Page 91 of The Billionaire’s Contract Bride

Victor’s patience snapped. He drew a silenced 9mm pistol from his coat, stepped behind Evelyn, and pressed the cold steel barrel directly against her mother’s temple. “Sign it now, or her blood is on your hands.”

Aria’s jaw tightened. She looked into her mother’s calm, trusting eyes, dipped the pen, and signed her name across the bottom line.

Victor snatched the documents, the pendant, and the flash drive. “You have your father’s exact brand of foolish courage, Aria. Elias also believed that evidence and legal documents would protect him from men like me.”

Before he could pull the trigger, every industrial floodlight in the hangar shattered simultaneously in a shower of sparks.

The hangar plunged into pitch darkness.

Victor cursed, firing wildly into the gloom. “Kill them!”

Aria didn’t freeze. She lunged forward, grabbed the handles of her mother’s wheelchair, overturned the steel workbench to create a barrier, and pulled Evelyn out of the chair and flat onto the concrete floor.

Flash-bang grenades detonated at the eastern bay doors with a blinding white flash and a deafening roar. Lucien’s tactical team swept into the hangar, flashlights mounted on their rifles cutting through the rising smoke.

At the same time, the heavy western pedestrian door was kicked completely off its hinges.

Damien Blackthorne charged through the haze, stripped of his tailored suit, wearing a dark tactical jacket. His eyes were locked onto Victor with lethal, terrifying intent.

Victor spun around, spotted Damien through the smoke, and raised his gun, firing two rapid shots.

Aria saw the muzzle flash pointing straight at Damien’s chest. Moving purely on instinct, she threw herself out from behind the steel table and into the line of fire.

Bang.

A searing, white-hot line of pain tore through Aria’s left shoulder. She gasped, staggering backward before collapsing onto the cold concrete floor.

Damien’s entire universe fractured. A sound tore from his throat—a roar of pure, unadulterated fury. He crossed the remaining distance in a blur, dodging Victor’s third shot, knocking the weapon from his hand with a devastating strike, and slamming Victor face-first onto the hard floor.

Damien pinned Victor down, straddling his back, drew his own sidearm, and pressed the barrel flush against the back of Victor’s skull. His finger tightened over the trigger, his hands shaking with violent rage.

“Damien!” Aria cried out, her hand clutching her bleeding shoulder. “Damien, look at me!”

Damien’s head snapped toward her, his breathing heavy, his eyes wild and dark with the monster he had spent years cultivating.

“Choose me,” Aria pleaded through the searing pain, her voice steady despite her trembling body. “Not revenge. Not the empire. Choose me.”

Damien stared at her. The silence in the smoke-filled hangar stretched for three agonizing seconds.

For the very first time in his life, the monster inside Damien Blackthorne disobeyed its hunger.

Slowly, deliberately, Damien lowered the gun from Victor’s head, pulling both of them to standing.

Then, a sudden, sharp pop echoed from the dark threshold of the hangar entrance.

Victor’s body jolted violently once, and then went completely limp.

Damien whipped around, raising his weapon.

Standing in the doorway, illuminated by the flashing red lights of approaching emergency vehicles, was Augustus Blackthorne. He stood tall, leaning on his silver cane with his left hand, while his right hand held a small, smoking snub-nosed revolver.

Augustus looked down at his son’s corpse without a single flicker of emotion.

“Victor always was a profound disappointment to this family,” the old man said quietly.

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Burn for Her

Victor was still alive.