The Billion Dollar clause

CHAPTER FOUR

~DAMIEN~

I didn't ask her. I didn't give her the chance to answer either way. My hand closed around her uninjured wrist and I pulled her out of that alley before she'd even caught her breath, before the man bleeding on the wet concrete had finished begging me to stop. The SUV was waiting exactly where I'd left it, engine running, back door already open because Amir knew me well enough to anticipate the moment. I put Emilia inside it the way I handled everything else in my life. Decisively, and without room for negotiation.

"I'm fine." She said it the second the door shut behind us, her voice thin and unconvincing, her hands trembling in a way that betrayed every word. "Really, Damien, I just need to get home. My mother will worry." She reached for the door handle like she actually intended to climb back out into the rain and walk the rest of the way herself, as though what had just happened in that alley was a minor inconvenience rather than something that could have ended her life.

I said nothing. I simply reached over, took her wrist gently this time and turned it toward the light filtering in from the streetlamps outside. The bruises had already begun to darken, four distinct marks pressed into her skin where his fingers had dug in, and something in my chest tightened at the sight of them in a way that had nothing to do with logic or restraint. Emilia followed my gaze down to her own arm and went quiet.

"You're not fine." I kept my voice level, because raising it wouldn't have helped either of us, and because some old instinct told me she needed calm more than she needed force. "You're coming with me tonight. Nonnegotiable." I watched her open her mouth to argue again, watched her look at the bruises one more time, and watched the fight drain out of her shoulders as she finally sank back into the seat and said nothing at all. It wasn't agreement so much as surrender, and I understood the difference well enough not to mistake one for the other.

Amir pulled away from the curb without a word, the wipers beating a slow rhythm against the windshield, the city sliding past in smears of red and gold through the rain-streaked glass. I caught his eyes once in the rearview mirror. He had on an unreadable glance that asked a dozen questions I had no intention of answering before he returned his attention to the road. He'd been with me long enough to know when silence was an order rather than an accident, and he respected it the way he respected everything else I asked of him.

The quiet stretched between Emilia and me like something physical, heavy and unfamiliar, filling every inch of space the leather and glass couldn't. Ten years should have given us enough time to prepare for a moment like this, should have handed us the right words somewhere along the way, but instead they'd only made the distance wider. I glanced at her once — she was staring resolutely out the window, arms wrapped around herself, rain still clinging to strands of her hair — and I found I had no idea where a person was even supposed to begin after a decade of silence.

I could have told her why I was there tonight. I could have told her about the three years of rent, the certifications, the countless small mercies I'd arranged from behind a wall of anonymity because I hadn't trusted myself to do it any other way. I could have told her that I'd never really stopped watching, not once, not for a single year of the ten that had passed since we were children who believed dinosaurs could beat dragons. Instead I said nothing, because some truths felt too large for a car ride, and because I was still, after everything, a coward when it came to her.

"Where are we going?" Her voice finally broke the silence, quieter now, stripped of the earlier protest. "My penthouse," I said. "You'll be safe there tonight." She didn't argue this time. She only nodded once, turned back to the window, and let the city carry us the rest of the way in a silence that said everything neither of us was ready to.