The fisherman's hut sat at the far edge of the coast, where the land jutted into restless black water and the salt air never left your skin. It wasn't much — a single room with peeling paint, a stove that groaned when lit, and windows so clouded they blurred the horizon.
It was perfect.
Damien woke the morning after the river with muscles aching and lungs still raw from the water. The fisherman — a man who called himself Calder — had left a chipped mug of coffee on the table.
"You're lucky I fish the river at night," Calder said when Damien stirred. "Lucky… or cursed. Haven't decided yet."
Damien sipped the bitter liquid in silence. His head throbbed, but his mind was sharper than it had been in years — every image of the night before carved into his memory with surgical precision. Ava's green dress. Julian's smirk. The taste of poisoned champagne.
"They'll think I'm dead by now," Damien said quietly.
Calder eyed him. "And if you go back, they'll make sure of it. Best to stay gone."
Damien looked down at his hands. These were the same hands that had signed contracts, sealed deals, shook the palms of men who could buy and sell cities. But those same hands had been too trusting — blind enough to let a brother and a lover stand close enough to strike.
"Damien Kane is dead," he said finally, the words tasting strange on his tongue.
Calder nodded once, as if that was the only answer worth giving. "Then you'd better figure out who you're going to be next."
Two days later, Damien burned the only clothes he had been wearing the night of the betrayal. He watched the flames devour the black tuxedo and soaked silk, the smoke curling into the salt air until there was no trace left.
It wasn't enough.
At a payphone in the nearest town, he made his first move. He called an old contact — not a friend, never a friend — a fixer who dealt in identities, untraceable accounts, and secrets the law couldn't touch.
"I need to disappear," Damien said when the man answered.
"You already have," came the reply. "The news says you're dead. But if you want it airtight… it'll cost you."
"Money's not a problem."
"It will be, until I get you working again. You'll need a name, a past, papers that hold up even if the government comes sniffing." The fixer chuckled. "You looking to hide, or you looking to come back for blood?"
Damien's silence was answer enough.
The transformation began small.
A passport under a new name: Adrian Vale.
A driver's license with a face just different enough to pass under scrutiny — same eyes, but harder now, hair cropped shorter, jawline shadowed by stubble.
The old Damien Kane had been clean-cut, approachable, every inch the image of the respectable heir. Adrian Vale was not.
Calder watched the changes with quiet curiosity. "You planning to leave the country?"
"Yes." Damien's voice was colder now, each word deliberate. "If I'm going to take back what's mine, I need more than money. I need power they can't touch."
The next five years were a blur of calculated moves.
He went to places the Kane family's money had never touched — the steel-blue towers of Singapore, the private banking rooms in Zurich, the quiet boardrooms in Dubai where fortunes were made over whispers and cigars.
He learned everything he hadn't known before — not the polished etiquette of the elite, but the way true power moved behind closed doors. The kind that didn't need cameras or press releases to control nations.
And with each deal, each acquisition, each ruthless strike against those who underestimated him, Damien shed more of the man he'd been.
In a penthouse in Hong Kong, a rival once asked him over a game of poker, "What's your secret, Vale? You never flinch."
Damien's smirk was faint, almost dangerous. "I died once. After that, nothing scares you."
But in the quiet hours — and there were always quiet hours — the memory would return. The green of Ava's dress. The weight of Julian's hand on his shoulder. The plunge into black water.
He didn't drink champagne anymore. He didn't celebrate victories. And he never, ever trusted anyone who smiled too easily.
By the sixth year, Adrian Vale's name carried weight in the circles that mattered — and fear in the ones that preferred to stay hidden. His network was global, his resources limitless, and his reach extended into places that could ruin a man with a single phone call.
That was when he made the decision.
It was time to go home.
Calder was older now, slower in his step, but his eyes lit when Damien stepped into the same small hut on the coast.
"I wondered if I'd ever see you again," Calder said. "And if I did… I knew you wouldn't be the same."
Damien looked out at the black water, the same river that had swallowed him. "I'm not."
"Then what happens now?"
Damien's gaze was fixed on the horizon — past it, to the city that had once been his.
"Now," he said slowly, "I dig up the bones of Damien Kane… and bury Julian in the same grave."