Aria – First Person POV
I barely slept.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Damian’s command from last night echoing through the dim hallway of his penthouse:
“Don’t go looking for what you’re not ready to know.”
It wasn’t a threat.
It was a warning.
And that somehow made it worse.
By the time I walked into the office the next morning, I was running on caffeine and anxiety. The lobby felt colder, the glass walls sharper, the pace of footsteps faster—as if the whole building sensed I had crossed some invisible line.
But I pushed through, stepped out of the elevator, and headed to my desk.
Trent was already there.
He didn’t greet me.
He didn’t joke.
He didn’t even look up from the files he was pretending to organize.
He just murmured, “You shouldn’t have seen that photograph.”
A
