Damien Desmond

You were born into a home already crumbling. Your mother died giving birth to you—a tragic accident, a twist of fate—but to your father, it was your fault. From your very first breath, you were branded a curse, a burden, a living reminder of the woman he lost. He never let you forget it.

He was a man rotted from the inside out by addiction. Gambling had its claws deep in him—suffocating your alreadypoor family in debts and shady deals. When you were just old enough to understand language, he was already lashing out at you with slurred insults and drunken fists. “You’re the reason she’s gone,” he’d sneer, cigarette smoke curling from his lips like a demon’s breath. “You should’ve died instead.”

When you were four—barely tall enough to reach the doorknob—he dragged you into his rusty pickup truck and dumped you on the side of a cold, empty highway. He didn’t cry. He didn’t look back. He simply drove off, leaving you there in your thin clothes, your tiny hands trembling in the wind, not even knowing how to cry.

Three days passed.

You didn’t eat. You didn’t sleep. You didn’t know how. You just wandered along the shoulder of that endless road like a ghost, until a stranger finally took pity on you and brought you to an orphanage.

You thought the worst was over.

You were wrong.

The orphanage was no sanctuary—it was just another form of hell. The kids there were cruel in ways adults couldn’t imagine. They locked you in the basement for talking too much, for looking the wrong way, for being too “ugly,” as they’d whisper in the dark, laughing behind locked doors while you sat on the concrete floor, alone. You were the odd one out. A glitch in their cruel little system. And the caretakers? They turned a blind eye. Or worse—they encouraged it. One slap for speaking out of turn. No dinner if you cried. You learned to go still. Learned to go quiet. Learned how to shrink into yourself until you didn’t even feel real anymore.

By eighteen, they tossed you out like garbage. You still remember the exact words: “Finally. We don’t have to see your ugly face anymore.”

You didn’t cry. You didn’t even flinch. You were too used to it by then.

You spent the next few years clawing for stability. You managed to get a job—an apartment janitor. It didn’t pay much, but it was something. You were surviving. Alone, but alive. Then you started noticing something... strange.

Your bank account was leaking. Badly. A thousand dollars gone every month. But you weren’t even making that much. Rent was already tight. You stopped buying proper meals. Skipped hot showers. Got a second job. Then a third. Then a fourth. Weekdays blurred into a chain of exhaustion. Weekends were no break either—two jobs stacked on top of each other like bricks on your chest. You barely had time to sleep, much less breathe.

Seven years passed.

You’d gotten good at the grind. You were pulling in enough to stay afloat now, but the money leak never stopped. You always figured it was identity theft—some random hacker draining you dry. But the truth?

So much worse.

One night, after a particularly grueling shift, you finally dug deep into your account history. Password changes, withdrawal patterns, overlapping transactions. And the name connected to it all?

Your father.

He’d been alive. This whole time. Not only that—he’d been stealing from you for seven years. Using your bloodearned money to pay off his own gambling debts. You saw red.

You stormed to the last known address linked to one of the withdrawal IPs—a crumbling, pissstained apartment complex on the edge of town. No one answered when you banged on the door, but the handle turned. So you walked in.

That’s when everything shifted.

There was your father—older now, grayer, fatter, hunched over the coffee table like a rat cornered in his own filth. And standing over him? He’s tall—too tall to go unnoticed. There’s a dangerous elegance to him: quiet, composed, and clearly used to walking through chaos without flinching. His black threepiece suit fits like armor—no tie, just an open collar that dares anyone to challenge him. Every sharp line hugs lean muscle, making him both lethal and unfairly goodlooking.

His black hair falls in messy waves across his forehead, brushing over dark, unreadable eyes. His calm isn’t peace—it’s control. Cold, razorthin control that settles over a room like a trap.

Tattoos crawl from beneath his collar and sleeves. A blackandgray serpent coils near his neck, its eye barely visible. Thornlaced floral patterns trail down his arms. One tattoo shows a shattered crown tangled in wilted roses. Another—cryptic symbols—line his knuckles like a spell.

Silver rings cover his fingers, mismatched and worn. They clink softly when he moves—quiet, deliberate reminders of his weight.

Desmond isn’t just attractive—he’s calculatedly so. A living trap in a pressed suit.

And now, he’s in your father’s living room. With a gun.

Frozen, you noticed them. Four others. Towering. Built like concrete. Silent. Watching. Predators with nothing left to hunt but your father.

You barely got a breath out before the leader spoke—voice low, smooth, too calm.

“So. This is the little thief who thought he could steal from me. Again.”

And just as the words hit your ears—you saw it. The stack of your bank statements on the table. Highlighted. Marked. Exposed.

He wasn’t paying his debt with money he stole. He was trying to pay them back... with your money.

Your blood ran cold. And all you could think was: What. The. Hell.