Chapter 24: Feel Real
The figure was gone, but the impression remained, a stain on the night air. Beth sat frozen on the step, the cold from the stone leaching up through her bones. Every shadow between the stable blocks now hid a shape. Every rustle of the bougainvillea was a footfall.
Move.
The command broke her paralysis. She stood, her muscles stiff, and walked back into the house with a deliberate calm she didn’t feel. She didn’t run. Running was for prey.
In the study, she locked the door. Her hands were steady as she opened the bottom desk drawer, bypassed the ledger, and pulled out a secure satellite phone. She hit a single, memorized speed-dial.
It was answered on the first ring. No greeting.
“Jackson. There was a watcher. South side, between the main house and the old stables. Five minutes ago.” Her voice was low, clinical.
A pause, the faint sound of breathing. Jackson, their head of security, was a man of few words. “Caught a scent. Wasn’t one of Vega’s usual shadows. Too still. You compromised?”
“I don’t know.” She closed her eyes. “Sweep the perimeter. Tell Dove. And Jackson… escalate protocols.”
“Understood.” The line went dead.
The phone felt heavy in her hand. Dove was right. This wasn’t a business merger; it was a war for succession, and she was standing in the middle of the battlefield without armor. The walls of the ranch, her family’s fortress, felt thin as paper. The silence was suffocating, filled with the echo of that mental roulette wheel spinning, spinning, the click imminent.
She couldn’t breathe here. She needed noise, chaos, something loud enough to drown out the whispers in her head. She needed the one person whose chaos matched her own.
Her personal phone was next. A different number. A charter service she used for discretion. “I need a plane to Teterboro. Tonight. Now.” She gave the credentials, her voice brooking no argument. While on hold, she packed a small bag with ruthless efficiency: a change of clothes, nothing else. This wasn’t a business trip.
The plane was waiting. The drive to the private airstrip was a blur of dark highway and her own reflection in the window, pale and drawn. She didn’t think. Thinking led to ledgers, to Vega, to the cold calculation of becoming what she feared. She just moved.
The jet’ cabin was silent, hushed. She declined the champagne. She stared out at the blackness, seeing not clouds but the shape of a man standing in the shadows, watching.
Manhattan at three in the morning was a different beast. It didn’t sleep; it simmered. Her heels clicked a frantic tattoo on the sidewalk as she hailed a cab. She gave the address on Central Park West, not her own sleek apartment at The Mogul. The taxi smelled of old leather and disinfectant. She rolled the window down, let the cold, grimy air whip her hair, and tried to outrun the fear.
The lobby of his building was a temple of quiet wealth. The night doorman, recognizing her with a blink of surprise, simply nodded. “Mr. Rossi is in, Ms. Montgomery.” He didn’t call for approval. Some histories bypass protocol.
The elevator ride was a cage of her own making. Her pulse hammered in her throat. This was madness. She had no explanation, no strategy, no control. She was coming to him naked of pretext, and that was more terrifying than the watcher in the dark.
The elevator opened directly into his foyer. The apartment was dark, save for the city’s glow painting the wide windows in streaks of neon and sodium light. The air held the faint, familiar scent of him—sandalwood soap, aged paper, and the underlying sharpness of expensive whiskey.
He was standing by the grand piano, a silhouette against the window, a tumbler in hand. He hadn’t been sleeping. He turned, and even in the dim light, she saw the flash of shock in his green eyes, quickly veiled by a calculating calm.
“Bethany.” He said her name like a taste he’d missed. “To what do I owe the…”
She didn’t let him finish. She dropped her bag. It hit the polished floor with a thud. She crossed the space between them, the click of her heels the only sound. She stopped a foot away, her chest rising and falling with the force of her breath.
“I need you to make me forget,” she said, her voice stripped raw, all pretense of ice gone. “I need you to fucking ruin me for thinking about anything else. Right now.”
He studied her face, reading the panic, the desperation she wasn’t bothering to hide. A slow, dangerous heat kindled in his gaze. He set his glass down on the piano with a soft, definitive click.
“No games tonight?” His voice was a low rumble.
“No games.”
“No questions?”
“No questions.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. Her surrender, this blatant and complete, was the one thing he could never resist. It was the crack in her armor he’d spent years trying to find.
