The words refused to leave me.
"When you're ready to tell me... you will."
They lodged beneath my skin like a splinter too deep to pull free. Every time I closed my eyes, I heard them again—not as a promise, not as a threat, but as something infinitely worse.
Patience.
Damien Cross had returned the photograph without unfolding it.
He hadn't searched my room.
He hadn't demanded an explanation.
He hadn't even asked why I'd stolen something from his private office.
Any other man would've called it betrayal.
Damien had called it... nothing.
That unsettled me more than anger ever could.
I lay awake on the narrow bed, staring at the cracked ceiling while the clubhouse settled into its familiar rhythm. Somewhere downstairs, a refrigerator hummed. Pipes groaned inside the old walls. A m
