Blood has a memory.
It remembers pain, vengeance, and the echo of a name whispered in the darkness.
Elena Hart thought she knew the depths of ruin. She was wrong.
Six months ago, Damien Voss vanished. After the chaos, the bloodshed, the betrayal that shattered both their lives, he disappeared like a ghost into the night. No warnings. No farewells. Only silence—and the wreckage he left behind.
In his absence, the underworld fractured.
Power shifted. Empires rose and fell.
And Elena, once a pawn, began to sharpen her edges.
She became the cold whisper behind closed doors, the silent architect of a new empire. No longer the hunted girl in Damien's shadows, she was reborn. Forged in fire and fury. She wore her scars like war paint, learned the rules of the game—and how to break them.
But the devil doesn't stay dead.
Not Damien Voss.
The whispers came first. Rumors that he'd been spotted—alive—in a blood-soaked club in Prague. Then a massacre in Spain, too clean to be cartel. A silent assassination in Russia with no witnesses. Each one bore his signature: calculated, cruel, precise.
But nothing compared to the moment his name resurfaced in New York.
It wasn't just the underworld that froze. Elena did too.
Because she had built her world around his absence.
Now, everything she knew was about to burn.
---
The night he returned, it rained.
Not the kind of rain that washed things clean, but the kind that drowned the city in gray. Elena stood at the window of her penthouse, watching droplets race each other down the glass. Her empire hummed below—quiet, ruthless, efficient.
And then the lights flickered.
Once. Twice. Gone.
Darkness swallowed the room like a throat closing around a scream.
Then came the footsteps.
Measured. Slow.
Familiar.
Elena didn't move. She didn't have to. She knew who it was before the scent of expensive danger filled the air.
"Still love the dramatics, I see," she said quietly.
Silence.
Then, "And you still love tempting fate."
His voice was a rasp of velvet and steel. She turned.
Damien stood in the doorway, soaked in rain and fury. The man she once knew was still there—sharp jaw, obsidian eyes, the cold calm of a killer—but something darker clung to him now. Something broken.
Something reborn.
"You're supposed to be dead," she said.
"I was."
Their eyes locked, and the world shrank.
He stepped forward. She didn't step back.
The air between them cracked like a lightning strike.
And just like that, the game resumed.
But this time, the rules had changed.
---
Because Damien hadn't come back for forgiveness. Or love.
He came back for vengeance.
For the truth.
And
for the woman who dared to rise from his ashes.