Chapter 19
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.”
Her lips part, just a little. Her throat moves as she swallows, but no sound comes out.
“He has no soul. No lines he won’t cross.
What he did to her… what he’s doing now…
” I shake my head and look away, my jaw tight.
My fists are still clenched at my sides.
“I can’t lose you, Lo. I loved Laura, but you?
What I feel for you? It’s beyond love. It’s obsession.
It’s need. It’s fucking survival. You’re in every part of me, even the ones I hate.
I wake up choking on it, sleep with it under my skin.
And if you walk away right now, I would understand, but I don’t know what the hell is going to be left of me. ”
Then she moves. There’s no warning, no hesitation. One second she’s frozen, the next she’s wrapping herself around me like none of it scares her. Like the blood, the guilt, the monster in me doesn’t matter. Like she still sees me beneath it all.
My body locks up at first, too stunned to move.
Then my hands find her waist, her back, gripping hard, afraid she’ll disappear if I let go.
My chest caves in, all the rage and anguish folding beneath the warmth of her touch.
I press my face to her temple and breathe her in.
Smoke and sweat and something soft I thought I’d lost for good.
“I hired Reese to keep an eye on you,” I say quietly, still holding her against me.
“Just an extra pair of eyes. That’s all it was.
There was no other woman. There is no one else.
There never will be again, Angel. You’re it for me.
I got Reese because I didn’t want you walking around with a target on your back while I was scrambling to figure out what Clay was planning. ”
She doesn’t say anything, so I keep going. My voice is lower now, tighter. “I had my contact follow Clay. Watched him pull into a motel. He wasn’t alone. Your half-sister was there.”
She stiffens in my arms. Fuck. I knew this part would hit different. “He met with her for a few hours,” I add. “Then left.”
She pulls back, slowly. Her eyes climb up to meet mine, but they don’t hold fear like I expected. They hold fire. “Taylor?” she grinds out.
I nod once.
Her jaw clenches. Her eyes narrow. Her whole body tenses like she might throw something. “You think she fucked me over again?”
I cup her face in both hands, my thumbs brushing the heat in her cheeks. I don’t want to answer. I don’t want to say another word. I just want her to stop looking at me like that, like she’s about to break into a thousand pieces, not from fear—but from more betrayal.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. I study her, every inch of her. The wild, beautiful rage in her expression. The way she’s barely holding it in.
And all I want—God help me—is to shut her up with my mouth on hers.
To crawl inside her and lose myself there.
To make her forget every single reason she should walk away from me.
I want to feel her hips tremble under my hands, hear her lose control against my lips.
I want to taste her anger, her heartbreak, her need.
I want to feel the scrape of her teeth when she bites back a moan, the sting of her nails dragging down my back as I pin her to the mattress and remind her that even if the world is burning, she’s mine.
I want her thighs wrapped tight around me, shaking, her pussy throbbing around my cock.
I want to kiss her so hard it resets her memories.
I want to make her come apart in my hands.
That’s the only language I know how to speak right now. And God, I want to hear her scream it.
Marlowe tilts her head, eyes narrowed with that wicked glint I never see coming until it’s already cutting me down. “Stop fucking me in your head,” she says, and it lands like a slap and a kiss all at once.
The words burn across my chest. I drag in a breath and meet her gaze. “How do you know that’s what I’m thinking?”
She smirks, slow and devastating. “Because your pupils are blown, your jaw’s clenched, and you keep looking at my mouth like it owes you a blowjob.
” She crosses her arms, still watching me like I’m on trial.
“I’m still really pissed off at you,” she says, not letting me off the hook for even a second.
“You’ve been using sex to avoid talking about things.
Every time I asked you something, you kissed the questions right out of my head. ”
That hits harder than I expect. I flinch.
Not outwardly, not enough for her to catch unless she’s really looking, but inside, it hits deep.
“I’m sorry,” I say, the words thick in my throat.
“I didn’t mean to make you feel like that.
It wasn’t what I was trying to do.” It takes everything in me to admit the rest. To be soft in this way, with her, now.
“I just… it calms me down,” I say, voice lower now.
“Being inside you. It’s the only time I feel right.
Like I’m not some weapon just waiting to go off.
You make me feel human. You make it all fade into the background.
All the noise. All the rage. Everything settles inside me when I’m with you like that. ”
Her eyes soften, those ocean-colored eyes locking with mine like she’s searching for a lie and not finding one. My ribs feel like they’re caving in, the way she looks at me—like she’s still deciding whether she’s staying.
"I love you, Marlowe. I fucking love you like I’ve never loved anyone in my entire life. This—" I breathe her in, tuck that wild strand of hair off her forehead, let my fingers linger there like maybe it’ll keep her here with me, "—this is all new to me."
She looks at me, waiting, needing more.
“That’s everything I’ve been hiding from you.”
Her voice is soft but sharp enough to cut. “Why did you hide it all? Why didn’t you think you could tell me any of it?”
I swallow hard. Because this truth is ugly too.
“You’ve got enough on your shoulders already,” I say, slowly, carefully, like I’m laying the words at her feet.
“You wake up every day fighting your own demons. You’re always bracing for the next panic attack.
And I see it, even when you think I don’t.
” My voice thickens, but I keep going. “You didn’t need my fucked-up world added to that.
I didn’t want to be another weight pressing down on you.
I didn’t want to be one of your triggers, Lo, like Bridger says.
I wanted to be your anchor. The one thing that made it easier to breathe. ”
I cup her jaw, fingers gentle even though everything in me feels wrecked.
“I thought keeping it all away from you would protect you. I thought I was doing the right thing. But maybe I was just scared you’d see the truth and decide I wasn’t worth the trouble.
” I pause, watching her eyes, watching her process.
“But I see now, not telling you only made it worse. And I’m done doing this halfway.
If you’re in, I’m all in. No more secrets. Not from you.”
Her blue eyes stare right into my soul.
“The night we first met, I told you I wasn’t a good man,” I say, my voice low, steady, even though everything inside me is trembling with how close I am to her. “I warned you. But fuck, Angel. I want to be a better man, if only for you.”
The corner of her perfect mouth lifts, barely. Just the hint of a smile, like she doesn’t want to give it to me but can’t help it. “I nicknamed you Trouble before I even knew your name.”
I run my thumb over her bottom lip, slow and reverent, aching to kiss her. But I don’t. I won’t. Not until she wants it. Not until she asks.
She breathes me in like she’s trying to memorize the way I smell, and I swear it does something violent inside my chest.
“Marlowe,” I murmur, “how come you’re not more freaked out that I told you I put a hit out on my father?
” Because it’s been haunting me since I said it.
Because it doesn’t make sense that someone like her—someone soft and sharp and full of light—would still want to be near a man like me.
A man who can say those words and mean them.
She lifts her eyes again to mine, calm, steady, burning with fire. “Because I have a father just like yours,” she says, voice low and lethal, “and I would’ve pulled the trigger myself on Vick if I held a gun for what he did to your mother and me.”
Fuck. It’s not just the words. It’s the certainty behind them. The strength. The loyalty. It hits harder than anything I’ve ever felt in my life.
And it makes me fall harder for her than I already have.