THE ASHWOOD LEGACY

OLD GROUND

Chapter 13 — Old Ground

They met privately on Thursday evening, the night before the verification ritual, in a Cross Enterprises conference room stripped of the usual formality — no board members, no assistants, just the two of them and a folder of ceremonial protocols neither of them had actually opened.

"You should know what to expect tomorrow," Damian said, breaking the silence that had stretched too long since Elena arrived. "The ritual draws on old blood magic. There will be an incantation, a binding circle, and a cut — shallow, ceremonial, nothing dangerous on its own. The danger comes from what happens after, when the ritual tries to draw out whatever bloodline power exists in your blood and confirm it against the historical records."

"And if there's nothing there to draw out?"

"Then nothing happens. The ritual fails harmlessly, and we're both back to where we started." He hesitated. "But if there is something there, and your body isn't prepared for how quickly it surfaces, the strain can be..." He trailed off, clearly reluctant to finish the sentence.

"Fatal. You can say it, Damian. I'm not made of glass."

"I know that better than anyone," he said quietly, and something in his voice made her look up, made the careful professional distance she'd been maintaining all evening c***k just slightly at the edges. "I've never known anyone stronger than you, Elena. Not before the rejection, and certainly not now."

The silence that followed felt charged, dangerous in an entirely different way than the ritual he'd just described. Elena looked away first, focusing very deliberately on the folder between them.

"Why did you do it?" she asked, the question she'd sworn to herself she wouldn't ask escaping anyway. "Three years ago. Why did you actually reject me, if the bond never fully died?"

Damian was quiet for a long moment. "My mother told me it was necessary. That the alliance with the Hale family was the only thing standing between Crimson Hollow and a hostile takeover from a rival territory. She made it sound like the pack's survival depended on it." His jaw tightened. "I believed her. I was twenty-six years old, I'd just become alpha eight months earlier, and I trusted my mother's political judgment over my own instincts. That's the truth, Elena, as ugly as it is. I chose what I thought was duty over what I actually wanted."

"And what did you actually want?"

He looked at her then, direct and unguarded in a way she hadn't seen from him since before the rejection, since before either of them had learned to armor themselves against each other.

"You," he said simply. "I wanted you. I've wanted you since the moment I saw you at my mother's gala, before I knew anything about bloodlines or council politics or any of the reasons everyone kept telling me it couldn't work. I rejected the one thing in my life I actually wanted, because I was too young and too afraid to fight for it, and I have spent three years regretting it every single day."

Elena's breath caught, the old ache in her chest flaring hot and immediate, three years of carefully constructed distance suddenly feeling paper-thin.

"That doesn't undo what you did," she said, though her voice had lost some of its earlier steel.

"I know it doesn't." He reached across the small space between them, slow enough that she could have pulled away, and rested his hand over hers where it lay flat against the table. "I'm not asking you to forgive me tonight, Elena. I'm asking you to survive tomorrow. Everything else, we can figure out after."

The moment his skin touched hers, the bond — three years dormant, three years carefully buried under grief and rage and a business empire built specifically to prove she didn't need him — surged back to life with a force that made them both gasp.

The windows of the conference room cracked, a spiderweb of fractures racing across the glass, and neither of them pulled away.