Victor Kane had always believed death would be an inconvenience rather than an end. He treated mortality the same way he treated hostile mergers: with cold preparation and absolute certainty that he would come out owning more than he started with. The private Gulfstream jet had been his latest acquisition, customized down to the monogrammed whiskey tumblers. When the right engine disintegrated at thirty-seven thousand feet, he did not scream. He reclined his seat another two degrees, sipped the last of his twenty-five-year-old Macallan, and ran probability matrices in his head. Survival window closed at zero-point four percent. He accepted the arithmetic without resentment.
The impact was mercifully quick.
Then came darkness.
When awareness returned, it arrived wrapped in pain and the smell of burning thatch. Victor opened eyes that felt wrong: younger, sharper, unburdened by decades of late-night negotiations. The sky above was a black vault studded with stars too bright, too close. No sodium haze. No distant jet contrails. Just wilderness and fire.
He lay on trampled grass at the edge of what had been a village square. Bodies dotted the ground like discarded inventory. Smoke rolled thick and acrid. Heat pressed against his skin. Blood soaked the coarse wool tunic clinging to a lean, unfamiliar torso. Eighteen, perhaps nineteen years old. Sword-callused hands. A short, practical blade lay inches from his fingertips.
A woman's scream sliced through the night.
"Damien! No! Damien!"
The voice carried layers of agony and desperate possession. It struck something primal inside the new body, something that answered before Victor's intellect could intervene.
Mother.
He pushed himself upright. Ribs protested with sharp fire. A deep gash wept blood down his left thigh. None of it mattered. Across the square, two bandits dragged a struggling woman toward a tethered horse. She was tall, willowy yet generously curved, silver-blonde hair spilling in wild waves down her back. The moonlight caught the pale skin of her exposed shoulder where her dress had torn. Full breasts heaved with each frantic breath, barely contained by the ripped green fabric. She fought like a cornered lynx, nails raking, heels digging furrows in the dirt.
One bandit, a gap-toothed brute with a scarred cheek, laughed and yanked her harder. The other, shorter and thicker, groped her openly, thick fingers digging into soft flesh.
"Keep screaming, love," the scarred one sneered. "Makes it sweeter."
"Damien!" she cried again, voice breaking.
Victor's lips peeled back from his teeth.
He stood.
The world steadied. Muscle memory that was not originally his flooded every limb: balance perfect, grip instinctive. He closed his hand around the sword hilt. The weight felt like an extension of his will.
"Stop."
The single word carried across the square with the flat authority of a man who had once silenced boardrooms with less volume.
Both bandits turned. They saw a bloodied youth swaying on his feet and grinned.
"Look at the pretty boy," the thick one rumbled. "Come to save mummy?"
Victor did not waste breath on banter.
He moved.
The first step was measured. The second explosive. The scarred bandit swung a rusty longsword in a lazy overhead arc meant to split skulls. Victor stepped inside the swing before it reached its apex. His blade flickered upward in a single, surgically precise line. Steel kissed throat. A wet gurgle replaced the bandit's laughter. Bright arterial spray painted the night. The man collapsed like a marionette with cut strings.
The thick one bellowed and charged, raising a cleaver-like axe. Victor pivoted on his lead foot, body low, sword already traveling in a diagonal rising cut. The axe head whistled over his hair. The blade met ribs, slid between them, found heart. He twisted once on the withdrawal. The bandit coughed blood once, eyes bulging in comic surprise, then folded forward.
Two heartbeats. Two corpses.
Silence fell, broken only by crackling flames and the woman's ragged sobs.
She stared at him, green eyes enormous in a face pale with shock and soot. Silver hair clung to sweat-damp skin. The torn dress gaped further, revealing the upper swell of one breast, the dark pink edge of an areola. She did not seem to notice. All she saw was him.
"Damien…"
Victor let the sword fall from numb fingers. His legs buckled. The ground rushed up. Then her arms were around him, impossibly strong, impossibly soft. She sank to her knees with him cradled against her chest, rocking gently, murmuring broken endearments into his hair.
"My boy… my sweet boy… you're alive… thank every god and spirit…"
He smelled lavender, woodsmoke, woman. Felt the frantic beat of her heart against his cheek, the warm press of breasts, the tremor in her limbs. Something ancient and possessive uncoiled in his chest.
