*Aria's POV*
The house was quiet again. It always was.
Morning light pooled through the tall windows, soft and gold against the cold marble. The ocean beyond the cliffs lay calm, stretching endlessly into the horizon — beautiful, but distant. Like him.
Aria had been here for days now, yet she still felt as though she were trespassing inside someone else's silence. Damian Cole's silence.
He spoke rarely, and when he did, every word felt measured — as if too many of them might cost him something. He wasn't cruel, just… distant. Detached. The kind of man who had built walls long before the world gave him a reason to.
Sometimes she caught him staring at the ocean as if waiting for it to give something back. Other times, she found him lost in thought, his hand resting on the same untouched whiskey glass on the desk, his reflection watching him from the window.
She had written for all kinds of people — politicians, entrepreneurs, celebrities — but no one had ever looked more like a story than Damian Cole.
Still, she didn't know where to begin this one.
The email that brought her here had been brief and strange — no signature, no sender's name… only a request for a discreet ghostwriter and a promise that the story would "change everything."
She almost didn't take it. Almost.
But the industry name caught her attention. And the money… it wasn't a sum anyone could brush aside.
Yet even more than that — Damian Cole's name had caught her attention.
Two years ago, his face had been everywhere: breaking headlines, whispered conversations, news specials dissecting every detail of his downfall. The billionaire whose empire collapsed under scandal. The man accused of financial crimes, conspiracy, corruption — sins too heavy for a single headline.
Then came the crash.
A private jet off the coast of Italy.
A funeral without a body.
A world that mourned a villain.
She remembered watching it unfold from her small apartment, the blue glow of the screen flickering across her tired eyes. She didn't know if she believed everything they said about him then — and she wasn't sure she believed it now.
Still, she needed answers. Even if it meant walking too close to a wound buried two years deep.
So she listened instead — to the house, to the ocean, to the way he sometimes exhaled like someone trying to forget how to breathe.
Her notes were scattered across her desk — timelines, fact sheets, clipped reports printed from old archives.
None of them added up.
"Truth is never loud," she whispered to herself. "It waits."
Footsteps broke the silence.
She turned. Damian stood in the doorway, his sleeves rolled, the faintest shadow of fatigue beneath his eyes.
"You're awake early," he said, voice low but steady.
"I couldn't sleep."
He walked closer, his gaze drifting over the papers on her desk. His expression tightened — just a fraction.
"You're going through the old reports," he said quietly. Not accusing. Simply acknowledging the past he could not outrun.
She froze. "I—"
"The articles. The accusations. All of it."
Her throat tightened. "Yes."
A pause. Then he gave a small, humorless smile. "Good."
She frowned. "Good?"
"At least you know what they took from me."
He turned away before she could respond, crossing to the window. The ocean breeze stirred the curtain behind him, carrying the faint scent of salt and rain.
Aria hesitated — then asked the question she had been circling since the moment she arrived:
"Did your brother do this?"
Silence.
A long, heavy silence.
Damian didn't turn around immediately. His shoulders rose with a slow breath — not sharp, not startled… resigned. As if she had finally placed her hand on the right door, the one he had been guarding with everything he had left.
When he looked back at her, his eyes were unreadable. Not cold. Not angry. Just tired — the kind of tired that lived deep beneath the skin.
"No," he said quietly. "My brother didn't do this."
A pause. A shift in his gaze.
"But he helped the people who did."
Aria felt her breath catch.
Damian continued, voice softer, darker — the tone of a man speaking of ghosts that never learned to let go.
"They needed access. Someone close enough to know where to strike. And he…" His jaw tightened. "He gave them exactly what they needed."
The bitterness in his voice wasn't loud.
It didn't have to be.
"My blood ruined me," he said. "But it was my enemies who buried me."
The words hit harder than she expected.
He didn't wait for her reaction. He didn't look away either. He simply let the truth settle between them — sharp, quiet, undeniable.
Then he stepped back, as if the moment had taken something from him.
When he left the room, the silence returned — but it wasn't the same.
It felt heavier.
More personal.
Damian Cole was supposed to be a dead man.
A ruined man.
But sitting in his silence now, Aria wasn't sure which version of him was more dangerous — the one the world buried, or the one who came back to rewrite his truth.
And for the first time, she wondered if the story she'd been hired to tell was one the world was ready to hear.