Burned Dynasty Part One (Wall Street Empire: Strictly Business Book 3)

Chapter 5

Savage drives us out of the city toward New Jersey, which means I’m quite possibly, once again, leaving Damion behind. Only this time, it’s his choice, not mine, though I doubt he’d see it that way. I’m the one who pushed him away. I’m the one who said no more.

Unless, of course, he’s traveled ahead of us, but I don’t know that I can count on that actually being true. I think of all that has happened these past few days and how out of my own mind I’ve been until Damion jolted me back to myself a few minutes ago. It’s funny how one can wallow in such pain that it owns us and everyone around us. There is no room for anything but the destruction it creates. We feel nothing else, certainly not compassion for those we love, because we have become the pain.

I once said Damion owns me.

But it’s the pain of losing my father that’s owned me these past days.

No, I amend firmly, in my mind. It’s not the pain that’s owned me. It’s something darker and harder. Somehow, pain has transformed into bitterness, anger, and a need for revenge, and those things have been all-consuming. Thanks to Damion, I know now that those cutting emotions are more dangerous than even the greed that West Senior openly owns—more destructive, too. That brutal combination drove me away from Damion under the fa?ade of protecting him.

Maybe it was a fa?ade. I don’t know. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself to that point.

I love Damion, and I do very much want to protect him, but the reality here is, if I’m being honest with myself, that I never believed he’d simply accept what had to happen to remedy his father’s ways. He’d never have allowed me to throw myself on the sword and risk myself to bring damaging attention to his father. And I didn’t want to wait to trap his father. I didn’t want to allow logic to own a place in my decisions, and Damion would have made me step back and think.

Or he would have promised me my revenge at his own jeopardy.

The drive stretches onward, which really doesn’t surprise me considering the destination is a safehouse, which means it must be someplace where we won’t easily be found, and West Senior’s power lies within the city. Or maybe it stretches far beyond, and it just serves my state of mind well to believe it’s somehow limited by distance.

Fifteen minutes stretch into what feels like an hour despite being truly only fifteen minutes. Impatience and my feeling of lacking control win, and I glance at Adam where he sits on the other side of the backseat. “How far until we’re there?”

“Depending on traffic, forty-five minutes to an hour and a half.”

In the New York/New Jersey connection region, that broad statement rings true rather than ridiculous, as it might elsewhere. “Do you have actual intel that I’m in danger?”

“Yes,” he replies.

My stomach knots, but there is no real fear inside me for my own safety where there might have been in the past. I’m not afraid for myself. I’m afraid for my mother and for Damion. In that, I have been on the right side of this, even if I allowed the wrong path of action. “Can you tell me what?”

“That’s up to Damion,” he replies.

It’s an answer that strips even more of my control and removes me from the equation that is my own safety, but Adam ultimately works for Damion, and—well, I’ve not exactly proven I won’t take what he gives me and go public with it, either. I don’t push back, which, even in our short acquaintance, is probably as shocking to Adam as it is to me.

I’ll talk to Damion if I ever get the chance.

I nod and sink back into my cushions, lashes lowering, as I stare down at the engagement ring I didn’t forget to remove, as I told the crowd in the audience today. I simply don’t want to remove it. But my mind goes back to a time when wearing it was as painful as removing it. I’m there again, living that experience. I’d been destroyed by the fake finance routine and by the idea of wearing a ring he’d bought for me but never intended for me to wear until this charade of an engagement served his purpose.

As if he reads that in me, his hand closes around the ring and my hand. “This isn’t nothing.”

“It’s fake,” I reply, when in my mind I’ve told myself to just let it go, but apparently, I just don’t have that in me.

“It’s not fake. God, woman. I bought it for you.”

Only to basically tell me it was a stupid mistake, I think, but this isn’t a conversation I want to have right now. My emotional bandwidth has expired times a thousand. I try to push around him. He cages my legs with his powerful thighs. “Alana.” This time my name is a stubborn plea. He’s not ready to drop this, and I am.

“Let me go.”

“I did that several times now,” he replies. “It never works out for me.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“Letting you get away was a mistake I won’t make again.”

