Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
DAMIAN
She’s gone.
The door slams, and the silence that follows feels like a chokehold. I stare at the mess I made—takeout cartons ripped open, soy sauce bleeding into the wood, chopsticks snapped like bones. The whole kitchen looks like it got hit by a storm, and somehow I’m still the eye of it.
I’m motionless, yet breathing too hard.
My fists ache from clenching. My teeth grind until my jaw threatens to splinter.
I don’t know what to do with the heat under my skin, the pressure in my chest, the words I don’t fucking have.
Everything I wanted to say is trapped behind my ribs, and now she’s gone again.
Gone with questions I refused to answer.
Gone thinking the worst because I gave her nothing but silence.
My silence is poison. I know that. But I still drink it every time.
I move without thinking. I just explode.
My arm sweeps across the counter, knocking every pot, pan, and glass dish to the floor with a roar that sounds like it’s tearing out of my spine.
Everything crashes. Metal on tile. Shattering ceramic.
A frying pan bounces once before slamming into the cabinet with a dent that’ll stay there like a scar.
It's still not enough. Nothing touches the fury in me. The way it writhes under my skin, alive and blistering. I reach for the edge of the counter, grip it so hard the tendons in my forearm scream, and I feel a sting—sharp and immediate. My hand’s bleeding.
A thick, deep cut across my palm. I must’ve caught the edge of a knife blade on the swing.
Doesn’t matter. I barely look at it. I don’t even flinch.
I like the pain. It’s the first thing that makes sense.
I lean back against the wall. Something soft squelches behind me—rice and noodles, the guts of an egg roll. The salty smell of soy sauce and sesame oil clings to everything, and I let myself sink down, slow and heavy, until my ass hits the floor.
The wall’s filthy. The floor’s worse. But I don’t move to clean any of it. I just sit there, back against drywall, hand bleeding, chest heaving. No tears. No shaking. Just pressure. And rage. Just the sound of my own heart throbbing in the wreckage I made. It thump, thump, thumps. It’s all I hear.
Voices come in slow, muffled, like they’re underwater. Like I’m underwater.
I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here.
One minute I’m staring at the tile, breathing like my chest is full of fire, and the next—
“Damian!”
A sharp sting explodes across my cheek. My head jerks to the side.
Blindingly fast. Real. I blink hard. Bridger is crouched in front of me, his face tight, eyes wild.
Neve is standing behind him, hand over her mouth, pale like she’s about to pass out.
“Damian, Jesus Christ,” Bridger barks. “Can you hear me?”
My lips move, but nothing comes out.
The kitchen’s spinning. It’s trashed—obliterated. Shards of glass everywhere. Chunks of broccoli stick to the ceiling. I don’t even know how that’s physically possible. A pan is halfway lodged under the fridge. Soy sauce is smeared across the floor like someone was dragged.
Neve stumbles forward, eyes darting like she’s trying to make sense of what she’s seeing. “Where is she?”
I blink up at her. “What?”
“Where is Marlowe?” Her voice is sharp and shaking. “Where is she?”
“I—she’s not—”
Neve bolts before I can finish, running through the apartment, opening every door like she’s expecting to find a body behind one of them.
My stomach flips. Acid-hot.
I look down at my hand.
Blood.
A lot of it. Dried and fresh. Streaked across my fingers, coating my palm. My jeans are stained dark from where I must’ve wiped it. I didn’t even notice. “I didn’t—” I shake my head, throat dry. “I would never hurt her.”
Bridger watches me like I’m not entirely human right now.
“She left,” I say. “She just needed air.”
Neve bursts back in, out of breath, eyes still wide. “She’s gone. She’s not here. Damian, what the fuck—”
“I said she left!” My voice cracks out like a whip, harsher than I mean, but it shuts them both up.
For a second.
Then Bridger steps back, eyes scanning the wreckage again—my blood, the shattered kitchen, the look on my face. He throws his arms out. “And you think after this she just needed air?”
I stand, dizzy, adrenaline still clawing at my throat. “This happened after she left.”
He doesn’t believe me. Or maybe he does—but it doesn’t matter. Because the scene tells a different story. A fucking horror movie version of what they walked into. And I can’t blame them. Not when I look like this. Not when I feel like this.
“I lost it,” I say, quieter now. “She walked out, and I—I didn’t know what to do with it.” The silence. The guilt. “I didn’t know what to do with my hands.” I hold up the bloody mess that used to be my hand. “I didn’t know what to do with anything.”
The rage has burned out, and what’s left is this gutted, hollow thing in my chest I can’t scrape out. Neve and Bridger hover like they’re waiting for me to detonate again, but I don’t have it in me. Not right now.
Neve paces toward the couch, scans the room, then picks something up off the cushion. “She left her phone,” she says, holding it like evidence. “She left without her phone.”
My vision blurs, but I don’t let it stop me. I walk to the trash, grab a handful of destroyed cartons and paper napkins, and start tossing them into the bag like I can clean this up fast enough to erase what they walked in on.
“She needed air,” I mutter. “So she left quick. That’s all.”
Bridger exchanges a look with Neve, but they don’t argue with me.
Not yet. They start helping without a word.
