The smell of mold and stale cigarette smoke was the only thing I knew. It coated the back of my throat like grease, a suffocating layer of grime that matched the rusted walls of the van I was trapped in.
I was huddled in the corner, my knees pulled tight to my chest, my wrists bound so tightly behind my back that my fingers had gone numb hours ago. The plastic zip ties bit into my skin, a dull, rhythmic throbbing that had long since faded into the background of my terror. Duct tape covered my mouth, trapping the sobs that wanted to rip out of my throat, forcing them to stay as jagged, whimpers in my chest.
I was twenty-two years old. Two days ago, my biggest worry had been whether the shade of white I chose for the gallery showing was too ivory. Now, I was just hoping I would live to see the sun rise again.
There were three men in the front. The driver was a beefy man with a neck like a tree stump, and the two passengers were leaner, twitchy, their eyes darting to the rearview mirror every few seconds. They were laughing about something—money, or maybe what they were going to do to me when we got to the safe house. The sound of their laughter was worse than the screaming. It was casual. It was normal to them.
"She's a pretty one, ain't she?" the one in the passenger seat said, craning his neck to look at me. His teeth were yellowed and crooked. "Mr. X said not to mark her up, but he didn't say we couldn't have a little fun on the way."
"Shut up, Mick," the driver snapped, though he was grinning. "We get paid when we drop her off. You mess around, you mess with the payout. You know who hired us?"
"Yeah, yeah. Some heavy hitter. Don't care, man. Look at her. She's shaking."
I squeezed my eyes shut, praying for a miracle. I prayed for my father. I prayed for the police. I just prayed for the pain to stop, or for the van to crash, for anything to end this nightmare.
But God wasn't listening. Or maybe, He was just waiting for the right moment to introduce something far worse than a few hired thugs.
The van screeched to a halt so hard my head slammed against the metal wall.
Stars burst across my vision. The world spun.
"Check the cargo!" the driver shouted, killing the engine. "We're early. Make sure she's still breathing."
Mick opened his door, the hinges groaning. Rain lashed into the vehicle, cold and biting.
But before the back doors could open, the roof of the van caved in.
Literally caved in. As if a giant hand had just punched down from the sky.
Metal shrieked, tearing like wet paper. The steel groaned under a pressure that shouldn't exist, buckling inward with a deafening roar. The van tilted violently to the side, the suspension snapping with the sound of gunshots. The goons screamed—a chaotic mix of panic and confusion that was swallowed by the sound of the storm.
I curled into a ball, shielding my head as debris rained down on me. I waited for the crush of death. I waited for the pain.
It didn't come.
Instead, there was silence. A heavy, suffocating silence that rushed in after the noise.
I looked up, trembling, through the jagged hole in the roof. Rain poured in, soaking my hair and dress, mixing with the dust and the oil.
A man dropped in.
He didn't land with a thud. He didn't stumble. He landed softly, like a cat, his knees bending to absorb the impact before he stood up straight in the cramped, ruined space.
He was wearing a plain, black suit that looked untouched by the rain outside. Not a single drop of water marred the charcoal fabric. His hair was damp, dark strands falling over a forehead that was smooth and pale. His face was calm. Bored, even.
He wasn't particularly tall, but the air around him suddenly felt heavy. It was like the oxygen had been sucked out of the van, replaced by a static pressure that made my skin prickle and my teeth ache. It felt like the atmosphere before a lightning strike, but focused entirely on him.
"The hell is this?!" the driver yelled, fumbling for a gun under his seat. "Who the fuck are you?!"
The man in the suit didn't answer. He didn't even look at the driver. His eyes were fixed on the side mirror, watching the rain.
"I said—!" the driver started, raising the weapon.
The man in the suit moved.
I didn't even see him step forward. He just... vanished. One second he was standing by the hole in the roof, the next he was directly in front of the driver, motionless as a statue.
There was a sickening *crunch*.
It wasn't a gunshot. It was the sound of bone shattering. The driver flew backward, his chest caving in as if he'd been hit by a sledgehammer moving at the speed of sound. He smashed into the steering wheel, then through the windshield, shattering the glass. He slumped over the dashboard, motionless.
Dead before he hit the wheel.
