Page 20 of Damian
It should’ve been background noise. Just a civilian scribbling.
But my body betrayed me.
The way her hair fell loose around her shoulders, soft against the collar of her shirt, made my hands itch to tuck it back. The curve of her neck when she bent over the papers drew my gaze like a target I shouldn’t aim at. And when she smiled faintly — that rare, unguarded moment when shecracked her own armor — it hit me low, hard, in a place no rifle or knife had ever touched.
I shifted in my chair, jaw tight. Christ. I was reacting to her like a green recruit, not a man who’d seen more battlefields than birthdays.
“Something on your mind, Damian?” River’s voice was too casual from across the room.
I shot him a look sharp enough to silence a lesser man. He just smirked and went back to cleaning his pistol. Bloody nuisance. He’d clocked me hours ago.
Cyclone didn’t look up from his screen, but the slight twitch at the corner of his mouth told me he’d noticed too.
I forced myself back into the mission. Focus. Hub 9. Caldwell. Hemsley. Luthor. Every name a stone I stacked between me and the pull of Morgan Tate.
But when her voice drifted across the room, soft and steady — “Charities hide monsters in plain sight, but monsters always leave cracks” — I felt it again. That dangerous tug in my chest.
I clenched my fists until my knuckles whitened. I couldn’t afford this. Not now. Not with Ruby missing, not with Luthor watching, not with a woman who didn’t even realize the kind of storm she’d walked into.
And yet… when her eyes lifted and met mine, wide and earnest, I couldn’t look away.
For the first time in years, the battlefield wasn’t out there.
It was in m
21
Damian
We rolled out just after sundown, the van cutting through the dark like a blunt blade. River cracked a joke about Morgan packing us snacks, and I shut him down with a look, but the truth was—I’d thought of her too. Thought of her sitting in that kitchen, whispering into that recorder like it was a lifeline.
I told her she was safe here. But safety was a fragile thing, and I hated leaving her behind.
The road stretched black and empty, headlights carving pale tunnels. Cyclone tracked Hemsley’s beacon, the green pulse steady on his screen. Southbound again, but slower this time, like he wanted to be noticed.
“Could be bait,” Cyclone muttered.
“Of course it’s bloody bait,” I said. “Question is, do we take it or cut the line?”
River leaned back, lazy grin not fooling me. “You’re wound tighter than usual, mate. That because of him—” he jabbed a thumb at the tracker—“or because of the woman sitting back at the farmhouse?”
My grip on the wheel tightened. “Watch your mouth.”
He held up his hands, grin widening. “Just saying. You glare less when she’s in the room.”
I didn’t answer, because the worst part was—he wasn’t wrong.
I’d trained my whole life to compartmentalize. Mission here. Emotion there. Never bleed one into the other. But Morgan had slipped through a crack I hadn’t known was there. And the more I tried to wall her out, the more I caught myself thinking about the way her voice softened when she said Ruby’s name. The way her smile flickered alive when she forgot she was afraid. The way my chest felt when her eyes found mine, like I was the one being seen.
Bloody foolish.
Cyclone broke the silence. “Truck’s slowing. Pulling toward the outskirts.”
I snapped back into soldier mode, forcing every stray thought about Morgan into the vault. “We follow. No closer than five hundred. If Hemsley wants to play bait, we’ll play smarter.”
River muttered something about “smarter than lust-drunk Brits,” but I ignored him, eyes locked on the taillights ahead.
Because no matter what else was tearing through my head, one truth burned clear:
