Chapter 5 - Sixty Floors Above The City
Victor Kesler slammed Elena Marlo against the reinforced glass wall sixty floors above the city, and he smiled.
Her feet left the floor. The wind outside howled against the exterior glass, and the city glittered below her like millions of broken diamonds scattered in the black void. Her lungs burned for air as Kesler’s thick fingers clamped down on her windpipe.
“Tell Blackwood,” Kesler said softly, like a man ordering coffee, “that I own everything he loves now.”
Behind them, Kesler’s men were tearing the office apart—pulling drawers out of her desk, tipping the file cabinets onto the carpet, shattering the computer servers. The desk she had rebuilt with her own hands, the system she had organized out of nothing, the four years of her life that had finally stopped feeling borrowed—all of it was being reduced to ashes.
Elena clawed at Kesler’s wrist, her vision tunneling into dark, spinning spirals. But through the gray haze, she saw Damian.
He was rising from the floor.
He didn't look like a wounded man. He looked like an ancient, vengeful deity rising from the underworld. The bullet wound in his shoulder poured blood down his arm, but his posture was terrifyingly straight. His face was devoid of pain, devoid of fear, consumed by a single, catastrophic intent: total extermination.
“Drop her,” Damian’s voice didn't rise above a whisper, but it carried an authority that made the air in the room freeze solid.
Kesler laughed, pressing Elena harder against the glass until hairline fractures spiderwebbed across the inner pane. “Shoot him!” Kesler barked at his men.
The two mercenaries turned their weapons toward Damian, but they were too late.
The heavy service elevators behind the reception area blew open with a deafening crash. A dozen men in black tactical armor—Damian’s personal elite praetorian guard—flooded the penthouse like shadows from hell, led by Gerald Chen, who wielded a suppressed combat rifle with the cold expertise of a retired special forces commander.
A hail of suppressed gunfire swept through the suite. Kesler’s men collapsed in rapid succession, their weapons clattering uselessly against the floor.
Kesler’s eyes widened in sheer, sudden panic. He reached for his sidearm with his free hand, but Damian was already there.
Damian crossed the thirty feet of ruined floor in the blink of an eye. He grabbed Kesler’s wrist and snapped the bone backward with an audible crack. Kesler screamed, releasing Elena.
Elena fell to the floor, gasping desperately for air, coughing as oxygen rushed back into her burning lungs.
Damian didn't look at Kesler’s gun. He grabbed Kesler by the throat with his right hand, lifting the two-hundred-pound mobster clear off the floor with monstrous, terrifying strength, and slammed his face into the shattered remnants of the obsidian desk.
Blood sprayed across the leather blotter. Kesler whimpered, his face unrecognizable.
“You touched her,” Damian growled, his voice a guttural roar from the depths of hell. He drew his combat knife, pinning Kesler’s hand to the mahogany desk with the blade. Kesler shrieked in agony.
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“Damian!” Elena gasped from the floor, clutching her bruised neck. “Damian, stop!”
Damian froze. The blade ceased its downward pressure. Slowly, he turned his head toward her. The murderous fury in his slate-gray eyes clashed violently with the raw, desperate panic of a man who had nearly lost the only light in his dark universe.
