That was back when he forced Julius to drop out of school.
I had cried bitterly, even knelt on the ground, clutching his pant leg, pleading for Julius to be spared.
He had rested his foot on the coffee table, lazily plucking a rose from the vase beside him. He tore it into pieces, placed the fragments in his palm, and blew them toward me.
The rose, damp with its juices, stuck to my face.
His tone was teasing, yet laced with regret: "This red of the rose is lovely, but it's no match for the brilliance of blood."
He smiled. "Wouldn't you agree, Olivia?"
I slowly released his hand... trembling as I brought it to my mouth, biting down, then smearing the blood over the places where the rose fragments had stuck.
My face was covered in the metallic scent of blood.
It felt as though my heart had stopped.
All I could see was Damien's amused, stunning smile, paired with a mocking malice.
He chuckled softly: "Olivia, you know, nothing I say can ever be taken at face value."
And he still forced Julius to drop out.
That night, the breeze was slow and gentle as I knelt on the villa's marble steps. My face bore the dried scent of blood mingled with sweat, soaking into my lips, into my throat... all of it sliding irreversibly toward a dark abyss.
"Why do you think that by changing, the wrongs you committed can simply be erased?"
"I am not someone who can forget the past. Every hurt you inflicted, every pain I endured—I remember it all, vividly."
"No matter how much you change, no matter how deeply you regret it, even if you lose your mind or your life, I will never forget those nightmarish five years."
I was so angry that my shoulders shook uncontrollably.
Looking at his shattered, innocent face, I smiled faintly and slapped him across the cheek.
"I hadn't intended to hold the past against you."
"But it's you who keep haunting me like a specter. You who keep reminding me that there was once a demon who did such cruel things to me."
When I was 21, he snatched me away, forced me out of school, and cut me off from my education and the world.
At 22, he destroyed Julius as if toying with a plaything. My desperate, tearful pleas—kneeling, begging—earned only his scornful words: "You think you have the right to ask me for anything?"
At 23, I went on a hunger strike, we fought, and in a fit of rage, he locked me away in a secluded mountain villa for three years.
Three years later, he brought me out. By then, bizarrely, he seemed to have fallen in love with me, becoming uncharacteristically kind and clingy, as if trying to make amends.
Life's rollercoaster—its ups and downs, twists and turns—I experienced it so many times.
Every time I glimpsed the faintest light of hope, Damien would appear to shatter it.
It was always him. Only him. Like an inescapable enemy destined from birth, haunting me, destroying every bit of hope I had.
"I'll tell you one last time."
"I will never love you, never forgive you, and never, ever give you what you want."
