YOURS BY FORCE (RELEASING SOON)

Scarlet’s POV

The rain taps steadily against the glass of my tiny studio apartment in Portland.

It is past midnight.

The city outside is quiet, bathed in the orange glow of wet streetlights. In the corner of my room, the radiator clanks and hisses, barely keeping the cold air from creeping through the floorboards.

I sit cross-legged on my thin mattress on the floor, my woollen sweater pulled tight around my shivering shoulders.

In my lap rests the battered brown leather journal I’ve carried with me since the day my dad died. The corners of the cover are frayed, the binding held together by black drafting tape.

Inside this book is my entire life.

Every secret. Every tear. Every piece of the man I broke my own heart to save.

I run my thumb over the worn leather cover, taking a slow, shaky breath before opening it to the very first page from six months ago.

October 14 — Seattle

Dear Dad,

I fell in love with a monster.

No, that’s not fair. Damien Knight isn’t a monster. He is just a man who had his heart carved out by his own father when he was a boy, and he built a fortress of steel and glass around the wound so nobody could ever hurt him again.

I still remember the first day I saw him. That elevator at Knight Enterprises getting stuck between the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth floors. In the pitch black, while I was gasping for air, he grabbed my hand. His fingers were so big, so warm, so steady. He talked me through my panic attack with that deep, rough voice.

Then came the desk in his office. That explosive kiss that ruined me for any other man on earth. The way he looked at me when we won the Bellevue Civic Centre contract, presenting your cedar arches to the world. He stood on live television, looked right into the cameras, and called me his full partner.

I thought I had found home, Dad.

I moved into his penthouse sixty floors above Seattle. I slept in his arms every night. He held me like I was fragile, like I was the only thing in his dark world worth protecting.

And then Richard Knight destroyed it all.

Richard cornered me at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel. He showed me the loan contracts. Damien had signed a personal guarantee on eighty million dollars of Swiss bonds ten years ago. If the debt defaulted on Friday, the courts were going to take everything Damien owned...his firm, his bank accounts, his patents, and his license to practice architecture.

Damien was going to let himself be ruined for me, Dad. He told Ethan he would work with a hammer in the freezing rain before he ever traded me to his father.

I couldn’t let him do it.

Building things is Damien’s soul. Without his company, without his pencil and his designs, he would wither away into a ghost. So I made the deal.

I signed the equity surrender. I took Richard’s two-million-dollar cashier’s check. And when Damien walked into my office carrying my favourite cinnamon tea, I looked him in the eye and lied.

I told him I was tired of his family war. I told him fairytales don’t pay bills, and that two million dollars bought my freedom from student loans. I made him believe I was greedy, shallow, and heartless.

I had to make him hate me, Dad. Because if he knew the truth, he would have ripped up the papers and let himself drown to save me.

I’ll never forget the sound of the bronze lamp shattering against the window. I’ll never forget the cold disgust in his grey eyes when he threw the check at my chest and told me to get the fuck out of his building.

Tonight, before I left Seattle, I went to his dark penthouse one last time. I left my platinum keycard on the kitchen counter. I left the patent assignment. And I left your antique brass callipers right next to it.

I wanted him to have the only thing left of you, Dad, so his legal title to Bellevue would be unbroken.

I’m driving to Portland in the pouring rain. I don’t know who I am anymore. My chest aches so badly I can barely breathe.

November 2 — Portland

Dear Dad,

I rented a studio apartment in the Pearl District above an old print shop. It’s cheap, drafty, and smells like damp cedar and paper ink.

I found a job at a small firm called Vance & Miller Architectural Studio. There are only seven of us here. I work in the basement drawing stairwell details and ADA bathroom layouts for forty-eight thousand a year under the name Scarlett Rose.

Nobody asks questions. Nobody knows who I am.

Under my mattress, I keep a green tin lockbox. Inside it sits Richard Knight’s green two-million-dollar cashier’s check.

I haven’t cashed it. I never will. I would starve in the street before I spent a single penny of Richard’s blood money. It stays locked in that tin box as proof of my penance. Proof that I loved Damien enough to become the villain in his story.

At night, the silence in this room is suffocating. I wake up reaching for him in the dark, gasping for air, searching for the heat of his skin, the smell of his sandalwood cologne.

He will never know why I left.

He will go on hating me. And I have to live with that. It hurts so bad.

January 18 — Portland

Dear Dad,

I bought a copy of the Seattle Business Journal at the newsstand on 5th Avenue today.

Damien was on the cover.

He was standing on the gravel at the Bellevue site in that long black wool coat, his dark hair whipped by the wind. The headline called him ‘The Untouchable King of Seattle.’ The article said Knight Enterprises just completed the first phase of the cedar foundation arches...your arches, Dad.

He looked so handsome. But when I looked closely at the photograph, his eyes were dead. Pitch-black. Hollow.

There was a small rumour in the gossip column about Genevieve Sinclair, but no engagement has been announced. Ethan was quoted as saying Damien works eighteen hours a day and sleeps on his office sofa.

He’s drowning in his work because he doesn’t want to feel anything. Just like he did after his mother left.

I did that to him. I took the little boy who was locked in that dark cellar, and I put him right back inside the darkness.

I cried so hard in the grocery store parking lot that my vision went black. God, Dad, what did I do?

April 22 — Portland

Dear Dad,

Something is terrifying me.

For the past two weeks, a black sedan with Seattle plates has been parked across the street from Vance & Miller. It sits under the awning of the brick warehouse, the engine idling whenever I leave the office at six o’clock.

Yesterday, Mr Vance called an all-hands meeting. He was crying. He told us that our firm is drowning in commercial debt, and that an investment group out of Seattle called Pacific Crest Acquisitions just bought up all our bank notes and the lease to our building.

Dad... Pacific Crest Acquisitions is Damien’s company.

Ethan set that shell company up three years ago. I remember seeing the legal paperwork on Damien’s desk during my second week at Knight Enterprises.

Damien didn’t buy Vance & Miller because he needs an architecture firm in Portland. He bought it because he holds every single dollar, every paycheck, and every roof over my head.

He found me.

Six months of silence. Six months of hiding. And he was hunting me the entire time.

He doesn’t know about the sacrifice. He still thinks I stole his heart, took his father’s check, and ran like a thief.

If he comes here, it won’t be to forgive me. It will be to punish me.

April 24 — Tonight. 12:15 AM.

Dear Dad,

My hands are shaking so violently I can barely hold the pen.

A car just pulled up in front of my building.

A black Maybach. The headlights cut through the blinds of my third-floor window like two white blades.

I crept to the glass. I looked down into the dark street.

He stepped out into the rain.

It’s Damien.

He’s wearing a black cashmere coat, his dark hair soaked with water, his face carved from ice. He didn’t use an umbrella. He just stood there on the wet sidewalk, tilted his head back, and looked straight up at my window.

His eyes pinned me through the glass. Even from three stories up, the predatory weight of his gaze stole every drop of air from my lungs.

He isn’t coming up the stairs to talk.

He isn’t coming to ask for an explanation.

He bought my firm. He bought my debts. And now he’s coming through that front door.

Damien Knight is taking me back...this time...BY FORCE.