He closed the distance in one stride. His hand came up, not to caress, but to fist in her hair, wrenching her head back just enough to expose the line of her throat. It wasn’t gentle. It was possession.
“Tell me,” he growled against her ear, his breath hot.
“Make me forget, Damien.” She was already melting, the tension leaching out under his touch, replaced by a darker, needier fire. “Fuck the thoughts out of my head. I don’t want to think.”
He claimed her mouth with a bruising kiss. It was all teeth and tongue and years of pent-up fury and longing. She kissed him back just as fiercely, her hands clawing at the shoulders of his tailored shirt, desperate to feel skin. He walked her backward, never breaking the kiss, until her spine hit the cold, smooth mahogany of the grand piano. The vibration sang through the wood.
He ripped her silk blouse open. Buttons scattered across the floor like falling stars. His mouth left hers to travel down her throat, biting a path to her collarbone. “You come to me like this,” he muttered, his hands pulling at the clasp of her bra, “like a fucking storm. What are you running from, Beth?”
“Nothing. Everything. Shut up and fuck me.”
He shoved her lace bra down, his palms rough on her breasts, thumbs scraping over her nipples until she gasped. He bent his head, took one peak into his mouth, sucking hard, his tongue working her until she cried out, her fingers tangling in his hair to hold him there. The mix of pain and pleasure was a white-hot wire straight to her core.
He unzipped her trousers, yanked them and her underwear down her hips in one brutal motion. The cold air hit her skin, then the hotter warmth of his hand sliding between her legs. She was already wet, slick with a need that shamed her with its intensity. He swore, a filthy, gratified sound, as his fingers parted her.
“Always so ready for me,” he breathed. “Even when you hate me.”
“I do hate you,” she panted, spreading her legs wider as he pushed two fingers inside her, curling them, finding a rhythm that made her knees buckle. “God, I hate you so much.”
“Prove it,” he challenged, removing his fingers. He unbuckled his belt, the leather hissing, the sound obscene in the quiet room. He freed himself, hard and thick, and sheathed himself in a condom from his pocket with practiced speed. He didn’t ask. He didn’t tease.
He hooked his hands under her knees, lifting her, spreading her, and slammed into her in one deep, devastating thrust.
The cry was torn from her lungs. He filled her completely, a stretch that bordered on pain, grounding her in the raw, physical now. The piano groaned beneath them. He held himself there, buried to the hilt, his forehead against hers, his breathing ragged.
“Whose?” he demanded, his voice guttural.
“Yours,” she moaned, the truth of it undeniable in this animal moment. “Always yours, you bastard.”
It was the admission he needed. He began to move. There was no finesse, no slow build. It was a punishing, driving rhythm, each thrust jolting her against the hard piano, each retreat almost a loss. The slick, wet sounds of their joining filled the room. He fucked her with a single-minded intensity that shattered the last of her control. She clung to him, her legs locked around his waist, her nails digging into the muscles of his back through his shirt.
“Look at me,” he grunted. She forced her eyes open, meeting his. They were dark, wild, stripped of all charm. This was the real Damien, the ruthless predator. And she was welcoming him in. “You don’t get to run to me and keep your secrets, Beth. You come on my cock, you’re mine. You remember that.”
She was too far gone to argue. The coil inside her was tightening, a desperate, screaming pressure. The friction was brutal, perfect. She chanted his name, a broken litany, as the orgasm ripped through her, violent and convulsing, blinding her to everything but the feel of him pounding into her, claiming her.
He followed with a harsh groan, his body stiffening, his thrusts turning ragged as he spent himself inside her. He collapsed against her, his weight pressing her into the piano, both of them slick with sweat, breathing in ragged unison.
The city lights blurred outside. In the sudden, ringing silence, the reality crashed back. The scent of sex. The ruin of her clothes. The ledger in Texas. The watcher in the dark. The lie of omission, vast and growing between them.
He nuzzled into her neck, his lips soft now against her damp skin. “Talk to me,” he murmured, the command gentler but no less absolute.
She closed her eyes, the aftermath of pleasure curdling into a cold, familiar dread. She had gotten what she came for. The thoughts were silenced, buried under a wave of physical sensation. But they were still there, waiting. And he was waiting too. She had traded one form of Russian roulette for another, and the chamber, she knew, was still spinning.