
He kissed me like a verdict. Like seven years of fury compressed into one devastating mouth. Like I was still his. I bit his lip until it bled. Because I'm NOT. Damien Blackwood — billionaire, syndicate prince, the man the business world calls Satan — thinks I owe him something. Seven years ago, I was the naive girl who trembled in his arms and believed him when he said forever. Seven years ago, I gave him everything. My first kiss. My first love. My whole stupid, reckless heart. He doesn't know what happened after. The baby. The hospital. The flatline. The parents who threw me out like garbage. The wooden stick that cracked my skull while he was across an ocean, oblivious. The marriage I never wanted to a man I never loved — because he was the only person decent enough to catch me when I fell. I rebuilt myself from NOTHING. And now Damien stands in front of me with those black, bottomless eyes, gripping my wrist like I'm a debt to be collected, whispering: "I gave you seven years of freedom. That was seven years too many." Freedom? He calls what I survived FREEDOM? Here's what he doesn't understand: the girl he's looking for is dead. I killed her myself. Buried her in a hospital room at three a.m. next to a baby who never got to breathe. The woman standing in front of him now? She doesn't break. She doesn't beg. She doesn't belong to anyone. But God help me — when his hand touches the small of my back, my body remembers things my mind has spent seven years trying to forget. And the woman watching us from the shadows? She knows secrets about that night. Secrets that could turn his obsession into something far worse. He thinks he's the predator in this story. He has no idea what's hunting us both.