Isla's POV
Some wars aren't fought with weapons. Some are fought with silence and a suitcase.
The elevator doors didn't close fast enough. I stood inside, blinking against the overhead light, clutching the handle of the suitcase like it was an anchor. Or a weapon. Or both. I didn't look back. Not because I didn't want to but because I couldn't afford to. If I did, if I turned and saw him standing there in that doorway, all muscle and madness and the kind of love that smells like gasoline I'd burn and I'd crawl right back into the fire. So I didn't.
The doors slid shut with a soft, damning ding and just like that, Damien Valerius was behind me. Maybe for good. The streets outside were loud. Messy. Alive. People brushed past me, yelling into phones, balancing coffee cups, laughing like the world wasn't still bleeding from what just happened upstairs. I hailed a cab with a raised hand and a silent prayer.
The driver didn't ask questions. He just looked at me through the rear-view mirror, saw the smudged mascara and suitcase, and drove. Good. I didn't have words. Not yet. An Hour Later I sat on the edge of a narrow bed in a motel room that smelled like mildew and old tobacco. The carpet was scratchy. The air conditioner wheezed. A cockroach scuttled under the dresser like even it didn't want to be here.
I stared at the peeling wallpaper. At the suitcase. At the version of myself reflected in the mirror. Red eyes. Swollen lips. Love bites disguised as bruises across my neck, thighs, soul. I looked like someone who had just been fucked, gutted, and left to sew herself back together and maybe I had.
I opened the window, even though the air outside was thick with July heat and sirens. The noise reminded me I was still alive. Still free. Free. That word felt too big in my mouth. I had no money. No job. Nowhere to go but somehow, for the first time in a long time, I didn't feel trapped because I wasn't in his bed anymore.
I wasn't dancing to strings I didn't know were tied to me. I wasn't his and that meant I was mine again. I remembered when I'd fallen asleep on Damien's chest, lulled by the quiet thump of his heartbeat. He smelled like cedar and sleep and something dangerous I couldn't name.
I'd woken up in the middle of the night to find him watching me. Eyes open. Unblinking. Like he wasn't sleeping at all. Like he never had.
"You okay?" I whispered, fingers brushing his chest.
He didn't answer right away. Then: "Do you believe in fate?"
I smiled, half-asleep. "You? Asking about fate?"
"I think I've always believed in it," he said, his voice too calm. "But I don't think fate is kind. I think it's a fucking loaded gun."
At the time, I didn't understand what he meant. Now I do.
My phone buzzed. Clara. I hadn't answered her in days. I didn't want to explain why I disappeared or why I looked like I'd just survived a car crash made entirely of secrets and orgasms but I picked up.
"Isla?" Her voice hit like a safety net I didn't know I needed.
"Hey."
"Where the hell have you been?"
"I left him."
Silence.
Then: "You okay?"
I looked at the ceiling. At the mold in the corner. At the bruises under my skin and the cracks in my heart.
"No."
She didn't ask more. Just said, "Where are you?"
"Somewhere that doesn't belong to him."
"Good," she whispered and that was enough.
I found an old notebook in the bottom of my bag. The kind I used to journal in before life became an endless series of power plays and heartbreak. I flipped to a blank page and wrote three things:
1. Find an apartment. 2. Get a job. Any job. 3. Don't look back.
The pen pressed harder with each word. underlined the third one. Twice but my hand still shook because the truth was, no matter how far I ran, I wasn't sure I'd ever fully escape him. Damien wasn't a man. He was a scar. He was stitched into my story now, whether I liked it or not. I could write the next chapter without him.
The next morning, I woke up with a crick in my neck and my thighs still sore. The sheets were scratchy. The walls hadn't changed. But I had. Something inside me had snapped loose, like a bone that finally broke clean after weeks of grinding fractures. And maybe now… maybe now I could set it properly.
