Chapter 5: Scars and Salve

Chapter 5: Scars and Salve

The ride back to the penthouse was a blur of smeared city lights and suffocating silence. The engine of the Maybach, usually a soft, unobtrusive purr, roared in Damien’s ears, a useless sound that couldn't drown out the frantic replay of the last ten minutes. Elara’s gasp. The bloom of livid red on her skin. The flash of a dozen smartphone cameras. And worst of all, the slow, knowing smirk that had spread across Marcus Thorne’s face—the look of a predator that had just scented blood in the water.

Humiliation was a bitter acid in his throat. His perfectly orchestrated evening, the culmination of months of strategic planning, had been spectacularly derailed. But beneath the cold fury, a new, unsettling feeling was taking root: a deep, visceral horror. The image of those welts, stark and brutal under the ballroom’s crystal light, was burned into his memory.

Elara sat huddled on the far side of the plush leather seat, as far from him as she could get. She was shivering, a fine tremor running through her body despite the heat that seemed to radiate from her in waves. She hadn’t said a word since he’d bundled her out of the gala, his arm a rigid bar across her back, shielding her from the prying eyes and whispered questions.

The private elevator ascended in the same tense silence. The sterile, white marble lobby of his penthouse, normally a source of pride—a testament to his control and minimalist taste—felt stark and clinical tonight. It wasn’t a home; it was a hospital waiting room.

As the doors slid open, he guided her inside. The sprawling, glass-walled space was dark, the city skyline a glittering, indifferent tapestry below. He flicked on a single, low-watt lamp, casting long, distorted shadows across the room. The silence here was different. It wasn’t just the absence of noise; it was a heavy, suffocating blanket thick with unspoken accusations.

“I… I have to get it off,” Elara whispered, her voice a raw, cracked thing. It was the first time she’d spoken. Her hands were fumbling at the back of the crimson dress, her fingers clumsy and trembling. “I can’t… I can’t breathe.”

This was it. The moment of reckoning. His desire was to fix this, to rewind the last three hours and make a different choice. To control the narrative. But the narrative was out of his hands. His only immediate goal was to end her obvious suffering.

The obstacle was the dress itself—and him. He was a man who commanded boardrooms, who could dismantle a rival company with a single phone call, but he was utterly, profoundly out of his depth.

He strode into her bedroom behind her. “Stand still,” he commanded, the authority in his voice a flimsy facade for his rising panic.

She froze, her back to him, her shoulders hunched in a posture of pure misery. He reached for the zipper, his large, capable hands suddenly feeling like clumsy, useless appendages. The pull-tab was a delicate, jewel-encrusted thing, caught in the fine lace. He worked it free, his fingers brushing against her skin. It was shockingly hot, like touching a furnace. A low hiss of pain escaped her lips at the contact.

He pulled the zipper down. The rasping sound was obscenely loud in the quiet room. He had to peel the fabric away from her shoulders, the lace clinging to her inflamed skin like a cruel second skin. And then he saw it.

What he’d glimpsed at the gala was a prelude. This was the full, horrific symphony.

Her entire back and shoulders were a canvas of agony. The intricate floral pattern of the lace was perfectly, brutally embossed on her flesh in shades of scarlet and deep, angry crimson. Raised, swollen welts traced every seam, every delicate swirl of the design. Her skin was a testament, a physical transcript of every moment she had suffered in that dress. The memory of the Rodeo Drive shopping trip—her flimsy excuses, her tears he’d dismissed as petulance—crashed over him with the force of a physical blow. He hadn’t seen the proof then. Now, he was drowning in it.

The dress, the breathtaking symbol of the life he was forcing upon her, pooled at her feet in a puddle of crimson silk and lace. She stood there, trembling, in a simple slip, her back a roadmap of his arrogance.

A wave of something akin to nausea roiled in his stomach. He, Damien Blackwood, The Shark, who prided himself on seeing every angle and anticipating every outcome, had been this blind. This willfully ignorant.

“A cool shower,” he said, the words feeling foreign and inadequate in his mouth. “Go. Now.”

It was an order born not of dominance, but of desperation.

As the sound of the water started in her en-suite, he stood frozen in the center of the room, staring at the discarded dress. It looked like a casualty of war. He felt a sudden, violent urge to rip it to shreds, to destroy the evidence of his monumental failure.

Instead, he forced himself to move. What did one do? He couldn’t call his assistant. He couldn’t delegate this. This was his mess, his responsibility. He strode into his own master bathroom, a space of black marble and chrome, and yanked open a drawer. It was filled with expensive grooming products, cologne, shaving balms—all useless. Tucked in the back was a basic first-aid kit. He pulled it out, finding only antiseptic wipes and bandages. Useless.

His mind raced, trying to solve this problem as he would a hostile takeover—with logic and resources. What did she need? Softness. Relief. He remembered the simple, un-dyed fabrics she always wore. He went to his closet, past the rows of immaculate suits and starched shirts, and pulled out the softest thing he owned: a worn, plain grey t-shirt made of Pima cotton, a relic from a time before his life was dictated by board meetings and bespoke tailoring.

When Elara emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a large, fluffy white towel, her face was pale and drawn. The cool water had dampened the fire, but her skin was still a shocking testament to the ordeal. She flinched as the plush texture of the towel rubbed against her shoulders. Even comfort was an enemy to her now.

He didn't speak. He simply held out the grey t-shirt.

She looked at it, then at him, her large, doe-eyes filled with a weary confusion. She took it without a word and disappeared back into the bathroom. A moment later, she returned, enveloped in the soft grey cotton. The shirt hung off her small frame, the hem falling to her mid-thighs, making her look impossibly small and fragile.

“Sit,” he said, gesturing to the edge of the bed.

She obeyed, perching cautiously on the mattress, as if expecting it, too, to betray her. He opened a small jar of a generic, all-purpose healing salve he’d found—a pathetic offering against the damage he’d inflicted. He knelt in front of her, an unfamiliar, humbling position.

“Turn around.”

She hesitated, then slowly turned, presenting her back to him. He squeezed a small amount of the cool cream onto his fingers. The act of tending to her skin became his unwilling, intimate penance. His touch, which had been dismissive and demanding only hours before, was now hesitant, almost reverent. He gently smoothed the salve over the welts, his fingers tracing the phantom patterns of the lace. He could feel the residual heat, the slight swelling. Each touch was a fresh indictment of his cruelty.

He worked in silence, the only sound the soft whisper of his fingers on her skin and her quiet, controlled breathing. The air between them was charged, not with anger or passion, but with the raw, stripped-down reality of her pain and his guilt.

When he was done, he slowly stood up. Elara didn’t turn around. She just sat there, her small shoulders slumped in exhaustion.

“Lie down,” he said softly. “Try to sleep.”

He watched as she slid under the covers, curling into a protective ball on the far side of the vast bed. He turned and walked out of the room, closing the door quietly behind him.

He stood alone in the cavernous living room, the city lights twinkling mockingly below. The silence of his perfect penthouse was no longer a sign of his power. It was the sound of his profound and utter failure. He had wanted a perfect trophy wife to secure his empire, but he had broken her to get it. And for the first time in his life, Damien Blackwood had no idea what to do next.