The other two men scrambled for the doors, screaming now. They weren't laughing anymore. Their faces were masks of pure, animalistic terror.
"Monster! He's a frickin' monster!" Mick shrieked, clawing at the handle of the sliding door.
The man in the suit didn't chase them. He simply sighed, a sound of exhausted annoyance. He turned his head slightly, his eyes narrowing.
He exhaled—a short, sharp puff of air.
It wasn't breath. It was a shockwave.
The metal doors of the van didn't just open; they exploded off their hinges. They tore away from the frame, flying into the night like missiles, clattering into the wet road twenty feet away.
The goons fell out into the mud, scrambling to their feet and sprinting away into the dark without looking back. They left their boss, they left the money, they left their dignity. They just ran.
He didn't run after them. He didn't seem to care. The wind howled through the empty frame of the van, chilling me to the bone.
Then, he turned around.
And he looked at me.
I froze. The breath caught in my throat. His eyes were terrifying. They were completely black—no whites, no irises, just an endless, void-like darkness that seemed to swallow the light from the moon. They weren't human eyes.
He looked at me the same way a person looks at a bug they found in their soup—annoyed, and wondering whether to squash it or just flush it down the disposal. There was no empathy. No heroism. Just a cold, calculating indifference.
He walked over, stepping over the dead driver's legs without a glance. He crouched down in front of me. I flinched, squeezing my eyes shut, waiting for the hit. Waiting for the end.
Instead, I felt a hand on my chin. His fingers were freezing cold, hard as marble.
He tilted my head up. I opened my eyes.
"You're dirty," he said. His voice was low, a smooth baritone that didn't match the violence I had just witnessed.
He reached up with his other hand. With a single finger, he hooked the edge of the duct tape covering my mouth.
*Riiiip.*
It came off in one violent tear. I gasped, air rushing into my lungs, stinging the raw skin around my mouth. I wanted to scream, but the terror paralyzed my vocal cords.
"Please," I finally choked out, my voice a broken whisper. "Please don't kill me."
He ignored my plea. His gaze dropped to my wrists. He tapped the plastic zip ties with a single fingernail.
*Snap.*
The plastic fell away, severed as if by an invisible blade. The relief was instant, blood rushing back into my hands with pins and needles. I rubbed my wrists, tears streaming down my face, mixing with the grime on my skin.
"Th-thank you," I whispered, the words tumbling out instinctively. "Who are you? I need to call my dad. My father is Alexander Vance. He can pay you. He has money. Whatever they paid you, he'll double it. Triple it."
The man paused.
The air in the van seemed to drop ten degrees.
He tilted his head, the boredom in his eyes sharpening into something else. Something predatory. The name had hit a switch.
"Vance?" he repeated softly.
"Yes. Please, just let me go. I won't tell anyone. I promise."
"Alexander Vance," he said again, testing the name, rolling it around his mouth like a piece of rotten meat. Then, a small, humorless smile curled his lip. "The man who slaughtered my family twenty years ago."
My blood ran cold. The van, the rain, the pain—it all faded into the background. "What?"
He stood up abruptly, towering over me. He looked down at me with a gaze that made me feel small and dirty. He wasn't seeing me anymore. He was seeing a ghost.
"Fate has a twisted sense of humor," he said, speaking more to himself than to me. "I stop to kill some low-life scum who kidnapped a woman for pocket change, yet I find a lost lamb from the Vance flock."
He reached down and grabbed my arm. His grip was like iron. There was no shaking it. He hauled me up out of the van and dumped me onto the wet grass beside the road. The rain was pouring harder now, soaking my dress, plastering my hair to my face.
"Get in the car," he said, pointing to a sleek black sedan parked on the side of the road. It looked expensive, dark, and out of place on this desolate stretch of highway.
"I... I can't go with you," I stammered, scrambling backward in the mud. The logic was trying to catch up with the horror. "You said you want to hurt my father. You're a monster!"
He sighed, looking up at the moon, looking utterly exhausted by the conversation. He adjusted his cufflinks, completely ignoring the rain.
"I don't want to hurt him, little girl," he said, his voice dead flat. "Hurt implies he has feelings that can be damaged. I want to erase him. I want to scour his name from the history books and salt the earth where his ancestors are buried."