Neve’s pulling glass out of the corners.
Bridger’s on his hands and knees wiping up sauce.
The three of us working in this wrecked kitchen.
I’m so fucking ashamed the bridge of my nose stings.
“She stormed out for no reason?” Bridger asks as he stacks broken mugs in a bin.
“Yeah,” I say.
“For no reason?” Neve repeats the question, wiping soy sauce from the cabinet.
I grunt, grabbing the broken remains of a pan and dropping it in the trash.
The vase lies in pieces near the counter, water pooling underneath, flowers splayed like casualties.
I crouch down, gathering the torn petals and jagged stems, trying, futilely, to piece something beautiful back together.
My fingers tremble as I press wilted color into broken glass, like that’ll fix any of it.
There’s a weird rhythm to Bridger and Neve helping me. The three of us moving through the chaos, piecing it back together like if we can get it clean fast enough, we won’t have to talk about what really happened here.
But Neve’s too much of a pain in my ass for that. She stops, turns, and looks between us—eyes narrowed, voice suddenly razor-sharp in its calm. “What’s really going on?”
I pause, a busted bowl in my hand.
“You two are lying to me,” she says, matter-of-fact. “Or not lying. Just… dancing around something.”
Bridger looks at me, then her, then sighs.
Neve crosses her arms. “Why did you buy me a ticket to come here, Damian?”
I look away. Because that question has weight. Because that question leads to answers that don’t fit neatly into trash cans or garbage bags like the broken glass does.
Bridger slams the busted dustpan on the counter harder than necessary and rounds on me, jaw clenched tight. “You keeping shit from everyone is making it all worse.”
“It’ll be fine.”
Neve tosses a handful of dirty paper towels into the trash. “You know she thinks all there is between you is sex, right? She thinks you’re just going to leave.”
“No, she doesn’t,” I say.
“Uh, yeah, she does, asshole. She doesn’t think she means anything to you. And you need to fix that if she does mean something.”
I don’t flinch, but the words hit hard, because she’s not wrong. I open my mouth to speak—to say something, anything—but Bridger cuts me off before I get a single word out.
“Clay’s out of prison.”
The world narrows.
Bridger keeps going, voice rising like a wave about to crash. “He’s pissed, Damian. His shop is gone. His house is gone. His wife’s gone. He knows about Vick. He knows Joel’s dead, about Zero, and he knows we had something to do with it all.”
My stomach knots, tight and cold. I feel Neve’s eyes snap to mine like she’s watching something click into place. “And he knows about Marlowe too, doesn’t he?”
The words don’t just hit. They collapse something inside me, bone and breath and every raw, visceral thing I’m made of.
Neve drops the rag in her hand. “You think he’s going to come after her?”
I look at her, jaw tight. I don’t speak right away. I can’t—not without the weight of it landing wrong. Not without her hearing the truth in my silence. Clay is a fucking monster.
So I just nod.
Curt. Heavy.
Because yeah.
He is. It’s what I tried to deal with in Vegas.
Neve grabs me by the shoulders. Not rough, but firm.
Intentional. She pulls me toward her, and before I can look away, she makes me meet her eyes.
And for once, it’s not hard. She’s not the kid I used to have to protect from the world.
Not the little girl who used to trail after Bridger with skinned knees and wide eyes, begging to ride on the back of my motorcycle.
She’s grown into this sharp, unshakable thing—this woman who stands toe-to-toe with a storm and doesn't flinch.
And now she’s Marlowe’s friend. Somehow, that means more to me than I can explain.
“Don’t treat her like Laura,” Neve says, voice quiet but full of steel.
The words land so deep they knock the wind out of me.
Neve doesn’t blink. She doesn’t soften at Laura’s name.
“You feel all this guilt for her. But Laura had her own demons she was running away from, it wasn’t you. It wasn’t your fault.”
I swallow, but my throat’s dry. Tight. She’s wrong. It was my fault.
“Marlowe isn’t Laura,” she continues. “She’s stronger. Fiercer. She doesn’t want a softer version of you. She wants the one with blood on his hands.”
I start to shake my head, but Neve cuts me off again, relentless now. “She smiled when you snapped Zero’s neck.”
I remember it. The way Marlowe looked at me after it happened. Not with fear. Not even with shock. With fire in her eyes. Like I was some goddamn hero.
“She doesn’t care how dark your heart is,” Neve says, voice gentling now, but still firm. “As long as it’s hers.”
I let that sit in my chest like a brand.
And for the first time in a long time, I feel myself unravel—not with rage, not with violence—but with the kind of sharp clarity that knocks everything else sideways. Because I’ve been treating Marlowe like a ghost. Like someone I’m already destined to lose.
But she’s nothing like Laura.
And if I don’t start acting like I believe that…
I will lose her.
“I should go find her,” I say. And after tonight, it’ll all be over.
Clay will be gone forever. The threat erased.
Everything will be clean and safe. But the thought turns bitter in my gut.
I look down at my phone. The screen is still blank.
No text messages. No confirmation. No proof that the job is done.
My throat tightens. Something’s wrong. Something went wrong.
I feel it, deep in my chest—that sharp, sick twist that always comes before everything falls apart.