Page 121 of Watch Me Burn
Reality settles back over us. I see the moment it hits him too. His expression shifts and hardens as he retreats behind those walls again.
“How long are you going to punish me?”
“I’m not punishing you.”
“It fucking feels like it.”
He moves closer again, crowding me, but keeps his hands at his sides. My body tenses, uncertain whether I have the strength to push him away a second time if he reaches for me.
“I know I hurt you. But I don’t know what else to say other than I’m sorry. I’m not a man who apologizes, Luna. I’m not a man who usually feels remorse.”
A bitter, knowing smile tugs at the corner of my mouth. If that isn’t the understatement of the century, I don’t know what is.
“I’m not sorry for all of it. I’m not sorry about how we came together.” That rough timbre slides through his voice, the one that’s commanded my surrender in a hundred different ways. “I’m not sorry for having kept my identity hidden at first. But I am sorry for not telling you the truth when I realized I was falling in love with you. When I realized you were falling in love with me.”
I open my mouth, then close it, searching for a response that doesn’t exist.
“What are you going to do about Karen?” I ask instead, smoothing down my torn shirt and trying to reassemble the pieces of my composure.
His face goes blank in an instant, every emotion wiped clean.
“I’ll figure it out.”
His dismissal sends worry crawling up my spine.
“Are you going to kill her?”
The transformation is immediate and chilling. His eyes turn ice cold, his pupils contracting to pinpricks while his jaw hardens into granite. Every soft line in his face disappears, replaced by angles sharp enough to cut stone. This is the killer. This is what his victims see in their final moments. Not Damien Wolfe, or even my wolf, but death wearing a human mask.
“I don’t kill innocents, Luna.”
His voice is quiet enough that I have to strain to hear it, but it’s loaded with enough menace to make me step backward.
This isn’t the man I’ve fallen in love with, the one who takes me apart with his hands and mouth, the one who makes me forget my own name when he kisses me. This is the predator who’s ended hundreds, if not thousands, of lives without losing sleep and will end hundreds more.
But fear doesn’t touch me. It should, but it doesn’t.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that. I know you only kill those who deserve it.”
His expression softens, some of the ice melting from his features, but violence still prowls beneath the surface like a caged animal.
“She’s doing her job. I can respect that, even if it makes her a problem I need to solve.”
I nod, not trusting my voice. Our situation crashes over me again. The impossibility of loving a man who solves problems with violence and death and who lives in shadows I can’t comprehend.
“For what it’s worth, I believe that you’re sorry, Damien. And I appreciate your honesty about what you’re not sorry for. But trust…” I swallow hard. “I don’t know if I can give you that again.”
The agony etched on his face is so intense, a sharp ache pulses in my chest.
“It has to be enough. There is no other option for me, Luna.” He pauses, the muscles ticking in his jaw as if he’s fighting some internal battle. “But I’ll be patient.”
“Will you really?” Skepticism colors every syllable.
He nods, but it’s obvious what saying those words cost him, by the way his hands flex and his shoulders tense with the effort of restraint.
“But my patience has limits. When it runs out, if you haven’t come to me…” His eyes lock on mine, holding me prisoner. “I’m coming for you.”
It’s both a promise and a warning.