The words are sweet, like sugar and happiness, but they don’t compute with everything else he’s said and done. “You confuse me.”

“Says the woman who told me we could only be friends when we both wanted more.”

“Okay,” I admit. “That’s fair, but we were kids. We’re not kids anymore.”

“We’re not just friends, either.” He releases my hand and grips my waist, and I swear his hand on my body is already burning through my brain cells. His forehead presses to mine, and he murmurs, “I did things, Alana.” His voice radiates with a mix of guilt and torment. And while, no, this is not the first time he’s said something like this to me, there’s a gut-wrenching quality to his confession that tears down the wall the whole ring thing has slammed between us.My hand presses to his cheek, and I meet his stare, hoping that he sees the truth in my eyes.

“Whatever you did, it’s in the past. I don’t care.”

“I do,” he insists. “I care. I don’t want you to know those things, and my worst fear is that I might not be able to hide them from you.”

“I don’t need you to hide anything from me, Damion. That feeling—like you need to do that—it’s not us. That’s not who I want to believe we are together. And that’s not how we make this work.”

“It might be the only way we make this work.”

“You want to live with someone you have to keep secrets from? Really? That’s your idea of happiness? The person you live your life with should be able to deal with the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s not like my family doesn’t have its ugly.”

“It’s not the same, Alana.”

“It’s the same to me.”

“No.” His expression tightens. “It wouldn’t be if you knew the details, which you will not.”

“That doesn’t work for me, Damion.”

“Try harder to make it work,” he demands.

Anger churns in my belly, and I try once again to escape his embrace. I barely move. He’s too big and too strong for me to push myself out of this confrontation.

“I thought I could protect you by staying away, but that didn’t work,” he confesses. “My father still has his claws in your family. I need you close, but I don’t know how close I dare.”

“Living with you is pretty close.”

“Probably too close, but I need to be able to protect you.”

That’s twice he’s made that statement, and this time, I bristle and press my hand to his chest.

“Is that what this is? A way to protect me?”

He covers my hand with his. “You know better. Do you really think I’d give you that ring and tell you the story behind it if I didn’t want to marry you, Alana? If I didn’t want to see the look in your eyes when I told you what I’d wanted then, and what I have always wanted with you.”

“And what did you see, Damion? What do you see now?”

“A woman who doesn’t believe I’ll be here tomorrow.”

“Will you?”

“I need to know nothing can blow back on you.”

My gut twists in painful knots. “That’s not the answer I want, and most importantly, it’s not the answer I need to be able to say yes to living with you. It sounds like an excuse.”

“It’s not a damn excuse. I’m standing here, right here, right now, telling you it’s bigger than that, Alana. It’s so damn much more.”

In that moment, it’s easier for me to believe he’s afraid of what I might learn than afraid of a real future with me. Maybe because it’s true. Maybe because it’s what I want to believe. “The part where I’m not the little girl next door anymore just doesn’t seem to compute with you, and maybe it never will.”

“No,” he says, “you’re not the little girl next door. You’re the woman I want in my bed every day when I wake up.”

He shrugs out of his jacket, and everything inside me screams, “Yes, please, let’s stop talking. Let’s get naked.” My sex clenches, and there is this need inside me for this man that has existed for what feels like my entire life. It’s pure craving, and that craving doesn’t care about heartache, rings, business agreements, or even living arrangements.

I reach for his silver tie and tug it free, the silk pooling on the ground as surely as I’m melting in my own high heels.

His hands settle possessively on my hips, scorching me right through the thin black silk of my blouse. There’s possessiveness in the way he holds me, the air charges around us, and my knees tremble with the intensity of what I share with this man. “God, woman,” he murmurs. “What do you do to me, and how do you do it over and over and over again? Tell me.” But he doesn’t give me the chance to argue the reality, which is much different than his version of who does what.

I blink back to the present and swallow hard against the emotion burning my chest. I love this ring. I don’t want to take it off. Ever. But the universe seems to forever divide me and Damion. How do we get by death and destruction? How do we end the cycle? Is it even possible?