He looked back at me, and for a second, the psycho mask slipped. The emptiness wavered, revealing a void of loneliness so deep it made my chest ache. It was a look of someone who had been alone for a very, very long time.
"But I'm curious," he murmured, stepping closer. "You don't have his eyes. His eyes are piggy and greedy. Yours look... soft. Stupidly soft."
He reached out, brushing a strand of wet hair from my face. His touch was gentle, terrifyingly so.
"I'm keeping you," he said simply. "As a pet. Or a hostage. Maybe a test subject. I haven't decided yet. But if you don't get in the car, I will break your legs and carry you. Your choice."
I stared at him. The rain washed the mud from my legs, but I couldn't move. He was serious. He was going to kill my father, and he was going to kidnap me. I was the enemy's daughter.
I should have run. I should have screamed. I should have fought him with everything I had, even if he was a superhuman freak.
But there was something in the way he stood there, alone in the dark. The rain didn't seem to touch him. He was the most powerful, dangerous thing I had ever encountered, yet he looked... empty. A vessel filled with nothing but revenge.
And stupidly, recklessly, my heart didn't feel fear. It felt a pull. I wanted to know why he was broken. I wanted to know why a man who could tear steel apart looked so tired.
I stood up on shaky legs. My dress was ruined. my life was over. But I was alive.
"What do I call you?" I asked, my voice trembling but audible.
He opened the car door. The interior light spilled out, warm and inviting against the cold rain. He looked at me over his shoulder, his face returning to that mask of cold indifference.
"My name is Damian," he said.
He paused, the weight of the name hanging in the air between us.
"Damian Tian."
*Tian.* The name of the master who had found him in the ashes of his home and taught him how to kill. The name of the man who had taught him that emotions were a weakness and that power was the only truth. He had taken the name to honor a monster, and now he was the one wearing the mask.
"Get in," Damian said, sliding into the driver's seat without checking if I followed. "The show is about to start."
I took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of rain and ozone. I walked to the car and got in.
The door closed with a soft *thud*, sealing me inside with the devil. The silence was instant. The sound of the rain vanished, replaced by the quiet hum of the engine.
Damian didn't look at me. He put the car in gear and pulled onto the highway, driving with a casual ease that contradicted the speed we were rapidly gaining.
"Where are we going?" I whispered, clutching the door handle.
"Home," he said, staring at the road. "To the top of the world. And then, Elena, we're going to watch your father's kingdom burn."
I looked at his profile—the sharp jaw, the empty eyes. I should have been terrified. I was. But as the city lights began to glow in the distance, I realized something terrifying about myself.
I didn't want him to let me go.
***
The ride took twenty minutes, though it felt like a lifetime. We didn't speak. The silence in the car was heavy, thick with unspoken threats and the weight of my family's sins. I watched the city skyline rise up out of the darkness—a sprawling metropolis of glass and steel. My father's city.
Damian drove with an arrogant precision. He didn't weave through traffic; traffic seemed to part for him. It was as if the other drivers could sense the predator in their midst, some primal instinct telling them to get out of the way.
We pulled up to a tower that pierced the clouds. It was the tallest building in the city, a monolith of black glass known as the Obsidian Spire. It was legendary in the business world. No one knew who owned it. It was a shell company, a ghost in the machine.
Now I knew. He owned it. He owned *everything*.
We entered a private underground garage. The car stopped, and the lights flickered on automatically, illuminating a space that held more cars than most dealerships—Ferraris, Bugattis, ancient vintage models.
He got out and came around to my side, opening the door before I could reach for the handle.
"Can you walk?" he asked, not out of concern, but efficiency.
"Yes," I said, my voice shaky.
"Good."
We took a private elevator. It didn't have buttons for floors. It just had a scanner. Damian pressed his hand to it, and the elevator surged upward so fast my stomach dropped.
We rose past the fiftieth floor. The eightieth. The hundredth.
Finally, it slowed with a soft ding, and the doors slid open.
We stepped into a penthouse that was larger than my father's estate. It was minimalist, cold, and breathtakingly beautiful. The floors were polished black marble. The walls were floor-to-ceiling glass, offering a panoramic view of the city below. It looked like a toy set from up here.
