Chapter 280: Not A Good Day To Be Possessive
The crystal tumbler sat completely ignored on the edge of the mahogany desk.
Damien didn’t bother with glassware tonight. He sat in the pitch-black silence of his study, leaning back in his leather chair, his fingers wrapped around the neck of a three-thousand-dollar bottle of Macallan.
He brought the bottle to his lips and took a long, punishing pull.
The premium scotch burned a harsh, fiery trail down his throat, settling like a bed of hot coals in his stomach. It was supposed to numb the edges of his mind. It was supposed to quiet the deafening roar of his own thoughts.
It wasn’t working.
Damien lowered the bottle, resting it on his thigh. He was shirtless, his skin still damp and flushed from a scalding shower that had done absolutely nothing to wash away the layer of guilt clinging to him. Small droplets of water fell from the tips of his wet silver hair, tracking slowly down the hard planes of his chest.
On the desk in front of him, his phone began to vibrate against the wood, the screen lighting up the dark room.
Caller ID: Kai Vane
Damien stared at the glowing name with hollow, dead eyes.
He didn’t want to hear Kai’s voice. He didn’t want to hear anyone’s voice but hers.
He reached out; his thumb pressing down hard on the side button and powered the device off. The screen went black, plunging the study back into undisturbed darkness.
He brought the bottle back to his mouth and drank again.
He had fucked up.
He had fucked up on a scale so massive, so profoundly catastrophic, that he genuinely didn’t know how to fix it.
Damien closed his eyes, his head falling back against the leather headrest. The memory of Aria staring at him as if she didn’t recognize who he was, played on a relentless loop behind his eyelids.
"You proved today that you will always, fundamentally, choose control over communication."
The words tore at the inside of his chest like jagged glass.
She was right.
Her world had shattered. The foundation of her reality had been completely ripped out from under her.
And instead of being her safe harbor, instead of being the husband who held her while she processed the devastation, Damien had become just another monster to torment her thoughts. He had become the puppet master. He had looked into her eyes for weeks and lied to her face, hoarding the truth because he arrogantly believed he knew what was best for her.
He let out a low, ragged exhale, the sound rough and broken in the quiet room.
Damien sat up, setting the bottle down on the desk with a thud.
He turned his phone back on. He ignored the flood of missed calls and text messages from Kai, asking about what happened, tapping into his photo gallery.
There was a photo of Aria curled up on the white sofa, wearing his t-shirt, fast asleep with a script resting on her chest. There was a short video he had secretly recorded of her laughing in the kitchen, her eyes crinkling at the corners as she ate ice cream straight from the carton.
He stared at the glowing screen, his thumb lightly brushing over her smiling face.
A foreign ache seized his heart, squeezing it until he could barely draw a breath. It was a terrifying, paralyzing sensation.
Damien was a man who solved problems with hostile takeovers, leverage, and violence. If an enemy threatened him, he eradicated them. If a company defied him, he bought them and liquidated their assets.
But this?
He couldn’t buy her forgiveness. He couldn’t shoot the pain out of her eyes. He couldn’t blackmail her into trusting him again.
For the first time in his twenty-nine years of existence, the untouchable Demon King of New York was completely helpless. He didn’t know how to fix a broken heart, especially when he was the one who had shattered it.
’Does she hate me?’ The thought was a venomous snake coiling around his windpipe.
Damien locked the phone and threw it across the desk.
He looked up at the ceiling, his jaw clenched. He knew exactly where she was. She was upstairs, in the guest bedroom. She was under his roof, just a few hundred feet away.
The urge to stand up, march up those stairs, kick the guest room door off its hinges, and drag her right back into his bed was a physical fire burning in his veins. Every instinct he possessed screamed at him to go to her, to wrap his hands around her waist, bury his face in her neck, and refuse to let her go until she surrendered.
But he couldn’t.
If he went up there, if he forced his presence on her when she had demanded space, he would only be proving her right. He would be proving that he was exactly the manipulative, controlling warden she accused him of being.
If he was ever going to show her that he was capable of change, that he was capable of being a true partner, he had to start respecting her boundaries. He had to stay away.
But Damien knew his own mind. He knew his own obsessive, possessive nature. If he stayed awake in this dark, silent penthouse, knowing she was sleeping alone in another room, he would inevitably lose the battle with his own willpower. He would break her boundary.
Damien grabbed the Macallan bottle and drained the remaining scotch in one long, continuous swallow.
He slammed the empty glass bottle onto the mahogany.
He pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk. Lying next to a spare magazine of hollow-point bullets was a small, orange prescription bottle.
Damien unscrewed the cap. He didn’t bother counting. He just tipped the bottle over, shaking a handful of sleeping pills into his palm.
He threw them into his mouth and dry-swallowed them, the bitter, chalky taste coating his tongue.
He didn’t get up to move to his bedroom. He couldn’t stomach the thought of lying in their bed, surrounded by the scent of her, knowing her side of the mattress would be cold and empty.
Damien crossed his arms over the smooth wood of his desk. He leaned forward, slumping his head down onto his forearms.
He closed his eyes.
He sat there in the dark, waiting for the chemical oblivion to hit his bloodstream, knowing that a drug-induced sleep was quite literally the only cage strong enough to keep him from walking to her door.
