Damien Vale
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Obsession was not new to Damien Vale.
It began long before Elena. Long before he had a name powerful enough to keep people quiet, long before he could vanish behind lawyers and lawyers behind money.
It began in a house with white walls and no warmth.
With a father who taught silence through fists and a mother who taught fear through absence.
Damien learned early that attention had a price. That love, if it ever existed, wasn't given—it was earned. Negotiated. Taken.
His first obsession was with patterns. Numbers, schedules, things that didn't bleed when he pressed too hard.
Then came people.
He watched them the way others studied constellations—quiet, from a distance, never fully certain if what he was seeing was real. But with people, unlike stars, he could interfere. He could test outcomes. Change them.
He remembered a girl once.
High school. Quiet like Elena, but fragile. Too fragile. She smiled when he offered to carry her books. Laughed when he knew exactly how she liked her coffee.
She thought it was fate.
He thought it was precision.
But she broke too easily.
One day she cried. Shook. Told her friends he made her feel watched. Cornered. Controlled.
Damien didn't argue. He simply let her go.
Because obsession, to him, wasn't about chasing. It was about claiming what wouldn't shatter under his grip.
And when he saw Elena years later at university—eyes sharp, spine straight, guarded even in her solitude—he knew.
She wouldn't break.
She would bend. Fight. Bleed if she had to.
And that, to Damien Vale, made her perfect.
He didn't want fragile.
He wanted fire.
And he would learn how to hold it without burning. Or—
burn with it, if he had to.
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