I showered. Not because I wanted to. But because it felt like an exorcism. The water pressure was pitiful. The soap was a sad little wafer. But I scrubbed every inch of myself until my skin stung. Until every scent of him the cologne, the sweat, the sin washed down the drain and when I stepped out, I didn't reach for perfume. I didn't need to smell like anything but my own skin.
I found a laundromat three blocks away and used the last of my cash to wash the clothes Damien had once peeled off me. I watched them spin in the machine lace and cotton and heartbreak swirling like confessions.
Next to me, a woman fed her toddler Goldfish crackers while folding towels. She looked exhausted. Alive. Real. I envied her because she didn't look like a woman who knew what it felt like to come undone in a billionaire's bed and still walk away empty.
I spent the afternoon job hunting. No resumes. Just grit. I walked into cafes, bookstores, anywhere that had a Now Hiring sign and asked if they were still hiring. Most said no. One manager looked me up and down and asked if I had barista experience. I lied.
He gave me a trial shift for the weekend. Victory tasted like burnt coffee and desperation. But I drank it anyway. That night, back at the motel, I sat cross-legged on the bed and opened my notebook again. I added a fourth line.
4. Don't answer his calls.
He was calling now. Five missed calls. A voicemail I didn't listen to. A text:
"You can't just disappear."
I stared at it for a long time. Deleted it. Then turned off the phone. Let him chase ghosts for once.
Three Days Later. I found a tiny studio on the edge of the city. The kind of place where the walls were thin, but the freedom was thick. Rent was cheap. It smelled like old wood and rain but it was mine. There was one window. A mattress on the floor. A second-hand lamp that flickered like it had secrets. And a sliver of sunlight that hit my face just right every morning.
No doormen. No elevators Damien could rig. No mirrors that showed me what he wanted me to see. Just me. Raw. Unfiltered. I found a rhythm. Wake up. Work. Sleep. Repeat. It was exhausting and lonely and fucking beautiful.
For the first time in forever, I wasn't waiting for someone to show up. I was showing up for myself. Until Thursday. I came home after a late shift smelling like espresso and bad tips. There was an envelope on my doormat. No name. Just cream cardstock and a wax seal I'd recognize anywhere. My heart stopped. Started. Then ran like hell. I picked it up with trembling fingers. Inside:
There's a gallery opening Friday. Yours.
I bought the building. You'll have the first showing. I still see the way you see the world, Isla. Even if you don't see me anymore.
— D.
I sat on the floor for a long time, envelope in hand, trying to decide if this was manipulation or redemption. Or both. Probably both because that was Damien Valerius. A man who ruined you, then built you a monument out of the rubble. I didn't text him back. Didn't throw the invitation away either.
I just placed it on my nightstand like a ticking bomb and crawled into bed with the kind of ache that doesn't have a name because the truth was I missed him. Not the power. Not the games. Him. The him who touched me like I was something holy, who bled confessions between my thighs. The him who said I was a wound he never saw coming but I also remembered the lie behind the elevator. The manipulation stitched into every word. The control. I wasn't going back to that. Not even for love.
The envelope was still on the nightstand. Unopened, technically. Though I'd read the words a hundred times. The wax seal sat beside it, broken in a perfect split—like a metaphor, or a scar. I made coffee in a chipped mug someone else had left behind. The kind that held memories, not espresso. My stomach twisted every time I looked at the clock. 11:03 AM.
Twelve hours from now, people would walk into a building with my name on the wall. My art. My chaos and maybe if he was as theatrical as I knew he was—him.
I got dressed in slow motion. Jeans that fit like truth. A black T-shirt that didn't show the bruise on my collarbone. A red lip that made me feel like a weapon. I wasn't going for pretty. I was going for armour. My reflection looked different now. Not healed but dangerous in the way that only survivors are.
By late afternoon, the ache in my chest had dulled into something suspiciously like anticipation. Which pissed me off because I shouldn't want this. Shouldn't want him. Not after everything. Not after the lies.
