CHAPTER 12 — THE BROTHER WHO DOESN’T FORGIVE #3
“I almost say a lot of things around your family all the time,” I replied, pressing my coat against my body. “It's an excellent exercise in self-control. I recommend it for arrogant athletes with a tendency to injure themselves.”
“Don't do that.”
“Do what? Turn discomfort into sarcasm? I thought you valued traditions.”
He walked around the car slowly, coming to my side.
The proximity in the parking lot was different from the penthouse, different from the hotel room, different from the physical therapy room.
There was open space around us, cold air, the risk of someone leaving the restaurant, and still Damon seemed to occupy everything.
His shoulder was rigid, but that wasn't what made me hold my breath.
It was his face. There was no outright cruelty.
There was frustration, confusion, maybe guilt—though I didn't trust that word enough to hold onto it.
“I stopped Julian,” he said.
“You stopped the dinner.”
“Noah.”
“No,” I said, before my name in his mouth could weaken me. “Don't turn the bare minimum into heroism. You didn't let him humiliate me completely—great. Thank you. But that's not the same as believing me.”
He took the words in silence. The fine rain trickled through his hair, and the parking lot light made his skin look paler, his eyes harder.
I wanted to touch his shoulder, adjust his posture, tell him to get in the car before the tension made the pain worse.
I hated that part of me. The insistent care, even when all I wanted was anger.
“You want me to believe what?” he asked, voice low. “You don't tell me anything.”
“Because you don't ask to understand. You ask like you're building a case against me.”
“And you respond like every question is a threat.”
“Some were. Many were. Most of them came with your last name lurking in the back of the room.”
Damon went so quiet I could hear the rain hitting the hood.
That sentence had hit too close. To the Blackwood name, to Julian, to his father, to my father, to all the arrangements made by adults while we were both too young to understand that love without power didn't protect anyone.
I stepped back, not from fear, but because his body still pulled at me even when the conversation hurt, and that made me angry at myself.
“You can't keep wanting my body while believing the worst of me,” I said. “It doesn't work, Damon. Not with me. I won't be your bed at dawn and your suspect by morning just because you're afraid to find out you hated the wrong person.”
His face changed, and for a second I thought he was finally going to ask the right question.
Not about documents. Not about Julian. About me.
About why I left, why I went silent, why I was still here.
But his phone buzzed in his pocket before he could get the words out, and the shadow that crossed his eyes told me it was Julian before he even looked.
Damon didn't answer. Maybe that was a choice. Maybe it wasn't enough.
“Get in the car,” he said, his voice tight. “You're shaking.”
“I'm cold.”
“Liar.”
“Learned from you.”
We got in without settling anything. The drive back to the penthouse was silent except for the sound of tires on wet asphalt and Damon's careful breathing whenever his shoulder flared on the curves.
I stared out the window almost the whole way, counting streetlights, buildings, and campus shadows so I wouldn't look at his hand on the wheel.
When we reached Whitmore Tower, I went straight up to the guest room with the excuse of writing up the report before bed.
Damon didn't stop me. That hurt too, in a small, stupid way.
In the room, I pulled out my phone to reply to my father and found a message from an unknown number.
For a second, I thought it was the same person from the envelope, another piece of the past being slipped under the door.
But the preview showed only one sentence, and my stomach went cold before I even opened it.
“Tell the truth, and I'll end your father's career.”
There was no signature. There didn't need to be.
I sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in my hand, coat still damp on my shoulders and the bitter taste of dinner stuck in my mouth.
Julian had waited for the exact moment: after dinner, after Damon almost defended me, after what I'd said in the parking lot, after I'd pushed too hard for trust. I looked at the closed bedroom door and imagined Damon on the other side of the penthouse, maybe staring at his own phone, maybe deciding whether to call his brother, maybe still believing the worst thing I was hiding was guilt.
The message glowed in my hand, short and perfect like a clean blade.
My father, the internship, the past, Damon—all of it tied up in the same threat.
I took a deep breath, locked the screen, and understood, with a calm that scared me, that Julian wasn't trying to stop me from telling the truth because it was weak.
He was trying to stop me because, spoken in the right place, it could still bring someone down.