The west wing of the Harrington estate was a different world from the gilded quiet Seraphina inhabited. If the east wing resembled a soft, padded confinement meant for a fragile mind, the west wing was a fortress. The walls were thick, the doors reinforced, the staff silent as shadows. Every evening, like clockwork, the atmosphere shifted when Adrian returned home—air tightening, lights dimming, voices dropping into reverent hush.
Tonight was no different.
Adrian walked into his private study at 1:27 a.m., the hour he usually began his second round of work. His shoulders were stiff beneath the fabric of his suit jacket, his hair slightly disheveled from running his hand through it too many times. A quiet sigh left him, but it wasn't exhaustion—it was the mechanical release of a man who had trained his body to keep functioning no matter how badly it needed rest.
Behind him, his chief of internal affairs and psychological oversight bowed slightly.
"Sir, your nightly reports."
Adrian took the thick folder without looking at the man. He didn't need to. Everyone in this wing knew that their master never wasted time on unnecessary formalities. His silence was command enough.
The door shut softly behind the departing footsteps.
He sat down at the massive walnut desk that once belonged to his father. The wood was darker now, more polished, as though time had soaked into the grains. His laptop glowed faintly. Various files and graphs lay scattered around—international projections, acquisition outlines, late-night audit summaries. Work was the only thing that kept his lungs operational.
But before he touched any of that, he opened the folder.
The clinical smell of paper surged upward.He scanned the first few pages—usual notes about her meals, her sleep, her conversations with staff. Then came the therapy log.
His fingers paused.
Session #19 — Summary of Patient's Emotional Condition
He never read these slowly. Normally he skimmed, verifying only her stability, making sure there was no imminent self-harm risk, nothing that required immediate intervention.
But tonight, something made him stop.
Maybe it was the exhaustion.Maybe it was the way his chest had been tight all day.Maybe it was the fact that she had gone out earlier, living the socialite life, smiling in photographs with practiced perfection—a performance he could instantly recognize.
Or maybe he sensed something before he read it.
He lowered his eyes to the paragraph anyway, expression smooth as marble.
Patient reports feelings of guilt, shame, and helplessness. She states that she understands now why her husband behaves the way he does. She described him as a "wounded creature," living only through discipline and agony. Patient seems to have realized the extent of his trauma and perceives him as irrevocably injured.
The words hit him harder than the rifle butt that once broke his ribs.
He didn't blink.
He didn't breathe for several seconds.
He just stared.
A wounded creature.
A wounded creature.
His jaw tightened, the muscles clenching until a faint tremor ran through them. He slowly set the paper down, but his hand didn't release it. Instead, his fingers curled, crumpling the edge slightly—small, barely noticeable, but a betrayal of control nonetheless.
"A wounded… creature," he repeated under his breath, the words tasting bitter on his tongue.
He leaned back in his chair, tilting his head upward as though the ceiling could give him answers. But nothing answered him except the slow, suffocating heaviness in his chest.
He didn't ask for anyone's sympathy.
He didn't want it.
He didn't need it.
His trauma wasn't something to understand. It wasn't a puzzle to solve. It wasn't a wound to heal. It was a black hole that had consumed everything he used to be, leaving nothing but discipline, ruthlessness, and self-retribution behind.
And now she—of all people—was calling him wounded?
He let out a short, humorless scoff.
No.No, that wasn't right.
Wounded implied there was something left to save.
Wounded implied someone could reach into him and pull the dying thing back to life.
Wounded implied there was still skin beneath the scars, still warmth beneath the cold.
But he knew better.
He knew himself better than any therapist could theorize, better than any report could summarize, better than she could interpret from the comfort of her cushioned east wing.
His wounds had not merely scarred.
They had rotted.
He pressed his hand against his sternum, feeling the steady, mechanical thrum of his heartbeat. It felt distant, like it belonged to someone else. A heart on autopilot.
He had stopped being salvageable long ago.
The night he woke up tied to a chair.
The night he listened to his captors laugh about the "accidental" car crash that killed his parents.
The night he learned they died while rushing to save him.
The night he realized he had caused every ounce of their suffering.
The night the agents burst in and dragged his half-conscious body through the remains of the warehouse.
The night the coffin lids closed.
The night he was handed a conglomerate he was never meant to inherit yet now had no choice but to rule.
The night he became a creature who was not allowed to collapse.
His wounds were not wounds anymore.
They were permanence.
He leaned forward again, elbows on his desk, both hands covering his face. He stayed like that for a long moment, fingers pressing into his eye sockets as though he could push the ache deeper until he couldn't feel it at all.
A wounded creature.
He didn't want her empathy.
He didn't even want her understanding.
He didn't want anything from her except distance.
His voice came out hollow, low, barely above a whisper:
"She shouldn't look at me like that."
He let the words settle.
They sounded wrong.
They sounded fragile.
And fragility had no place in his life anymore.
He dropped his hands, forcing his breathing to even out. The coldness returned to his face—anchored, rigid, composed.
He wasn't hurt.
He refused to be.
He simply acknowledged the truth buried in her words.
A truth that would remain untouched, unspoken, unhealed.
Her report concluded with the therapist's final note:
Patient expressed confusion about whether she fears or pities him more. She may be forming new emotional attachments as a coping mechanism. Recommend continued observation.
He closed the file.
Not angrily.
Not dramatically.
Just with finality.
He set it aside and opened his laptop, burying himself again in numbers, forecasts, global trajectories—his familiar world of brutal clarity.
But even as he typed, the words haunted him.
Wounded creature.
Wounded.
Creature.
He hated how accurate it was.
But the accuracy didn't change anything.
He wasn't going to heal.
He wasn't going to soften.
He wasn't going to break.
He was already broken—long ago.
Healing required hope, and he had none left.
As the clock ticked past 3 a.m., the lights in the west wing dimmed further, framing him in a pool of cold white glow.
Work continued.
And Adrian, expression carved from stone, carried on as though nothing had pierced him.
But a quiet truth settled in his chest like a shard of glass:
He could survive kidnappers.He could survive sleepless nights.He could survive his own parents' death.
But he didn't know if he could survive being seen—truly seen—by the woman who once despised him.