Chapter 20
Atlas
Ibecome obsessed with Sebastian because nothing else makes sense anymore.
Damien is falling apart in front of me, and nobody else seems to understand that this is bigger than a breakup. The team thinks he’s depressed. The media thinks fame got to his head. Joanna thinks ending the contract early destabilized him emotionally.
But I know Damien.
Or at least I thought I did.
Damien Harrow would never intentionally destroy his own career over heartbreak alone.
Something is wrong.
Something bad enough that he’s willing to let everyone think the worst of him instead of asking for help. That keeps me awake most nights. I start watching him obsessively at practice.
The weight loss is impossible to ignore now. His cheekbones look sharper every day, and his hoodie hangs looser around his body. Half the time he looks exhausted enough to collapse where he stands.
Then there’s the fear. Once I notice it, I can’t stop seeing it. Damien startles at loud noises. He checks exits constantly. Sometimes he’ll glance toward the arena entrance during drills with a look on his face that makes my stomach twist hard enough to hurt.
Like he’s expecting someone terrible to walk through the doors.
The worst part is that he still won’t look at me for more than a second, and every time he does, I remember the way he cried in my arms after that nightmare. The way he begged me not to leave him alone. The way he looked terrified instead of guilty when Sebastian texted him.
None of this fits the story Damien wants me to believe.
So I stop trying to let it go.
A few days after the last game, I sit alone in my apartment rewatching footage of Damien throwing another assist. The noise of the crowd drones quietly in the background while sports analysts dissect his “mental collapse.”
I barely hear them.
All I can think about is Damien’s face. The panic in his eyes after every mistake. The way he looked at the crowd.
Then, suddenly, a memory hits me.
Damien lying drunk across my chest after sex months ago, sleepy and warm and relaxed enough to answer a question he usually avoided.
“Where’re you from again?” I asked him.
“Ashbury,” he mumbled against my skin.
“Where the fuck is that?” I laughed.
He hummed against my skin, pleased I found it so funny, I guessed. “Illinois.”
He never elaborated. I remember that moment because I noticed how quickly he changed the subject afterward.
I sit upright and grab my laptop.
Three hours later, my apartment is dark except for the glow of my computer screen. Coffee cups litter the table around me while search results blur together across multiple tabs.
Sebastian Monroe.
Ashbury, Illinois.
Age thirty-two.
His first criminal records make my stomach tighten immediately—gang affiliation, racketeering, illegal gambling operations, weapons charges.
Facilitating prostitution.
Cold spreads slowly through my chest.
What the fuck? I click deeper into the records.
More charges: human trafficking investigations, witness intimidation. Most of the serious charges were dropped. I know enough about organized crime to understand what that probably means.
People got scared or got disappeared.
My stomach turns violently. I keep digging anyway. Because now I’m scared, too.
Eventually, I hit a wall. Juvenile records sealed. Associated minors redacted.
I stare at the screen for a long moment, then make a decision I probably shouldn’t.
Money talks, especially in shitty small towns with underfunded departments.
Forty minutes and one bribe later, I’m staring at files I absolutely should not have access to.
And then…I see Damien.
The breath leaves my body as I stare at a mugshot. It’s the first photo I’ve ever seen from Damien’s childhood: juvenile arrest, Damien Harrow, age seventeen.
I stop breathing for a second. He looks so young. Christ. Not just young…small.
The Damien in the photograph barely resembles the man I know now. His face still has softness to it, his curls shorter and uneven, like somebody hacked at them with kitchen scissors. And he’s hurt.
He has a split lip crusted with dried blood. One eye swollen and purple. Bruises crawl up his throat in unmistakable finger-shaped marks. Handprints. Someone strangled him.
My stomach lurches violently. I stare harder at the image, like maybe I’m misunderstanding what I’m seeing, but I’m not. The police took this picture after somebody beat the hell out of him.
The charge beneath the photo makes my vision blur: solicitation and prostitution, minor involved in organized criminal activity. Victim status suspected.
Victim status suspected?
I shove away from the desk so fast the chair crashes backward onto the floor.
Then I throw up into my kitchen sink. Acid burns my throat while I brace myself against the counter, trying to breathe through the nausea crashing over me.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
Damien was seventeen.
Seventeen.
I sink onto the kitchen floor, shaking hard enough that I can barely hold my phone. Everything clicks together in the most horrifying way possible.
The nightmares.
The panic attacks.
The way Damien flinches from certain touches before relaxing.
The terror around Sebastian.
The hypervigilance.
The shame.
The fear.
Sebastian didn’t just hurt Damien. He owned him.
Rage crashes through me so hard I can’t see straight. I think about Damien sitting in his apartment trying not to panic while I accused him of seeing Sebastian again.
I think about the jealousy I felt.
The fucking jealousy.
Meanwhile Damien was terrified out of his mind.
Tears threaten to fall.
I grab the laptop with shaking hands and force myself to keep reading. The arrest report is worse. Officers found Damien during a raid connected to illegal gambling and prostitution operations tied to Sebastian Monroe’s organization.
Damien refused to testify. Repeatedly requested not to be separated from Monroe. Visible signs of abuse were noted. Possible coercive control suspected.
I stare at those words until tears blur the screen.
Possible coercive control.
Like that clinical language could ever fully explain what that piece of shit did to Damien.
My stomach twists again, because suddenly I understand something terrible: Damien doesn’t know what love is supposed to feel like.
I grab my keys. I need to see Damien right now.
I need to hold him.
I need to apologize.
And more than anything…
I need to kill Sebastian Monroe.
