*Damian's POV*
The storm outside had quieted, but the one inside him never did.
He sat in the dark, his reflection caught in the window's glass. Behind that reflection was a man everyone thought had died—a man he sometimes wished had.
The world had buried Damian Cole two years ago. He'd watched it happen from the shadows, watched his name fade from headlines until it became a ghost story told in business circles.
But ghosts never really rest.
They remember.
Not the crash itself—his mind had blurred that into flashes of fire and sound—but the moments before it. The laughter. The warmth. The life he should have protected.
Her name still ached when he thought of it. His fiancée. The only person who ever made the chaos of his world feel still. They were supposed to be leaving for Florence. A week away from meetings, from noise. She'd insisted. "Just us," she said. "No phones, no boardrooms."
He had agreed. Too late, he'd realize, it wasn't a trip meant for peace.
The plane had lifted off the coast of Italy under a clear sky. He remembered reaching for her hand when the sound came—metal tearing apart, the shudder of the earth breaking through the air. Then fire. Then nothing.
When he opened his eyes, the world was red.
He was lying on blackened sand, half submerged in water, the air thick with smoke and oil. The wreckage burned in the distance, a twisted skeleton of steel scattered across the coast. He tried to move, but his body refused. Every breath came with fire.
He remembered calling her name. No answer. Only waves dragging pieces of what was left back into the sea.
He should have died there. He almost did.
What saved him were strangers — people who lived beyond the coastal cliffs, a small fishing family who came looking for debris the next morning. They found him barely breathing, his body torn and burnt, his pulse weak.
He had no name, no papers, no phone. Everything had gone down with the jet.
For months, they kept him hidden, not out of fear, but because they didn't know who he was. The crash had been all over the news, names of the dead announced, and his face among them. Every report said there were no survivors.
He couldn't tell them otherwise.
The burns took weeks to heal. The broken ribs, the fractured leg — months. The scars would never fade. But what broke him most was not his body. It was what he saw on the small television the family kept in their kitchen.
His company — his empire — had moved on. His younger brother had stepped in. His partner, the one man he trusted most, now stood beside him as co-owner. Together, they gave statements, held charity events in his name, and promised to "honor Damian Cole's legacy."
They had buried him beautifully.
And beneath all the flowers and speeches was betrayal.
It took him three months to walk again, six before he could stand without trembling. During that time, he said nothing of who he was. He helped mend nets, carried crates of fish, learned silence. They called him Luca, after the youngest son who'd died years before.
In that silence, he began to think.
The jet hadn't simply fallen. It had been tampered with. He remembered a faint click before the blast, an unnatural sound beneath the hum of the engines. He had dismissed it. He shouldn't have.
When his strength returned, he left quietly, with nothing but the clothes they'd given him and a promise burning in his chest. He couldn't repay them then — everything he owned had gone down with the jet — but he swore he would, one day.
They had taken in a stranger the world had already buried, nursed him back from death without asking for a name or a reason. He never forgot that.
"When I finally take back what they stole from me," he'd vowed silently, "I'll return — and make sure they never have to need again."
---
Now, standing in the mansion that had once been his refuge, Damian could hardly breathe.
The estate sat deep beyond the hills, surrounded by tall pines and the quiet of the sea. From the road, it was almost invisible by design. He had built it as a place to escape the noise of his world, a sanctuary only a handful of people even knew existed. That same secrecy was what made it the perfect hiding place now.
For two years, while the world thought him dead, this place had slept — untouched, forgotten, sealed behind locked gates and silence. Dust clung to the walls, yet his scent still lingered faintly in the air, like a ghost that refused to leave.
He stood by the wide windows, looking out at the stretch of water beyond the cliffs — the same sea that had almost claimed his life.
His parents had died there, too. Different coast, same unforgiving depth. He remembered the day their car plunged into the river on their way back from a charity event. He was barely twenty-one then, but the sound of that phone call never left him.
Loss had followed him all his life. It was almost poetic that it tried again in the form of fire and saltwater.
He exhaled slowly, fingers brushing against the cold edge of the desk — his desk. The same one he had signed contracts and built empires upon. Now it sat covered in dust and lies, reminders of everything stolen in his absence.
Two years. Two years of silence, of being nothing but a ghost in the world he built. But the silence had done something to him. It had sharpened his grief, carved his anger into focus.
He was done hiding.
And when he reclaimed everything they took, he would go back to those who saved him — because they had brought him back to life before the world even knew he was still breathing.
So he stayed the ghost.
A name hidden in plain sight.
The world believed Damian Cole was dead. He preferred it that way. Because sometimes, death is easier to live with than truth.
He walked to the shelf and poured himself a glass of whiskey. The burn was softer than he remembered. The silence heavier.
He thought of her again — his fiancée, her laugh, her defiance. The way she'd reached for him right before the world ended.
Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the same thing: her hand slipping away, his reaching too late.
He'd spent two years building walls around that moment. But Aria — the girl who'd walked into his quiet world without asking permission — was starting to tear those walls down.
There was something about her that didn't belong to the present. Something he couldn't name but recognized. The way she looked at him — not with fear, not with awe, but with understanding. As if she could see the wreckage in him and still wanted to know what burned it.
He hated it. He needed it.
Because she made the silence restless.
And that was dangerous.
He set the glass down and stared at his reflection again. The man in the window looked like a survivor, but not of a crash — of himself.
He whispered the name of the woman he lost, the name he hadn't said aloud in two years. It lingered like smoke. Then, quietly, he whispered Aria's name.
The sound felt like betrayal.
Maybe this was what survival meant — not escaping the fire, but learning to live with what it left behind.
He turned off the lights, one by one, until the mansion was swallowed in shadow.
Outside, the wind shifted. The waves crashed softly against the distant cliffs — the same sea that had once carried him back from the edge of death.
He closed his eyes and listened.
For the first time in two years, the silence felt alive.