Chapter 236 Nightmare
Damian’s POV
The morning after Aria went back to V&A Group, a message from an unknown number landed on my phone.
I didn’t see it until hours later, buried under a stack of pack reports. When I finally opened it, my chest went tight.
Vanessa.
[Are you feeling better? I’m leaving the country tomorrow. Can we meet tonight—just once? —Vanessa]
I didn’t reply. I didn’t know how to.
A while later, a second message came through.
[You said you’d never forget what my family did for you. Is leaving me to hurt like this how you repay the Cranes? I just want to say a proper goodbye. Otherwise... I could always tell Aria everything about you. But Damian, I don’t want to do that.]
*Everything about you.*
Something in me dimmed as I read those last lines.
Because when Aria had asked me about Vanessa, I’d told her the truth—just not all of it.
I’d told her about the pond. Alpha Crane’s visit, two pups playing in the garden, me falling in and hauling myself out before Vanessa ever thought to call for help.
A story light enough to laugh about. Light enough to end the conversation.
The rest of it, I’d never said out loud. Not to Aria. Not to anyone. In twenty years, I’d never once managed to force it past my teeth.
The memory pulled me under before I could stop it.
My father took the throne young, and he ruled well—but ruling well makes enemies.
In those years he was at war on every front: with rival Alphas, with his own relatives over the family empire, and finally with my mother, whom he divorced at the height of it all.
He cut everyone loose to protect the crown.
Including, for a time, me.
Cast out of his orbit, I became the perfect target. When I was fourteen, someone took me on my way back from training.
Held me in a basement that smelled of rust and river water, and demanded a ransom big enough to bleed the crown.
My father decided it was a hoax. He didn’t pay.
It was the Cranes who quietly put up the ransom, worked with the investigators, strung the kidnappers along for days until they found the basement.
When they finally pulled me out into the daylight, my father was there.
He was standing at the mouth of that basement looking like a man who had aged a decade in a single night. I’ll never forget his face in that moment.
Not the King’s face. Just a father’s, gray with the understanding that he had almost gambled his son away.
But he had still come too late to change what those days in the dark had done.
I didn’t speak for six months after that.
And my mother came back. She remarried him for one reason only, and everyone knew it: to hold together what was left of me.
But regret didn’t undo the danger. I was still the perfect target, and now everyone knew exactly how to hurt the King.
So my parents made the only choice they could—they sent me somewhere no enemy would think to look. A small private psychiatric facility on the edge of nowhere.
Discreet doctors, high walls, a false name. For my own protection, even their visits had to be rare, brief, and carefully arranged.
Which meant that most days, I was alone anyway.
What saved me was an accident of geography.
There was an orphanage next door. And there was a girl—small, maybe seven or eight, all elbows and tangled hair—who kept slipping through the gap in the hedge like the walls simply didn’t apply to her.
She didn’t know who I was. She didn’t care that I couldn’t talk.
She’d just sit on the grass beside my bench and fill the silence for both of us—chattering about the orphanage cat, dandelions, which of the nuns snored.
When I didn’t answer, she never once looked at me like the doctors did, like I was broken. She’d just shrug and say, "That’s okay. You can owe me the words."
Day after day. Week after week.
The first word I spoke in six months, I spoke to her.
Then one morning the hedge gap was empty, and it stayed empty. Transferred, adopted, moved—I never found out. I never even knew her name.
I only knew that a stranger of a child had done what an entire facility of specialists couldn’t, and I never got to pay back the words I owed.
That was the wound Vanessa was threatening to tear open.
Except she didn’t even know the shape of it—because in the story the Cranes told, and retold, and polished over the years, it was their love that pulled me through.
And I let them tell it. The ransom was real. The debt was real. So when Vanessa began collecting on it—a favor here, an appearance there, my name beside hers at every function—I paid.
Every time. Even when the demands grew from favors into a future: a formal binding. An engagement.
I said yes to that, too. What did it matter? The girl from the hedge was a ghost. Love was a thing I’d read about. And the Cranes were owed.
Then, weeks before the engagement, something happened.
I still can’t piece the moment together.