Not after realizing that love, in Damien Valerius's hands, was just another method of control. But… He gave me a gallery. He gave me a spotlight. He gave me a stage I would've died for a year ago and he never asked for credit. Or maybe that was the most calculated part of all.
I stood across the street from the building. A modern box of glass and shadows. Minimalist. Brutal. Beautiful. It had my name on a placard near the door:
ISLA CAMILLE – FRAGMENTS OF HER
I almost laughed because I was fragments. Scattered reassembled into something jagged and sharp and halfway whole. I crossed the street. My heels clicked like punctuation marks. The night wrapped around me like velvet and warning. Inside, the space was crowded.
Wine glasses. Flashbulbs. Gallerists and bloggers and patrons I'd never met but who somehow knew me. My art lined the walls like diary entries I'd painted in blood and colour. Each one a confession. Each one a piece of the version of me Damien never fully owned and then I felt him before I saw him.
That gravity. That ache that settled between my ribs like second-hand smoke. I turned slowly. He stood near the back of the room, dressed in a charcoal suit that looked carved from the absence of light. No smile. Just that dark, unreadable intensity that always made me feel like I was standing too close to a fire.
Our eyes locked and the entire world went quiet. He didn't approach me. Not right away. Instead, he watched. Letting the tension stretch tight like a violin string on the verge of snapping. People swirled between us. Waiters. Artists. Strangers but no one mattered. It was him. It was always him.
When he finally walked toward me, my breath caught. I hated how easily he still unravelled me. How his presence turned my bones to tremors.
"Isla."
His voice hit like a match against skin.
I swallowed. "Damien."
"You came."
"I didn't come for you."
He smiled like he didn't believe me. "Of course not."
We stood there, inches apart, the whole world pretending not to notice the hurricane forming between our bodies.
"You bought a building," I said.
"I bought an apology."
"And this—" I gestured to the gallery, the lights, the crowd "—is your version of sorry?"
"No," he said softly. "This is my version of truth."
I stared at him. Furious. Fractured. Feral and somehow, still wanting.
"I'm not yours anymore," I said.
His jaw clenched. "I know."
"Then why do this?"
He stepped closer. His voice dropped. "Because even if I don't deserve you… I still believe in you."
"Believing in me doesn't make you safe."
"I'm not trying to be safe."
He looked down at me then, and I saw it... The unmaking. The loss. The man underneath the monster and I hated him for it. Hated him for being human when I needed him to be the villain.
"Enjoy the show," I whispered, then turned and walked away.
Every step I took felt like reclaiming air. I didn't look back, not because I didn't want to but because I still couldn't afford to.
I made it to the far end of the gallery before the weight in my chest cracked like a rib. There was a chair near the back hallway half hidden, draped in shadow. I sat down before my knees remembered they were not made of glass.
From here, I could still see him. Damien. Standing where I'd left him. Alone in a crowd that hadn't noticed the tectonic shift between us. He wasn't watching me now. He was looking at the painting behind him "Red Mouth."
The one I'd painted the morning after he first kissed me. The one that bled. The one that screamed. He reached out, fingertips brushing the edge of the canvas like it burned. Like it remembered and in that moment, I saw it—
Not the billionaire. Not the manipulator. Not the man who turned obsession into currency. I saw the boy buried beneath the beast. The one who didn't know how to love without destroying and for a split second, I didn't hate him. I just hurt for him which was somehow worse.
A server passed with a tray of champagne. I grabbed one and drank half. It tasted like nerves and endings. I should have left right then. Slipped into the night with my armour still intact but I didn't instead I stayed. I watched as people moved around my pain like it was just another exhibit. Somewhere between the soft applause and the hollow praise, I realized something: He may have built the gallery. But the walls? The work? The story? That was mine. All of it.
Every broken line. Every violent shade. Every breathless stroke. He could claim the frame but the art was mine and that meant something. That meant everything.
I stood up. Smoothed my shirt. Fixed my lipstick and walked toward the door this time not away from him but toward me.