Page 79 of The CEO

Eve

The cabin creaks and settles around me, its wooden bones adjusting to the cool night air. Outside, an owl calls, the sound drifting through the partially open window along with the scent of damp earth. I wrap the blanket tighter around my shoulders, staring at the blank page of my journal.

I’ve been in this small hideaway an hour outside Chicago for two weeks. Two weeks of solitude, of processing, of grief that feels both ancient and achingly new. The cabin belongs to a photographer I once interviewed for theTribune—an elderly man who offered it to me without question when I called, desperation evident in my voice.

“Stay as long as you need,”he’d said, pressing the keys into my palm.“Sometimes the world gets too loud. I understand.”

The world hadn’t gotten too loud—it had shattered entirely.

I pick up my pen again, trying to organize my thoughts on paper, but the words refuse to come. Instead, memories flood my mind—my father teaching me to use his camera, my mother’s laugh as she watched us from the porch, the last dinner we shared before the accident. Happy memories now tainted by the knowledge that their deaths weren’t a random tragedy, but a deliberate cover-up.

Victor Messini killed them. Then Damien Knox hid the evidence.

The man whose kiss still burns on my lips is responsible for eight years of my grief, my loneliness, my life’s derailment. The rage this knowledge ignites should be pure, uncomplicated. Yet here I sit, my thoughts a tangled mess of hatred and desire, fury and fascination.

I close the journal, knowing no written words can capture this contradiction.How can I still want a man who helped destroy my family? How can my body continue to respond to the memory of his touch? What kind of person does that make me?

The reality of these answers sickens me. How could I long for the devil himself?

Sleep, when it finally comes, offers no peace. I dream of rain-slicked roads, of headlights cutting through darkness, of metal crushing against metal. I dream of my parents’ final moments—terror frozen on their faces, blood on shattered glass. I dream of Damien standing in the shadows, watching with those dark, calculating eyes.

I dream of him kneeling before me in that underground throne room, offering himself as atonement.

I wake, gasping, sheets twisted around my legs, sweat cooling on my skin despite the night’s chill. The digital clock reads 3:17 a.m.—the witching hour, my mother used to call it. The time when the veil between worlds thins, when truths reveal themselves in the darkness.

The nightmare leaves my heart racing, my parents’ screams still playing in my ears as I bolt upright in the unfamiliar bed. Sweat clings to my skin despite the cabin’s chill, my heart hammering against my ribs like it’s trying to escape. This dream was different—worse. For the first time, Damien stood over their crumpled car, his face impassive as my mother’s life drained away.

“Just a dream,” I whisper to the darkness, but the words ring hollow. Not just a dream. A memory twisted by truth. By his confession.

I reach for my phone on the nightstand with trembling fingers, scrolling to Damien’s number. My thumb hovers over the call button. What would I even say?

I hate you. I miss you. I don’t know how to exist in a world where both these things are true.

Instead, I toss the phone aside and open my laptop. The blue light is harsh in the darkness as I type: “vigilante justice organizations Chicago.” The search results populate, none mentioning The Shadows specifically, but articles about unsolved murders, criminals who mysteriously disappeared, corrupt officials who suddenly lost everything.

I don’t know why I even bother. I know I won’t find what I’m looking for. I grab my journal, flipping it open to a new page and taking a seat at the small desk in the corner.

I create a new document, dividing it with a line down the middle. On the left: “Reasons to Leave.” On the right: “Reasons to Stay.” Then I start writing.

I stare at the paper until the words blur together. When did the second column grow longer than the first? When did I start seeing his darkness not as a deal-breaker but as a complicated counterweight to my own evolving sense of justice?

Hours pass as I add to both columns, memories surfacing like debris after a storm. My mother’s voice in my ear:“The world isn’t black and white, Evie. Sometimes doing the right thing means getting your hands dirty.”

My father showing me photos from war zones:“Sometimes the truth hurts to look at, but looking away is cowardice.”

Light begins to slowly spread across the sky, dawn creeping over the forest. I move to the cabin door, stepping onto the small porch. The air is crisp, purifying, filled with the sounds of birds awakening. I take a deep breath, letting it fill my lungs completely, trying to forget the situation I’m in.

“Maybe justice doesn’t always look the way I thought it should,” I whisper to the trees, to my parents’ memory, to myself.

I think about Damien’s hands . . . hands that helped hide my parents’ killer, hands that have ended lives, the same hands that have touched me with unexpected tenderness. The moral calculus makes my head spin, but something deeper than logic is at work here. Something primal and honest that recognizes his darkness as a reflection of my own evolving shadow.

Walking back inside, I stare at my journal. The pages still divide my thoughts neatly into opposing columns, but life refuses such tidy categorization. I grab the paper and tear it from the book, wadding it up and tossing it into the trash before opening a second blank page where I begin to write what feels like the first honest words since I left Chicago.

The truth about Damien Knox isn’t that he’s a monster or a hero. The truth is more complicated. He’s both. Just like I’m becoming both. Just like justice itself is both mercy and vengeance, both light and shadow . . .

The sun rises fully as I continue writing, untangling the knots in my heart one painful word at a time.

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