After Rebirth, I Became My Ex's Aunt-in-Law

Chapter 277: My Husband Did What?

The French cartel boss didn’t waste another second. With a guttural snarl, he raised his own weapon, aiming the barrel directly at the center of Damien’s forehead. His finger tightened on the trigger.

But then...

The Frenchman froze, his breath catching painfully in his throat.

He didn’t lower his gun, but he slowly looked left. He looked right. The men he had brought with him, weren’t aiming at Damien anymore.

Their guns were now aimed at him, their eyes cold and dead.

A loud crack of thunder shattered the sky above them.

The oppressive mid-afternoon humidity finally broke. The sky opened up, and a downpour of rain began to crash down onto the hot asphalt.

The heavy rain beat against the metal of the vehicles and soaked the clothes of the men standing on the highway.

The boss stared at the man standing closest to him. As the freezing rain battered the man’s neck, the dark, coiled ink of the sinister snake tattoo began to blur.

The boss watched in paralyzing horror as the "Viper" tattoo literally dissolved. The cheap, water-soluble ink bled out, running down the man’s collar in a muddy, black stream.

He looked around wildly. Every single man on the highway was bleeding fake ink into the rain.

"Who..." the boss stammered, the gun trembling in his grip as he looked at the faces of the men surrounding him. Stripped of the arrogance of command, the horrifying truth finally dawned on him. "I don’t... I don’t know any of you."

"No, you don’t," Damien drawled, his voice a low, gravelly vibration that easily cut through the sound of the pouring rain. "Because they don’t work for you. They work for me."

The gun slipped from the Frenchman’s trembling fingers, clattering uselessly onto the wet pavement.

He stared at Damien, his mind frantically trying to process the magnitude of the trap he had just walked into. He looked at the two dead bodies lying in the pooling blood a few feet away.

The boss pointed a shaking finger at the corpses.

"Those two...they were your men," the boss choked out, his eyes wide with disbelief. "You... you executed your own men?!"

"My wife was under the vehicle," Damien stated, his voice devoid of an ounce of human empathy. "They advanced on the car. That made them a threat. I eliminate threats."

It was the chilling truth.

Over the past few weeks, while Aria was recovering from the bridge incident, Damien had not been sitting idle. After she woke up, he had promised her he would lay low. He had sworn to her that he would treat her like a partner, that he would be transparent, and that he would wait for her to be ready before they hunted the people who had hurt her.

He had broken every single one of those promises.

Damien, alongside Julian and Kai, had relentlessly torn the global underworld apart. They had torn through the dark web, hunted down the ghost van’s route, and spent millions on his mission down the rabbit hole of the beef between the Orpheus Syndicate and the Vipers.

Damien had learned the truth long before tonight. He had uncovered Eleanor Vale’s true identity. He had discovered that Aria’s father was a man named Marcel Martin. He had found most of the missing puzzle pieces.

But he had kept it all from Aria.

Every time he looked at her, he saw the lingering terror in her emerald eyes. He felt her shaking in her sleep, waking up gasping from nightmares of drowning in the freezing East River that she never remembers in the morning. He couldn’t stomach the thought of burdening her with the truth while she was still healing. He wanted to shield her. He wanted to be the monster in the dark so she could stand in the light.

So, Damien had orchestrated the entire snare.

He had used Kai’s network to feed a plan to Elena Sterling through a proxy, knowing the desperate, bitter socialite would jump at the chance to work with the Vipers for revenge. Damien had funded his own assassination attempt just to draw the French cartel boss out of Europe and onto American soil so he could extract the final details of the Orpheus feud directly from the source.

It was supposed to be a clean, flawless operation. It was supposed to happen on a Tuesday, while Damien was commuting alone.

But Elena had gotten impatient. She had jumped the gun.

She had sprung the trap today, while Aria was sitting in the passenger seat. Elena had brought C4 into the equation. And because Damien had ordered a strict "no contact" communications blackout for his undercover operatives to perfectly preserve the illusion, his men hadn’t been able to warn him the timeline had moved.

Damien had been forced to adapt on the fly. He had sacrificed his own men, entirely willing to pay the blood price to maintain the ruse long enough to get the information he wanted.

The French boss stared at the billionaire standing in the rain. He looked at the bodies. He looked at the cold, untouchable gold of Damien’s eyes.

"You are sick," the boss whispered, genuine revulsion twisting his scarred features. "You have no honor. You have no code. You are a fucking monster."

Damien let out a soft, dark chuckle. He calmly lowered his Glock, tucking the weapon seamlessly back into the waistband of his trousers.

"I can be the devil himself," Damien agreed smoothly, unbothered by the accusation. "And I will gladly burn in hell if it means protecting the only person on this earth I care about."

Damien raised a hand, giving a dismissive flick of his wrist.

"Take him to the black site," Damien ordered his men. "Break his knees so he doesn’t get any creative ideas in transit. I’ll deal with him later."

"Yes, sir!" the operatives chorused.

Four men surged forward. The boss didn’t even have time to brace himself before a baton connected with the side of his knee, dropping him to the asphalt. They dragged his thrashing, cursing body toward the truck, throwing him into the back like a sack of garbage.

Damien let out a long, ragged exhale, the rain soaking through his ruined white dress shirt, plastering the fabric to his skin and the vest.

It was over.

Damien turned around.

Aria was standing thee barefoot on the wet asphalt. Her messy bun had fallen out, her rose-gold hair plastered in dark, wet ribbons to her cheeks. She was shivering, drenched to the bone in the downpour. Her hands were coated in black car grease, and a thin, watered-down stream of crimson blood was trickling down from the cut on her forehead.

Damien’s chest seized with a pang of guilt and overwhelming relief.

"Aria," Damien breathed.

He closed the distance between them, reaching his large, warm hands out to haul her up from the pavement and crush her against his chest.

Aria looked up at him.

Damien froze. His hands stopped mere inches from her shoulders.

The look in her emerald eyes completely shattered him.

Her eyes were brimming with a heartbreak that cut deeper than any knife could.

Aria had heard every word.

She had heard the French boss rip away the saintly illusion of her mother, revealing the woman to be a manipulative thief who had lobotomized her father. Her entire childhood, her trauma, her abuse—it was all built on a massive lie.

But worse... she had heard her husband’s confession.

She had heard Damien casually admit to orchestrating the entire ambush. He had investigated, found the answers she had been desperately begging for, and he had looked her dead in the eyes and lied to her face for weeks.

He had promised to treat her like a partner. She had begged him to stop hoarding information. And he had smiled, kissed her, and played puppet master in the shadows while she was working to get herself back in a position where she could handle the French mafia. She wanted to pay the long game not only for her safety but for his, he knew that.

"Aria," Damien whispered, the panic bleeding into his voice as he saw the trust almost literally evaporating from her eyes. "Please let me explain."

He took a desperate step forward.

Aria didn’t flinch at the dead bodies lying in the puddles of blood nearby. She knew she had married a monster. She had made her peace with the blood on his hands.

But she hadn’t signed up to be managed. She hadn’t asked to be a glass doll placed on a shelf while he played god with her life.

Aria stumbled backward, her bare feet slipping slightly on the wet pavement as she pulled out of his reach.

She wrapped her grease-stained arms tightly around her waist, her chest heaving with silent sobs as the heavy rain washed the blood from her face.

"Stay right there," Aria choked out, her voice a broken whisper. "Don’t come any closer."