The gates loomed like iron monsters.
Black. Spiked. Guarded by silence and memory.
Raina hadn't seen them in over six years, but they still haunted her dreams La Casa de Sangre. The Blood House. Damián's ancestral estate buried deep in the Andalusian countryside.
She turned to him in the car, heart drumming like war.
"You said I'd never have to come back here."
Damián didn't even glance her way.
"I lied."
He killed the engine. A cold breeze swept through the cracked window, brushing her bare collarbone like a warning.
"You brought me here to punish me?"
"I brought you here to remember," he said darkly, stepping out and slamming the door behind him.
She followed reluctantly. The gravel crunched under her heels like broken promises. Her skin prickled.
Every brick of that estate had watched her bleed.
Inside, the old house was just as she remembered dark wood, red velvet, oil paintings of dead men with hollow eyes.
And the corridor.
The corridor where she'd once screamed for help, her wrists in chains.
Her throat tightened. Her fingers curled into fists.
Damián watched her from the foot of the grand staircase, his expression unreadable.
"You're not that girl anymore," he said. "You're not broken. Not unless you want to be."
She stepped toward him slowly.
"And if I want to burn this place to the ground?"
He smirked.
"I'll hand you the match."
But the tension between them was molten. Every step she took closer to him felt like shedding another layer of fear. When she finally stood before him, chest to chest, breath to breath, she stared into the eyes of her tormentor and the only man who'd ever made her feel alive.
"I should hate you," she breathed.
"You do."
"Then why did you save me from Manuel?"
He didn't answer. Instead, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a blood stained locket. Her locket. The one she'd flung into the sea the day she escaped this place.
"I pulled it from the ocean the night you ran," he whispered. "I knew one day you'd come back for it."
Raina's breath caught.
He opened it.
Inside was a picture of her as a child and him, younger, softer, smiling beside her in a garden long since gone.
Before everything turned to ash.
"I never forgot who you were," he said. "Even when you did."
Her voice cracked. "What do you want from me, Damián?"
He stepped closer, brushing his lips against her ear.
"I want you to become the woman you were born to be. Not soft. Not safe. I want the one who survived this house and still came back stronger."
She felt his fingers at the zipper of her dress, dragging it down slowly, like peeling away armor. Her body betrayed her again warmth flooding, spine arching.
"You want power?" he murmured. "Take it."
He stepped back, tossed her a silver key. Cold. Heavy. Familiar.
"Top floor. East wing. The room they kept you in. It's yours now."
Raina caught the key mid-air.
"You're giving me the room they tortured me in?"
"I'm giving you the room you escaped from."
She stared at him at the devil who refused to let her die, and the man who refused to let her forget.
"You're sick," she whispered.
Damián smiled slowly.
"Only for you, princesa."