There was no clutter. No personal photos. No coats thrown over chairs. It looked like a showroom, not a home.
"Sit," Damian said, pointing to a white couch that looked too pristine to touch.
I sat. I felt small in this room. I felt like an intruder in a god's temple.
He walked over to a bar cart at the far end of the room. He poured a drink—amber liquid in a crystal glass. He didn't offer me one.
"You're wondering why you're here," he said, his back to me.
"I know why I'm here," I said, surprising myself with my own boldness. "You hate my father."
He turned, swirling the drink. "Hate is such a pedestrian emotion. I don't hate your father. I despise him. He is a blight. A stain."
He took a sip, his eyes never leaving mine. "Twenty years ago, Elena, I had a family. A mother who sang, a father who laughed, a little sister who used to braid my hair. We were happy. We were nobody."
He started walking toward me, slow and deliberate.
"Then Alexander Vance decided he wanted our land. Our company. He didn't want to buy it. He wanted to take it. So he hired people. People like the ones in the van tonight. They came to our house while we slept."
He stopped in front of me. The air around him grew cold again. I could see the memories flickering behind his eyes—fire, blood, screams.
"They killed them all, Elena. My mother. My father. My little sister. They slit their throats and left them to bleed out on the kitchen floor. I survived by hiding in a cupboard. I watched the boots walk past. I listened to them die."
I pressed a hand over my mouth, tears welling in my eyes. "My father... he wouldn't..."
"He did," Damian said coldly. "And he built his empire on their graves. Every dollar he has is soaked in my family's blood."
He set the glass down on the table with a sharp *clink*.
"I was found in the rubble. Not by police. By a man named Tian. He was... different. He taught me that the world is a cruel place, and that the only way to survive is to be the cruelliest thing in it. He taught me how to cultivate my body, my mind. He gave me the power to take what was taken from me."
He leaned down, placing his hands on the back of the couch, caging me in.
"I spent twenty years preparing. I built a fortune larger than your father can imagine. I trained in arts that your limited mind couldn't comprehend. And now, I'm back. The trap is set. The pieces are moving."
He reached out, gripping my chin again, forcing me to look at him.
"And you, Elena Vance, are the final piece of irony. The daughter of the butcher, delivered into the hands of the survivor. Don't you see the poetry?"
I looked up at him, my heart breaking for the boy he had been, terrified of the man he had become.
"I'm sorry," I whispered. "I'm so sorry for what happened to you. But I'm not my father. I didn't do this."
"I know," he said, his eyes softening, just a fraction. "That's why you're still breathing. That's why I'm not going to throw you off this balcony."
He stood up straight, turning his back on me to look out at the city lights.
"You can stay here. You'll have everything you want. Clothes, food, art supplies. Whatever you need. But you are never leaving. You are my guest. My prisoner. My reminder of what I lost."
"And what if I can change your mind?" I asked, the words leaving my lips before I could stop them.
He turned, a dark chuckle escaping his throat. "Change my mind? You think you can fix me? You think kindness can undo twenty years of hell?"
"I don't know," I said, standing up. I walked toward him, my bare feet silent on the marble. I stopped a few feet away. "But I saw how you looked at those men in the van. You didn't enjoy killing them. You just wanted it over. You aren't a monster, Damian. You're just hurt."
He stared at me. For a long time, he didn't speak. The wind howled against the glass. The city lights flickered below.
Then, he walked past me, heading toward a hallway that led to the bedrooms.
"Go to sleep, Elena," he said, his voice weary. "Tomorrow, the war begins. And I suggest you pray to whatever God you believe in that your father surrenders quickly. Because if he doesn't..."
He paused at the doorway, his silhouette framed by the darkness of the hall.
"...I will burn the world down to get to him. And you will watch."
He disappeared into the dark.
I stood alone in the center of the vast, cold penthouse. I looked out at the city—my father's city. I knew I should hate Damian. I should fear him.
But as I touched my fingers to my lips, remembering the gentle way he had removed the duct tape, I knew the truth.
I was the only thing standing between Damian and total destruction. And maybe, just maybe, he was the only thing standing between me and the lie my father had built his life upon.
I wasn't a victim anymore. I was a catalyst.
And the game had just begun.