Page 95 of The Contract

“Well, you don’t exactly do anything halfway, Mr. Wolfe. From where I’m standing, it seems like every move you’ve ever made has been leading up to this. Like you always knew exactly where you were going.”

I hum, shifting the shoes in my hand before tucking my free hand into my pocket.

“I didn’t.”

She waits, patient, giving me the space to continue if I want to.

I exhale, my gaze tracing the horizon before I finally say it.

“My father was a mid-level corporate man who lost everything on a bad investment.”

Her brows furrow slightly, but she doesn’t interrupt.

“He made a bet on something too risky. Didn’t hedge it properly. And when it crashed, so did we.”

I shake my head slightly. “Lost the house. The savings. Everything.”

Elena stays quiet, listening.

“My mother . . .” I swallow, my voice steady, but the memory burns like an old wound.

“She never recovered from it,” I continue. “She fell into a deep depression. Eventually, she took her own life.”

Elena sucks in a quiet breath, but I don’t look at her.

This part has always felt so detached from me.

“I had no idea, Damien,” she whispers.

“You won’t find any records of it. No stories. No headlines. Just . . . gone.”

I keep my voice flat, because if I don’t, something inside me might crack open completely.

“When I was able to, I paid a lot of money to make it that way.”

I finally glance at her, my lips twitching into something humorless.

She doesn’t say anything, but I can feel the weight of her sorrow as she looks at me.

I turn back to the ocean, the water black and endless under the stormy sky.

“After that, it was just me and him. My father. But he didn’t even try to put us back together. He just . . . drank himself into a coffin a few years later.”

“Damien.”

Her voice is barely carried by the wind, soft and aching with something I don’t want to name.

I shake my head. “I raised myself. After he lost everything, he was content to sit in the wreckage, pretending the world owed him something. I wasn’t.”

My jaw locks, that old familiar burn settling deep in my gut.

“I was never going to be like that. Never again was I going to go to bed hungry for the third day in a row.”

Her grip tightens on my arm.

I glance down at where her fingers wrap around me, the contrast of her delicate touch against the tension still coiled in my body.

I hadn’t even realized she was holding onto me.

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