Chapter 246: Locked room

Damian carefully hooked his nail beneath the corner of the medical tape and ripped it off, clenching it in his fist as he hoisted my leg even higher, making the distinct sound of the seam splitting at my hip echo through the quiet living room.

"W-what are you doing?! I’ll fall!" Swaying unsteadily on one leg, I dug my nails painfully into his shoulders, leaving deep scratches across his skin. "Let me go!"

"Your wound has opened up," the guy said calmly, studying the cut. "Don’t step on it."

Releasing my ankle, he rose, easily scooping me up around the waist with one arm, and carried me over to the sofa, setting me down gently among the soft cushions.

"How did I even get it in the first place?" Because the black dress was suffocatingly tight, I couldn’t even pull my knee up to examine the injury properly. Even though I wore shorts underneath, I would never have hiked up my leg in front of Damian, yet I was dying to know how the wound had appeared.

"You tried to trash my apartment last night," the guy chuckled, pulling a transparent plastic medical box from the lower shelf of the glass coffee table and clicking the latch open. "Don’t you remember?"

"No..." Staring in shock at his unnervingly calm face, I couldn’t wrap my head around the absurdity of his words. "You’re lying! I would never do something like that!"

"Oh, but you did. You walked out into the hallway in the dead of night, smashed a collector’s vase to pieces, threw sharp shards at me, and shrieked at the top of your lungs that if I didn’t surrender to you immediately, you would finish me off and feed me to your stuffed rabbit." Unpacking a fresh adhesive patch, he placed the square on the table, crouched back down on the floor in front of me, and locked his searingly hot fingers firmly around my ankle.

The sight of his tanned, unnaturally broad palm wrapping effortlessly around my leg like a bracelet sent a shiver straight down my spine. The difference in our builds was so terrifying that it lay far beyond the limits of my comprehension. He could snap my bone with a single careless squeeze.

"I couldn’t possibly say such nonsense. And besides, I can treat my own—Ouch!!" Driven by a sharp sting, I jerked my leg back, but Damian held on with an unyielding grip, refusing to let me budge even a millimeter. "What are you doing? Let go, it hurts!"

"I’m treating the wound, you should be grateful," the guy rasped without raising his eyes, continuing to mercilessly torment my foot with a cotton swab soaked in something sharply pungent.

"If it weren’t for you, this wound wouldn’t even exist," I hissed through my teeth, wincing from the throbbing pain.

"If it weren’t for me, you would have been sold to some old pervert or tossed into a cheap brothel long ago."

Taping up the small cut, Damian lowered my leg to the floor and, without looking at me again, stood up and put the medical kit back beneath the table. His indifferent words swept through my soul like a corrosive acid, eating it away to tatters. A brothel? To some old pervert?

"Don’t exaggerate your importance! I managed to escape on my own."

"I won’t argue; you heroically escaped from a locked room. But you never would have gotten past the men waiting outside—that bastard’s personal security detail—if I hadn’t taken care of them. One of them trailed you all the way home like an obedient hound, and my men finished him off in a dark alley. They even ran a segment about it on the morning news. ’A model family man struck by a car, blah-blah-blah.’ Well, that exemplary family man really wanted to ravish you first, and then drown you in the nearest puddle, Hart."

Damian pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his pocket, flicked a lighter, and lit one, slowly exhaling a cloud of blue-gray smoke toward the ceiling. His voice had grown raspy, roughened by the smoke, yet it still cut straight to the bone, as though he had personally dragged his fangs across my throat. The gaze of his black eyes from beneath half-lowered lashes in the dimness of the room sliced me into pieces and mercilessly burned my skin.

I shifted nervously on the sofa. What he was saying completely refused to fit inside my head, shattering my worldview, but I remembered those exact news reports. That unknown man had been run over multiple times by a heavy SUV, and his corpse looked like a bloody mess rather than a human being. Even back then, I had been genuinely horrified by such brutality on the city streets.

"I don’t believe a single word you’re saying. You could have made this up right now just to scare me even more," I said with forced confidence, watching the guy twist his lips into a chilling sneer. "Open the locked room so I can wash the floors in there and finish up for today."

"You are strictly forbidden from entering that room."

I tensed up inside. The prohibition sounded strange. The door to his personal bedroom was always open, yet this one remained shut. Could there be something important in there that I could use against him?

"Is there something valuable in there?" Trying to sound as casual as possible and avoiding his gaze completely, I stood up from the sofa and limped toward the exit of the living room.

"More valuable than anything in the world," the guy murmured softly, with a frightening strain, as if speaking to himself.

I whipped around to face him, but he immediately reined himself in, slipping back into his habitual mask of icy composure as he added, "That’s a room for adult entertainment. I strongly advise you not to try getting in there, Hart."

He was so deadpan that I didn’t believe his final clarification for a second. The falseness cut through the air. Now, I was practically obligated to sneak in there. My intuition screamed at me frantically, begging me not to crawl into a monster’s lair, but my logical mind whispered that if whatever was hidden in there truly mattered to him, I could use that secret to leverage power over him—to force him to let my parents go.

"Fewer rooms mean less work for me," I shrugged with feigned indifference, walking out of the living room and leaving him behind.

My gaze glued itself relentlessly to the closed door. To the room I had to get into by any means necessary.