Damian's Pov
"Who's Julian Voss?"
"Someone your father promised you to when you were six years old." I said it flat, because there was no gentler way to say it and I've never trusted gentleness to survive contact with the truth for long. "A contract marriage. Two families' shipping interests, sealed with paperwork instead of feeling. He's spent five years looking for you. Apparently harder than I gave him credit for."
She went very still. "I don't want him. I never wanted any of it."
"I know." And I did, I'd read that much in her face the moment I said Elias's name and watched her flinch like the guilt of it belonged to her too. "But wanting nothing doesn't make you invisible, Ms. Cross. It never has. You're about to have two men from your old life converging on the same city inside t
