"No, Ana," Damian answered, his baritone heavy, flat, and uncompromisingly honest. "They didn’t ask about your well-being. They didn’t ask how you were holding up, and they didn’t ask to see you."
Ana flinched as if she had been slapped, her eyes dropping to the carpet as a single, silent tear spilled over her lower lash line.
"All they cared about," Damian continued quietly, reaching out with his large, warm hand to gently tilt her chin back up to face him, "was trying to bully me into a settlement to save their own money. Your brother Mark sat there smiling like a coward, and your father treated you like a bargaining chip until the very second my legal team crushed them."
Ana closed her eyes, letting out a long, shuddering breath as the harsh reality finally washed away the last traces of hope she had held for her bloodline. They really didn’t love her. They never had.
"Hey," Damian murmured, his thumb moving smoothly across her cheekbone to brush away her tears. "Look at me."
Ana opened her eyes, meeting his dark, hypnotic gaze.
"You don’t belong to them anymore," Damian spoke, his voice dropping into a deep, possessive promise. "They threw you away... but you are under my roof now."
Ana didn’t pull away this time. Instead, as the movie continued to play in the background, she leaned her tired head sideways, resting it softly against Damian’s broad chest.
Damian went completely still. His chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm beneath her cheek. Slowly, carefully, as if handling the most precious, fragile glass, his large arm wrapped around her waist, pulling her flush against his side.
She reached for her bottle of beer, struggling for a second to twist open the cap. Before she could try again, Damian’s large hand reached over.
He took the glass bottle from her fingers, popped the cap off effortlessly with a flick of his thumb, and handed it back to her.
Ana paused, looking up at him. "Thank you."
Damian leaned back against the base of the sofa, holding his own dark amber beer casually in his hand. He watched her intently... the way her small shoulders finally dropped their lingering tension, the faint flush on her cheeks, and the soft sound of her quiet chuckle at a silly joke on the screen.
For months, Ana had viewed this man as her terrifying jailer... a vengeful shadow holding a $100 million debt over her head. But sitting here on his floor, wrapped in his heavy, protective presence, a quiet, frightening realization washed over her... She felt safer in the Devil’s lair than she ever had in her own family’s house.
The alcohol and the cozy warmth slowly loosened the heavy knot in Ana’s chest.
________________________
Within minutes, the exhaustion of the past forty-eight hours finally caught up to her, and Ana’s breathing evened out as she drifted into a deep, peaceful sleep against his chest.
Damian looked down at her sleeping face, his thumb gently smoothing a stray strand of dark hair away from her forehead.
His dark eyes softened into something raw and deeply haunted as his mind drifted back to the night his own father, Arthur Sterling, had taken his life... the night the war began.
Right before his father took his final breath, he had held Damian’s hand, uttering a final, mysterious plea that had burned into Damian’s soul forever:
"Don’t destroy her, Damian... The Vances are corrupt, but that girl is innocent. Keep Ana close to you. Protect her from them... even if she hates you for it."
________________________
Damian tightened his arm around her resting body, pulling her closer into his warmth as he stared into the dim light of the room.
Is this what you wanted, Father? Damian thought silently, his dark gaze lingering on her soft, peaceful expression. Is this what you asked me to protect?
Damian carefully scooped Ana into his arms, carrying her asleep through the dimly lit penthouse and placing her gently onto the plush king bed.
He pulled the silk duvet over her shoulders, lingering for a second to watch her soft, rhythmic breathing before quietly stepping back into the hallway, closing the heavy mahogany door behind him.
The second the door clicked shut, his private encrypted phone vibrated violently in his palm.
Damian answered, pressing the receiver to his ear as he walked toward his private study. "Report."
"Sir... we have a major situation at Blackwood Hill," his chief of security reported, his voice tight, breathless, and laced with pure panic. "The FBI tactical unit breached the Stark lake house ten minutes ago. But Vivian wasn’t there."
Damian’s eyes narrowed into slits, his posture turning rigid as a dark, lethal tension filled the hallway. "Harrison gave up her exact coordinates. Where is she?"
"She escaped, sir... and it was a bloodbath," the officer revealed, his tone trembling. "Two federal agents were shot dead inside the foyer. Vivian didn’t act alone. Someone brought in an elite, heavily armed team to extract her before the perimeter was locked down. They wiped out the breach team and vanished into the treeline."
Damian stopped dead in his tracks, his obsidian eyes burning with a sudden, cold fury.
"Who extracted her?" Damian growled out, his baritone dropping into a terrifying whisper.
"We don’t know, Mr. Sterling. The operational precision was too clean... it wasn’t Harrison Stark, and it certainly wasn’t the Vances," his security chief answered. "Whoever pulled her out has serious military-grade backing. And sir... an hour ago, a dark SUV matching the getaway vehicle pinged a cell tower less than three miles from your estate."
Damian stared into the shadows of the long, silent corridor leading back to his bedroom where Anastasia lay sleeping, his jaw setting so tight a muscle flexed violently in his cheek.
"I don’t care what resources you have to burn," Damian commanded, his baritone dropping into a low, lethal growl that made the phone line go dead silent. "Find her. Lock down every exit route within a fifty-mile radius, track down that SUV, and bring her to me before anyone else reaches her."
Damian ended the call, gripping the phone so tightly his knuckles turned stark white.
Vivian knew too much about the dark, unspeakable secrets buried deep within the Sterling family history. If the shadowy power backing her extracted those secrets from her first, it wouldn’t just destroy his empire... it would shatter Anastasia’s world completely.
His obsidian eyes burned in the dark hallway as he looked back toward the mahogany door.
Vivian was loose, backed by a dangerous ally, and carrying secrets meant to stay buried forever. And Damian would burn the city to the ground before he let anyone use them against him.
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