CHAPTER 11
Selene
I wake up in Damon's bed to gray morning light filtering through curtains I don't recognize, and for one disoriented second I don't know where I am, and then the previous night comes rushing back — the alarm, the security room, the five bikes disappearing down the dark road — and I sit up fast, heart hammering, before I register the small, warm weight curled against my side.
Mia. Fast asleep, one arm flung across my stomach, having apparently climbed in sometime after Bear walked her back to our room and I must have carried her the rest of the way to Damon's apartment without fully waking either of us.
I don't remember making that decision. I remember lying awake for hours after Damon rode out, watching headlights that never came back down the driveway, finally drifting off sometime near dawn in the small guest room, and I have only the vaguest memory of Damon's voice, low and rough with exhaustion, telling me it was safer if we all stayed together tonight, and me being too tired to argue.
I ease out from under Mia's arm carefully, tuck the blanket back around her, and pad barefoot into the small kitchen, where the smell of coffee and something cooking hits me before I've even rounded the corner.
Damon's at the stove, back to me, still in yesterday's clothes, and even from behind I can see the exhaustion sitting heavy in his shoulders, the particular stillness of a man who's been awake all night and running on nothing but purpose.
"You're back," I say quietly, not wanting to startle him.
He turns, and the sight of him stops me cold — a fresh bruise blooming along one cheekbone, knuckles on his right hand split and scabbed over, the look of a man who spent his night doing something violent and came home to make breakfast anyway like the two things exist in entirely separate compartments of his life.
"Hey." His voice comes out rough, tired, but something in his face softens at the sight of me, tension bleeding out of his shoulders in a way I feel mirrored in my own chest. "Didn't mean to wake you. Was trying to be quiet."
"Are you okay?" I cross the small kitchen fast, reaching for his hand before I've fully decided to, turning it gently to examine the split knuckles, and he lets me, watching my face with an expression I can't quite read.
"I'm fine. Looks worse than it is." He doesn't pull away from my hands, just watches me fuss over knuckles that have clearly seen worse, and something about the moment feels almost domestic despite the violence written plainly across his skin — the smell of eggs cooking, morning light through the window, my daughter asleep in the next room, and this scarred, dangerous man letting me hold his hand like it's the most natural thing in the world.
"What happened last night?" I ask, though some part of me already suspects the answer isn't going to be simple.
He's quiet a moment, turning back to the stove, plating eggs onto two plates with careful, deliberate movements.
"We caught up with the scout vehicle at the county line.
Got confirmation of what we already suspected.
" He sets a plate in front of me, pours coffee into a mug, slides it across the counter.
"Richard hired Red Jaw. Cash and territory in exchange for information and, eventually, muscle to help him take Mia. "
The words land like ice water, and I set my coffee down before my shaking hand can spill it. "He's actually doing it. He's actually trying to have her taken."
"He's trying." Damon's voice goes hard, absolute. "He's not going to succeed. I made that very clear to the men driving that scout car, and they're going to make it clear to whoever they report to."
I should feel more frightened than I do, hearing this — should feel the old cold terror climbing up my spine the way it always has whenever Richard's reach into my life becomes concrete and undeniable instead of a background hum of anxiety.
Instead I feel something steadier settling in, watching this man across the counter from me, bruised and exhausted and entirely unbothered by what it cost him to spend his night making sure my daughter stays safe.
"You didn't have to do that," I say quietly. "Go out there yourself. You could have sent someone else."
"No," he says simply. "I couldn't have." He meets my eyes, steady despite the exhaustion carved into every line of his face.
"This is mine to handle, Selene. Not because I don't trust my club — I trust every man who rode out with me last night with my life.
But this is personal. You're personal. And I don't send other men to handle what's personal to me. "
Something in my chest cracks open at that, warm and terrifying in equal measure, and I find myself reaching across the counter to rest my hand against his uninjured cheek, and he leans into the touch like it's something he's been starving for.
"I need to know the rest," I say, quiet but certain.
"What you promised me on the porch. The full story of what happened twelve years ago.
I've been patient, Damon, and I understand you needed time.
But after last night — after everything you're clearly willing to do to keep us safe — I need to understand what happened before.
I need to know who I'm actually letting into my life. "
He's quiet a long moment, studying me across the counter, and I watch something settle in his expression — not reluctance, exactly, but the particular weight of a man about to set down a burden he's carried alone for a very long time.
"Okay," he says finally. "Sit down. I'll get it."
He disappears into the bedroom, careful not to wake Mia, and returns a few minutes later with a small, battered metal lockbox that he sets on the counter between us with a reverence that makes my chest tight before he's even opened it.
He works the combination with steady fingers, and inside, folded with the careful precision of a document handled rarely but always with the same deliberate care, sits a single sheet of paper, creased soft from age, the kind of paper that's been folded and unfolded so many times the creases have gone nearly translucent.
He hands it to me without a word.
I unfold it carefully, and even before I've fully processed the legal language crowding the page, I understand from the letterhead alone — a name I don't recognize, some kind of private lending arrangement, dense clauses about collateral and repayment terms that read less like a standard loan agreement and more like something drafted by people who never intended to answer to a court.
"I didn't run away," Damon says, and his voice has gone rough, low, the voice of a man finally setting down something he's carried in silence for twelve years.
"Selene, I need you to understand that first, before you read the rest of it.
I didn't leave because I stopped loving you.
I sold my freedom to my father's creditors so they wouldn't kill you. "
The words hang in the quiet kitchen, morning light falling soft across the counter between us, and I look down at the document in my hands — twelve years of silence, twelve years of grief, twelve years of believing I hadn't been enough for a boy who'd promised me forever — and understand, in one dizzying instant, that everything I thought I knew about the worst heartbreak of my life was wrong.
"Damon," I whisper, and my voice breaks on his name, tears already blurring the legal text in front of me. "What does this mean? What did you do?"
He reaches across the counter and covers my shaking hand with his own, and when he speaks, his voice carries twelve years of weight finally, finally coming loose.
"It means," he says quietly, "that I need to tell you everything.
From the beginning. And I need you to know that everything that happened after — the club, the silence, all twelve years of it — every bit of it was because I loved you too much to let anything touch you.
Not because I loved you too little to stay. "
I set the document down carefully on the counter, both our hands still joined over it, and nod once, throat too tight for words, ready — finally, after two years of running and twelve years of grief — to hear the truth.