MARRIED TO THE DEVIL CEO

CHAPTER TWELEVE: THE GATE

The dark comes so fast I don’t even have time to be afraid of it.

One second the room is lit by the small lamp in the corner, throwing soft yellow light across my unfinished canvas. The next, nothing. Complete black, the kind that presses against your eyes until they start inventing shapes just to have something to hold onto.

“Damien—”

“I know.” His voice comes from somewhere close, closer than I expect, and then his hand finds mine in the dark, sure and immediate, like he’s done this before, like some part of him has been waiting for exactly this. “Don’t let go of me.”

I don’t argue. Whatever coldness has lived between us these last five months disappears completely in that one instruction, and I grip his hand back just as hard, letting him pull me toward the door.

The hallway isn’t much better, lit only by the faint emergency glow of something battery powered near the stairs, casting everything in a dim red that makes the whole house look like it’s holding its breath along with me.

“What’s happening,” I ask, my voice smaller than I want it to be.

“I don’t know yet.” He doesn’t slow down. If anything, his grip tightens. “But the backup generator should have kicked in already. It hasn’t.

That’s not normal.”

“You were about to tell me something.”

“I know.”

“Is this because of that?”

He doesn’t answer right away, and in the silence, the alarm from the front gate grows louder, more insistent, joined now by a second sound, sharp and mechanical, coming from somewhere near the security office downstairs.

“Yes,” he says finally, quiet and clipped, like the word costs him something to admit. “Probably.”

We take the stairs fast, his hand never leaving mine, and I realize somewhere around the second landing that I haven’t questioned once whether to trust him in this moment. Five months of coldness, of condescension, of a marriage that felt more like a business arrangement than anything close to real, and none of it matters right now. Right now there’s only his hand around mine and the sound of something wrong moving closer through the dark.

We reach the ground floor just as two of his security men come around the corner, flashlights cutting white beams across the marble floor.

“Sir.” One of them, older, someone I recognize vaguely from the wedding, stops short at the sight of us. “You need to stay back. We’ve got a breach at the west gate.”

“A breach,” I repeat. “What does that mean.”

“It means someone cut the power on purpose,” Damien says, his voice gone flat and sharp in a way I haven’t heard since the day Amelia disappeared. “And someone got through the perimeter before the backup system caught it.”

“Is it her.” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them, hope and terror tangled together in the same breath. “Is it Amelia.”

Something crosses Damien’s face, quick and complicated, gone before I can read it fully.

“I don’t think so,” he says carefully.

“Then who.”

He doesn’t answer. He turns instead to his security chief, voice low and urgent, and I catch only fragments over the sound of my own heartbeat. Lock down the east wing. Get eyes on every entry point. Don’t let anyone near her.

Near me.

“Damien.” I pull at his hand, forcing him to look at me. “What were you about to tell me upstairs.”

His jaw tightens. For a moment I think he’s going to deflect again, the way he’s deflected every real question for months, retreating behind that careful, controlled version of himself he wears like armor.

He doesn’t.

“Someone’s been asking questions,” he says quietly, fast, like he only has a few seconds to get the whole truth out before something interrupts us again. “About the wedding. About what really happened that day. About why the woman living in this house doesn’t quite match the photographs from before.”

The floor seems to tilt slightly under me. “Someone knows.”

“Someone’s getting close to knowing.” His eyes hold mine, steady despite everything happening around us. “I found out this afternoon. I came up to tell you before you heard it from anyone else. Before you had to find out the way I did, secondhand, from someone who enjoyed watching my face when they said it.”

“Who told you.”

He hesitates.

“Richard,” he says.

The name lands strange in the space between us, and I don’t have time to ask what that means, what it means that his own uncle brought him this news, before one of the security men reappears at the end of the hallway, breathless.

“Sir. We have him.”

“Him,” I repeat.

Damien’s hand tightens around mine.

“Bring him to the study,” he says, voice gone cold and commanding in a way I’ve never heard directed at anyone but me. “Now.”

We walk together toward the study, his hand still locked around mine, the emergency lights flickering weakly overhead, the alarm from the gate finally beginning to quiet as someone shuts it off somewhere in the dark house. My heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat, half convinced I’m about to see my sister for the first time in five months, half convinced I’m about to see something far worse than that.

The study door is already open when we reach it, two of Damien’s men standing on either side of a man seated in the chair across from Damien’s desk, hands zip tied in front of him, his face turned toward the ground.

“Turn on the backup light,” Damien orders.

Someone does. A single battery lamp flickers to life on the desk, throwing harsh yellow light across the room, across the seated man’s face as he finally lifts his head to look at us.

I don’t recognize him.

I feel Damien go rigid beside me, his hand crushing mine now, all the color draining from his face in a way I’ve never once seen, not even the morning Amelia disappeared, not even at the altar when he told me flatly that none of this was real.

“You,” Damien says, and his voice comes out low, and shaken, and nothing at all like the controlled, cold man I’ve spent five months learning to survive.

The man in the chair finally smiles, slow and unhurried, like he’s been waiting a very long time for this exact moment to arrive.

“Hello, Damien,” he says. “It’s been a long time.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​