Page 64 of The Billionaire’s Contract Bride

Aria stared at him, cold disgust washing over her. “You think that makes this better?”

“No,” Damien said, reopening his eyes. “I want you to know I will not punish her because you hate me.”

The distinction mattered. She hated herself for recognizing it.

Aria packed only what belonged to her before Blackthorne House: her mother’s handmade quilt, a stack of family photographs, her personal identity documents, and the small ceramic bird her father had mended years ago.

Helena stood in the doorway of the guest suite, tears brimming in her eyes. “Miss Aria...”

Aria picked up the ceramic bird from the nightstand to place it in her bag. As she lifted it, it rattled.

Helena frowned slightly. “Is something broken inside?”

“It... it always did that,” Aria murmured.

But as she held it, memory contradicted her. It had never rattled. Her father had glued the heavy base back on after she dropped it on the porch when she was seven years old. A faint, discolored seam of epoxy circled the bottom rim.

The pendant clicked. The bird rattled.

Two gifts from her father. Two objects that had survived the years without him. Two physical hiding places. She filed that information away to be dissected when she wasn’t in Damien’s house.

“Will he try to stop me?” Aria asked, looking toward the hallway.

“He gave security explicit orders to clear your path,” Helena whispered. “He told the team that if anyone laid a hand on you, he would execute them himself.”

“Why?”

“Because you asked him not to touch you.”

Outside the grand gates of Blackthorne Manor, the morning air was freezing. No armored town car followed her down the winding driveway. No bodyguards shadowed her steps.

Aria walked three blocks toward the main avenue, her breath clouding in the cold, before the sheer unnaturalness of the silence hit her. Damien Blackthorne never left her unprotected. Never.

The plain black delivery van pulled alongside the curb without its headlights on.

Before Aria could turn, the side door slid open with a harsh screech.

A heavy, leather-gloved hand seized the collar of her coat. A second hand, smelling of harsh industrial chemical solvents, slammed over her mouth and nose, cutting off her scream.

Aria fought with feral instincts—driving her elbow backward into a ribs, biting down viciously on the fingers covering her mouth, kicking wildly at the threshold. Someone grunted and cursed in a low, unfamiliar voice.

As they dragged her into the dark interior of the van, her canvas bag hit the concrete sidewalk.

The fragile contents struck the curb with a sickening crash. She heard the ceramic bird shatter into a dozen pieces. Something small, metallic, and cylindrical dislodged from the broken base and rolled beneath the chassis of a parked car.

“Hold her arm steady!”

A sharp, icy bite pierced the skin of her neck.

The streetlights bled into long, distorted smears of white and yellow. The world tilted sideways.

As her consciousness collapsed into blackness, Aria reached uselessly toward the pavement, the black diamond ring Damien had forced onto her finger catching the last glint of morning sun—a useless signal sent to a man who was no longer there to save her.

Chapter Fourteen: The Enemy’s House

Aria woke in a room designed to imitate comfort.

Soft bed. Floral wallpaper. A fireplace flickering. No visible locks on the doors.