Chapter Eighteen- Old wounds
1562 Words
She found him on the balcony at midnight.
Not unusual anymore. They'd both developed a habit of ending up there when the penthouse felt too quiet and sleep felt too far away .Luna had stopped pretending she went purely for the air sometime around the third or fourth time. The air was fine inside. She went because the city at midnight looked like something she'd have painted once, all scattered light and dark geometry pressing up against the sky, and because standing out there had quietly stopped feeling lonely somewhere along the way.
Damien was leaning against the railing with a glass of something dark, looking at nothing specific the way he sometimes did — not troubled exactly, just somewhere else entirely. Present in body, absent in the particular way of someone turning something over repeatedly and not arriving anywhere satisfying.
He heard her before she reached the door. She knew that without needing to test it anymore.
"Couldn't sleep," she said. Not a question.
"No."
She came to stand beside him. Not close, not far ; the distance they'd settled into over weeks, comfortable and careful occupying the same space without negotiating it out loud. The city hummed thirty floors below them, indifferent and glittering.
"Thank you," Luna said. "Again. For last night."
"You don't have to keep thanking me."
"I know." She looked out at the lights. "I'm doing it anyway."
He made a sound that wasn't quite acknowledgment and wasn't quite dismissal. She'd learned to read those too had a whole subcategory for them in the collection, filed under things Damien Wolfe says without words.
They stood in the quiet for a while. Luna had stopped needing to fill silences with him, which was something she'd never quite managed with most people. She had always been comfortable alone but uncomfortable in the specific tension of two people who felt they ought to be talking. With Damien it had shifted somewhere into something easier, and she genuinely couldn't trace when.
"Your mother asked about you," she said eventually. "This morning when I called to check in. She wanted to know if you'd slept."
Something moved across his face. "What did you tell her?"
"That I'd check." Luna glanced at him sideways. "So. Did you?"
"Some."
"Convincing."
The almost-smile. Fractional, quickly contained. She'd catalogued that one early.
The quiet stretched out again and Luna let it breathe, because she'd learned that Damien said more in his own time than he ever did when pushed. She'd filed that observation carefully and used it ever since.
"My father called today," he said.
Luna went still. She kept her eyes on the city.
"What did he say?"
"Nothing new." Damien turned his glass slowly. "He doesn't say new things. He says the same things in different configurations and expects the answer to change."
"What does he want?"
A pause that had weight to it. "Control. Of the company. Of—" He stopped. Reorganized whatever had been building behind that sentence. "He handed everything to me at twenty-two and spent the next six years deciding it was a mistake."
Luna said nothing. She'd learned that too — that some things needed the space around them left intact or they collapsed before they were finished.
"He handed it to me," Damien said again, quieter this time. "I didn't take it. I didn't ask for it. He decided I was ready and then spent every year after that constructing evidence I wasn't." He paused. "There is no evidence. The company has tripled. Everything has held. But that was never actually the point."
"What is the point?"
He looked out at the city. "That it's still his. In his mind. Regardless of what the paperwork says. Regardless of anything."
Luna turned that over slowly. "How long since you've spoken to him?"
"Two years."
"Who stopped calling?"
"Mutual," Damien said. Then, after a beat: "Me. I stopped first."
She nodded. She wasn't going to tell him he was right or wrong — she didn't know enough, and she understood that people who'd carried something heavy for a long time didn't need someone weighing in on the carrying. They needed someone to stand there while they put it down for a minute. Just that. Nothing more complicated.
"My father caused the debt," Luna said.
Damien looked at her.
"I know you already know that," she said. "It's in whatever file you pulled on my family. But I mean — I know what it is to have a father who makes a decision that costs you something significant and then looks at you expecting you to absorb it without complaint." She kept her voice even, factual. "My father is genuinely remorseful. I think yours probably isn't. But the shape of it — the specific shape of it — is something I recognize."
Silence settled between them, different from the comfortable kind. Heavier.
"You're not angry at him," Damien said. "Your father."
"I was." Luna looked down at her hands on the railing, at the city lights reflected faintly on her skin. "Mostly I'm tired of it now. Anger takes a lot of maintenance. It wants feeding constantly and I don't always have enough left over."
He was quiet for long enough that she glanced up.
He was watching her with that expression she still hadn't fully named — the one that appeared when she said something he hadn't anticipated, like she'd moved a piece on a board he thought he had memorized and he was recalibrating without having hidden the process in time.
"What," she said.
"Nothing." He looked back at the city. "You just say things."
"People generally do."
"Not like that."
Luna left that where it landed and turned back to the lights.
"I used to come up here alone," Damien said, after a long while. "Before all of this."
"Before the contract."
"Yes." He turned his glass in his hand. "Every night almost. It was the only place that was just — quiet. No decisions attached to it."
"And now?" Luna asked carefully.
He took a moment that she didn't rush. "Now it's different."
She didn't ask him to expand. She understood instinctively that pressing it would make him pull it back, fold it up, put it somewhere she couldn't see. So she left different sitting between them in the night air, undefined and somehow complete.
"He was a good father," Damien said. Almost too quiet, almost to himself. "For a while. When I was young. Before he decided I needed to become something specific and started measuring the distance between what I was and what that was."
Luna felt the weight of that settle somewhere in her chest.
"That's the hardest kind," she said quietly. "The ones who were good first. It gives you something to compare everything else against. Something you keep reaching back for without meaning to."
Damien said nothing for a long moment.
"Yes," he said finally. "That's exactly it."
He said it like she'd named something he hadn't had words for before — like she'd opened a drawer he'd stopped trying to open and found it wasn't as empty as he'd told himself.
He looked at her, and this time when she met his eyes neither of them looked away. The city hummed below them. The wind moved quietly between them. Something sat in the air that had no name yet and neither of them reached for one, both aware of it, both choosing to leave it exactly where it was.
"You should sleep," Damien said eventually.
"So should you."
"I will."
"Still unconvincing," Luna said.
That sound again — halfway between acknowledgment and something warmer than he usually allowed. Luna pushed off the railing and moved toward the door, and then stopped.
"Damien."
He looked at her.
"The things that cost you something," she said. "They don't get to determine what comes after. That part is still yours. All of it."
She went inside before he could find a response to that.
He stood on the balcony for a long time after the door closed.
His wolf was completely still — that particular quiet that only happened after Luna said something that landed somewhere deep. Like even the restless part of him needed a moment to just sit with it before it found words.
She meant it, his wolf said finally.
I know.
She wasn't managing you. She wasn't being careful with you. A pause. She just meant it.
I know, Damien said again, quieter.
That was the specific thing about Luna Hayes that he hadn't found a category for and had stopped pretending he would. She didn't say things to fill the air or soften edges or position herself. She said what was true, cleanly and without performance, and then she left it there for him to do whatever he chose with.
He turned his glass in his hand and looked at the city and thought about his father — which he usually avoided, had built significant architecture around avoiding — and found that it hurt slightly less than it normally did.
He didn't know what to do with that.
She's good, his wolf said simply. Not possessive this time. Not hungry. Just true.
Yes, Damien agreed.
He stayed on the balcony until the cold finally gave him a reason to go inside, and even then he moved slowly.
- Writer
