low and unfiltered. “I guess I did.”
The absurdity of it settles over us.
She studies me carefully now, not flustered, not frantic. Thoughtful. For a moment, I see the calculation behind her eyes. She bites her bottom lip the way she does before saying yes sometimes.
But she doesn’t say it now. Instead, she tilts her head and says, “You know it was at the New Year’s Eve party, right?”
