The office was still filled with Stephan’s scent — that faint trace of cologne and conviction — long after he’d left.
Damien sat motionless at his desk, his fingers steepled beneath his chin, the weight of the silence pressing heavily on him. Outside, the city roared with life, but inside, it was suffocatingly quiet.
His mind wouldn’t stop replaying Stephan’s words:
“Where was Avery that night?”
He wanted to brush it off — to believe that Avery, the woman who had comforted him in his darkest hours, could never be capable of something so sinister. But the image of her that night when she returned from the club began to play in his head again — blood stains on her palm, small details that suddenly felt wrong.
The night Luke died, Avery had claimed she was waiting for him in the car par