Victor Kane passed out smiling.
Darkness swallowed him, and memory poured in.
The boy's life unfolded like a half-remembered film reel projected directly onto his mind.
Damien, eighteen, lived with Rosalynn on the western edge of a old village in a modest cottage with ivy crawling up whitewashed stone. A small herb garden. A woodpile he split every morning with rhythmic, meditative swings. Inside, Rosalynn moved with quiet grace, humming old lullabies while she spun wool or stirred stew. She was thirty-six but looked younger: porcelain skin, silver-blonde hair she rarely bothered to pin up, eyes the color of new leaves. A body that had ripened rather than aged, full hips, heavy breasts, a waist still narrow enough to span with two hands.
She had been widowed at twenty-three. Damien's father died in a skirmish with northern raiders. Since then, the boy had been her sun, moon, and every star between. She bathed him until he was twelve, insisting it was "mother's duty." She slept beside him during thunderstorms, pressing close until the fear left his body. She kissed his forehead, his cheeks, sometimes the corner of his mouth when she thought he slept. The villagers called her devotion touching. A few called it unnatural. Rosalynn never noticed the whispers. She only saw Damien.
And Damien saw her.
He loved her with a purity that had long since curdled into something darker. He noticed the way her shift clung to damp skin after she bathed. The way her breasts swayed when she bent to tend the fire. The soft sounds she made in her sleep when she curled against him. Shame burned him, but he could not stop looking. Could not stop wanting.
So, he learned the sword.
Old Garrick, the one-armed former sergeant, taught him in secret behind the mill. Footwork first. Then cuts. Thrusts. The angle that severs windpipe without wasting motion. Damien practiced until his palms bled, until the blade became part of his arm. Not for glory. Not for honor. For her. To make sure nothing could ever take her away.
In the memory the bandits came at twilight.
Thirty strong. Hard men from the broken borderlands. They wanted grain, livestock, women. They found a village with no walls and no militia.
Damien had been checking snares in the western woods when the first scream reached him. He sprinted back, sword already drawn.
Too late.
Huts burned. Villagers died screaming. In the square, two raiders dragged Rosalynn toward their horses. One had torn her bodice. Pale breasts spilled into firelight. She clawed at their faces, shrieking his name.
Damien charged.
He killed three before they overwhelmed him. A mace to the temple. Darkness.
Then Victor woke inside the dream, fused the memories together, and opened his eyes in the real world once more.
He lay on a straw pallet inside the half-ruined cottage. Bandages wrapped his torso and thigh. A low fire crackled. The scent of healing salve and rosemary hung in the air.
Rosalynn sat beside him on a low stool. She had changed into a simple linen shift that did nothing to conceal the lush curves beneath. Silver hair cascaded loose over her shoulders. Tear tracks still marked her cheeks, but her eyes were fixed on him with feverish intensity.
When his eyelids fluttered, she gasped.
"Damien!"
She threw herself forward, heedless of his injuries. Arms locked around his neck. Breasts crushed against his bandaged chest. She buried her face in the crook of his shoulder, body shaking with violent relief.
"You're awake… my heart… my everything… I thought the gods took you…"
Victor did not speak at first.
He lifted one hand, still stiff, and slid fingers into that silver hair. The strands felt like silk. He tightened his grip just enough to tilt her head back.
Emerald eyes met his.
He studied her. Really studied her.
The faint freckles across her nose. The soft bow of her lips. The way her pupils dilated when she looked at him. The tremor that ran through her when his thumb brushed the shell of her ear.
Victor smiled.
Not the boy's shy, uncertain smile.
A slow, predatory curve of lips that belonged to a man who had bought and sold empires.
Rosalynn blinked. Confusion flickered across her face, followed quickly by something hotter, something that had always waited beneath the surface of her endless devotion.
"Damien…?" she whispered.
He leaned forward until their breaths mingled.
"I'm here, Mother," he murmured, voice low and velvet-dark. "And I'm never leaving you again."
Her lips parted on a soft, involuntary sound.
He felt the shift inside her the moment maternal love twisted one final turn into something consuming, something that recognized its equal in obsession.
She did not pull away.
Instead, she pressed closer, trembling, waiting.
Victor Kane now Damien closed the distance and claimed the first piece of the empire he intended to build, as he passed away again from fatigue.
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