By the time Damien opens the door, I’m seconds away from breaking it down.
He looks exhausted—worse than exhausted. His curls are a mess, dark circles are carved deep beneath his eyes, and he’s so pale it scares the hell out of me.
When he sees me standing there, terror flashes across his face.
“What are you doing here?” he asks quietly.
I push inside before he can stop me. “Is he here?”
Damien blinks. “What?”
“Sebastian.” I look around the apartment quickly, adrenaline hammering through my body. “Is he here?”
“No,” Damien says. “It’s just me.”
I finally exhale.
Then I actually look around the apartment, and my stomach drops.
Damien is obsessively clean. His apartment used to look like a showroom, everything organized and controlled.
Now, laundry is strewn across the couch.
Empty protein shakes crowd the kitchen counter.
Takeout containers overflow from the trash.
The entire apartment feels wrong, like Damien’s slowly disappearing inside it.
“Damien…”
He crosses his arms tightly over himself. “What do you want?”
The distance in his voice nearly breaks me. I swallow hard before pulling the laptop from my bag. Damien’s entire body goes rigid, and the second I turn the screen toward him, all the color drains from his face.
I barely survived seeing it myself, but seeing Damien see it is worse.
“How did you get this?” he whispers.
I ignore the question because I can’t think about anything except the bruises around his throat in that photograph.
“Is it true?”
Damien looks down at the mugshot again. His breathing turns shallow and his hands shake.
God.
“Damien,” I say softly.
He stares at the screen like it’s haunting him.
Then he finally whispers, “Yes.”
The word tears straight through my heart. I close the laptop immediately because I can’t stand watching him look at that version of himself anymore. But Damien keeps staring at where the photo was with glassy eyes.
“I never wanted you to know,” he says quietly.
My throat tightens. “Baby?—”
“I never wanted you to know how disgusting I am.”
The words hit me so hard I physically recoil. “No.”
I move toward him.
Damien backs up instinctively. “No, Atlas, don’t.”
The panic in his voice destroys me. I grab his face gently before he can fully retreat, forcing him to look at me.
“You don’t get to talk about yourself like that.”
Tears spill down Damien’s face. “You don’t understand.”
“Yes,” I say fiercely. “I do.”
Damien shakes his head desperately beneath my hands. “No, you don’t. You saw the charges?—”
“I saw a seventeen-year-old kid covered in bruises.”
His face crumples.
“I saw fingerprints around your throat.”
Damien lets out a broken sound and squeezes his eyes shut.
“I saw a terrified child.”
That finally breaks him completely. Damien folds forward, sobbing hard enough that his whole body shakes.
And Jesus Christ—I think some part of me will hate myself forever for not understanding sooner.
I pull him against my chest.
Damien grips my hoodie with both hands. “I’m sorry,” he chokes out. “I’m so sorry.”
“Hey.” I cradle the back of his head. “None of this is your fault.”
“Yes, it is.”
“You were a child.”
The words echo harshly through the apartment. Damien starts crying harder, because I don’t think anybody’s ever said it to him that plainly before.
Sebastian convinced him he chose this.
That he deserved this.
And now Damien genuinely believes that being abused made him dirty somehow.
The realization fills me with such violent rage I almost feel dizzy from it.
“I’ve never been worthy of you,” Damien whispers brokenly against my chest. “Or your family. Or your kindness.”
My eyes burn. “Damien, look at me.”
He shakes his head.
I gently lift his chin anyway. His face is wrecked with tears.
“You’re not ruined.”
Damien’s mouth trembles. “You don’t know what he made me do.”
I cup his face more firmly. “I don’t care.”
That startles him enough to make him look at me properly.
And I mean it.
I don’t care.
All I care about is Damien crying in my arms like he genuinely believes he’s unlovable.
“You were a victim,” I tell him softly. “An evil man hurt you. That doesn’t make you dirty.”
I kiss him gently. It’s nothing like the angry, desperate kisses in the supply closet. This one is soft and careful. I kiss him like he’s something precious…because he is.
Damien melts against me with a shaky sound, his hands gripping my shirt tighter.
When I pull back, he looks devastated.
“I thought if you knew,” he whispers, “you’d see me the way I see myself.”
“Baby,” I murmur softly, brushing tears from his cheeks. “I love you.”
Damien shuts his eyes.
“I love you,” I repeat quietly. “I loved you before I knew this, and I love you after.”
More tears spill down his face.
“I accused you of seeing him again,” I whisper, my voice cracking. “I thought you were choosing him over me. I’m so sorry.”
“He’s here. In the city,” he whispers.
Ice slides through me. “What?”
Damien swallows hard.
Then finally—finally—he tells me everything.
The burner phone.
The strip club.
The finger.
Henry’s debt.
Grace.
The games.
Every word feels like another knife sliding between my ribs.
By the time he finishes, I’m shaking with rage so violently I can barely breathe through it. “He threatened Grace?”
Damien nods miserably. “He said he’d make it look like the leukemia got worse.”
I genuinely see red for a second. Damien starts panicking when he sees my expression.
“I’m sorry,” he says quickly. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I thought if I kept him happy?—”
“You thought sacrificing yourself would save us.”
Damien looks down, and there it is—the entire tragedy of him. He still thinks love means bleeding for everybody else until there’s nothing left of him.
I pull him against me again. “You’re not handling this alone anymore,” I say firmly.
Damien tenses. “Atlas?—”
“No.” I hold him tighter. “I’m done letting you carry this by yourself.”
And for the first time in weeks, Damien stops fighting being held.