58. Damon
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
DAMON
NOW
Keeping myself out of the cellar is harder than it should be.
I’ve spent hours in the gym lifting the heaviest weights my muscles can handle. I’ve tried to lock myself in my office and lose myself in work.
And I’ve even gone as far as leaving the compound in the hope that distance would help.
But time and time again, I find myself watching the feed from her cell.
Ronan left an hour ago after watching her sleep for longer than he should have, but she hasn’t moved.
She’s given up.
The spitfire I used to know, the one that met me toe-to-toe and called me on my bullshit, is missing, and I fucking hate it.
Far more than I should.
I should be counting down the fucking minutes until there’s a bullet in her brain and I’m rid of her forever, but instead I find myself dreading a world where she’s not in it.
Both meals Ronan’s taken her remain untouched, the final straw that had my feet moving down here without my mind telling them to move.
If she doesn’t eat, I won’t get to have my fun with her, and that’s not acceptable.
After everything she’s put this family through, she deserves to pay for her sins.
I drag the door open, metal and brick scraping together and making my skin crawl at the sound.
Why didn’t we replace these doors again?
Chloe doesn’t move, though, her body perfectly still.
She’s not asleep. Or at least I don’t think she is.
Even with the drugs I gave her running through her veins, she wouldn’t sleep this much.
“Go away, Ronan,” she murmurs.
“It’s a good thing I’m not him.” I smirk to myself as her body tenses at my presence.
Fucking with her never gets old, not even after all these years.
I drop down into a crouch beside the sorry excuse for a mattress each of these rooms has and tug her onto her back.
She glares up at me, which only makes my smirk grow. There she is. The only woman to ever challenge me. The only person that never backed down, not even when her life depended on it.
Maybe that’s why I’m here. Because soon she’ll be gone and the rest of my life will be filled with people doing everything I tell them.
A boring existence.
Dad fucking loves the power his position gives him, but part of me dreads it.
“What do you want?” she snaps.
“Ronan’s doing a pretty shitty job of getting answers from you, so I thought I’d give it a go.”
“It’s pretty hard to get answers from someone that doesn’t know anything. Can you just kill me already and get it over with?”
“No can do, Duchess.”
Her eyes narrow at the nickname, and I choke down the scoff that tries to surface.
It’s in her nature to argue with me, to challenge me at every turn, and I fucking love it. She was never like the other girls that ran in the mafia circles. She didn’t conform the way they did, and I used to think it was because she didn’t have to worry about finding a husband.
She and Ronan were endgame.
But now I realize it was just never who she was. She didn’t care about impressing anyone. She didn’t take her duty to the family too seriously. She knew what was required of her, and she met those expectations, but she didn’t live and breathe them like others did.
“I don’t know anything about Kingston. He helped me when I escaped.
He looked after me when I almost died miscarrying.
And then he left me in the middle of the night with an envelope of instructions on how to get to the new life he had set up for me.
I haven’t spoken to him since. I haven’t seen him since. I. Don’t. Know. Anything.”
Pain flashes through her eyes as she recounts that time in her life, and I can’t help but think she was hurt when he didn’t stick around.
It makes sense, I guess. She lost everything and everyone in such a short space of time. It’s only reasonable that she would be upset when someone else left, but it seems like…more.
“If I knew anything else, I would tell you. But I don’t expect you to believe me because you didn’t believe my father when he told you the same thing,” she spits.
“I asked Kingston when the last time he spoke to Dad was. I wanted to know if Dad was protecting him when he refused to speak, if he just left Mom and me to be assaulted out of loyalty.”
I flinch at the reminder that those scum bags raped Iris and groped Chloe after I specifically instructed them not to. There are some lines that shouldn’t be crossed, criminal or not.
“They hadn’t spoken in years,” she whispers. “Just one time after Kingston left, where Dad begged him to come back and explain his side of the story. That was it, and you killed them for it, and now you’re going to kill me for the same reason.”
My chest tightens the way it only ever has when Chloe is involved, and I internally berate myself. We do not care about her. She means nothing to us.
Chloe tries to look away from me, but before I can catch myself, I have her pinned beneath me. My hips hold hers in place, my hands pressed on either side of her head.
Her breath hitches at the move, something between hate and lust flashing through the pretty green that became my favorite color when I was too young to understand why.
“Damon,” she warns, but I don’t miss the way her voice shakes.
“Yes, Duchess?”
“What are you doing?”
I dip my head until our lips are so close I can almost taste her, and I fucking want to.
I’m desperate to know what she tastes like, to take her mouth in a rough kiss the way I’ve dreamed of.
But instead I drag my lips over hers in the softest of touches, satisfying the beast that is ever present when she’s near.
For years I’ve kept my need for her at bay. The line between hate and love blurry when it comes to her. But soon her life will come to an end, and I refuse to let that happen before I know what she tastes like.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I murmur against her lips.
She presses her hands to my chest, and for a moment I think she’s going to shove me away. I wouldn’t blame her, I am the reason for most of the bad things that have ever happened to her. But instead, her fingers grasp the fabric of my shirt, holding me in place.
“You can deny it all you want, but you and I both know you’ve always wanted me every bit as much as I’ve wanted you.”