Prologue
I was fifteen when I saw Damien Vale for the first time.
Not in the way a teenager notices someone older and handsome.
No — I saw him like a warning. A shadow stretching too far into a house that already had too many secrets.
He came in through the back door. He didn't knock.
Nobody told me we were expecting company that night, especially not someone like him.
He was tall, too tall for our creaking doorway. Clean-shaven, he wore a dark suit and black overcoat, and his silver watch caught the kitchen light with every movement. His presence was like a cold gust that swept through the room and never left.
My mother's posture changed the second she saw him. Her back straightened. Her wine glass trembled just a little before she set it down. Her lipstick suddenly looked too red, too smudged.
And my father — the man who hadn't looked up from a bottle in weeks — suddenly cleared his throat and forced a stiff smile.
"Damien," he said like the word itself hurt his mouth.
"Good to see you again, Charles," Damien replied coolly. His voice was calm but cold — practiced like a man who learned early in life how to say everything while revealing nothing.
He didn't look at me. Not right away.
But when he did…
I felt it.
Like something inside me shifted, tilted just enough to throw everything off balance. I didn't understand it then, but it was sharp and silent like a thread pulled too tight.
His eyes flicked over me, quickly. Almost like he regretted looking at all. I must've been nothing to him. Just a girl with chipped nail polish and borrowed heels, standing awkwardly at the kitchen entrance trying not to be noticed.
But I noticed everything.
The way his jaw ticked when my mother spoke to him.
The way she lit a cigarette even though she'd quit.
The way they didn't touch — but their silence buzzed like they had, once. And it hadn't ended well.
That night, I listened to their voices from the hallway after dinner. My parents thought I was asleep. But I wasn't.
I stood barefoot in the cold, behind the staircase, peeking through shadows as Damien leaned against the kitchen counter, his arms crossed, his body still.
My mother looked small in front of him. And she was never small.
"You shouldn't have come here," she said tightly.
"I told you I'd collect one day," he said.
She inhaled sharply. "Not like this."
His voice dropped. "There's no other way."
My mother slapped him.
Hard.
The sound echoed.
But he didn't flinch. Not even a blink.
Instead, he stepped closer.
And kissed her.
It wasn't gentle.
It was punishment. Regret. Possession.
And she kissed him back.
Only for a second — but it was enough to burn the moment into my memory forever.
I ran to my room that night, but sleep didn't come.
I stared at the ceiling, wondering what it meant. Who he was to her. Why did my father pretend not to care? Why the kitchen felt like it held something that didn't belong to any of us?
I never asked.
Because a week later, Damien Vale disappeared from our lives.
And a year after that… so did my mother.
No warning. No goodbye. Just her perfume lingering in the hallway, and a cold silence that took her place at the dinner table.
We told people she ran away.
But I never believed it.
Because Damien Vale had walked into our house like a man with unfinished business.
And I knew, deep down, that he'd be back to finish it.
Five Years Later
I'm twenty now. And I know better than to believe in monsters.
But the day I walked into that penthouse office, desperate, broke, and clinging to the last threads of my father's medical insurance…
He's the one waiting behind the glass desk.
Damien Vale.
Older. Colder. And more dangerous than I remembered.
He looks at me the way a man sizes up a priceless painting — not because he admires it, but because he already plans to own it.
"I said I'd collect one day," he says again.
This time, the debt isn't my mother's.
It's mine.
"What do you want from me?" I whisper.
Damien leans forward slowly, his voice silk and steel.
"You. As my wife. For one year."