Chapter 246 Take Him Back
ADRIANA
Eve was older than Laura. She sat down, looked at Damon once, and then looked at me and didn’t look at him again.
“My name is Eve. I worked as a maid in Alpha Damon’s household for four years.” She folded her hands. “When the guards came to our house and said the Alpha had seen me and wanted to offer me a position, my mother cried with happiness. We had nothing. We thought it was a blessing.”
She said the word blessing with a flatness that carried everything it needed to carry.
“Within a month, it started.” She kept her voice even, measured, like she’d practiced this somewhere alone until it stopped breaking. “At first I didn’t understand what was happening. I was young and I had no framework for it. It felt like a bad dream I couldn’t wake up from. And then I got pregnant and the dream became something else entirely.”
The courtroom was completely still.
“I went to him. I told him.” She paused. “He told me to get rid of it or he’d get rid of me. I didn’t have money for a child. I didn’t have anything. So I did what he said.” Her jaw tightened for a moment before she continued. “And then I got pregnant again. And I did it again. And then a third time, and the doctor told me that if I terminated this one I would lose everything — I would never be able to carry a child again. So I kept it. I kept the baby and I thought—” She stopped. “I thought if he found out he would send me away. That was the best outcome I could imagine. Being sent away.”
She looked at her hands.
“He found out. That night he came to my room and he beat me until I was bleeding on the floor. He kept going. By the time he stopped, I had lost the baby.” She took a slow breath. “The friends who found me took me to a hospital. The doctors removed what was left. They told me the damage was permanent.”
Nobody in the room moved.
Edmund rose carefully. “Eve, I want to—”
“Sit down,” I said. I didn’t raise my voice. He looked at me, calculated the distance between his position and mine, and sat down.
“Is there anything else you want the court to know?” Hazel asked her gently.
Eve looked up. For the first time since she’d sat down, she turned and looked directly at Damon across the room.
“When he was beating me, he told me why he’d hired me. He said my sister had been stupid enough to try to poison him. That she’d been working for him and when she tried to stand up for herself, he found out.” She paused. “He said he’d made her pay. He said it while he was hurting me, like he wanted me to know.” Her voice didn’t shake. “We’d been searching for her for three months. No one had seen her. We’d filed reports and been told it was nothing, that she’d probably just left.” She looked at Damon. “He was telling me he’d killed her. He wanted me to know that and to understand that there was nothing I could do about it.”
The room erupted in murmuring.
I held up one hand and the noise dropped.
“Damon.” I looked across at him. “Did you kill her sister?”
He had the expression of a man who had decided that the performance of innocence was no longer worth the effort. He looked at Eve with something that might have been nostalgia on a person without a conscience.
“What was her name again?” he said.
“Elena.” Eve’s voice was barely above a whisper. “Her name was Elena.”
Something moved across his face, almost amusement, and it turned my stomach. “She was determined, I’ll give her that. I remember my hands around her throat. She fought the whole way.”
He sounded like he was recalling something mildly interesting.
The sound that moved through the courtroom was not quite gasps and not quite silence.
I didn’t move. I kept my eyes on him and let the confession sit in the record for a long moment before I turned away.
“Bring in the guards,” I said.
Two men came forward, Garret and Larry. They’d been stationed outside Nancy’s room during her time in Damon’s household, and they stood side by side with the rigid posture of people who had been carrying guilt for a long time and had finally been handed a place to put it down.
Garret spoke first. “We were the only guards permitted in or near her room. He’d stationed us there specifically because she’d tried to take her own life before and he wanted to make sure she didn’t succeed.” He paused. “Not because he cared whether she lived. Because he wasn’t finished with her.”
The courtroom was completely silent.
“When he first brought her in, he locked the room and removed everything. No food, no water, nothing. One of the kitchen maids found out and started leaving things for her. b\\Bread, water.” He stopped. “When Damon found out, he killed the maid. In front of us. So we’d understand what the cost of interference was.”
The Chief Elder made a sound.
“After that, the room was sealed,” Larry took over. “He had us chain her before he came in. He hurt her in ways that I—” He stopped. “She had no way to leave. Nowhere to go. When she became pregnant he had the pregnancies ended, and when she found a way to hide one from him, he found out and that was the night she tried to kill herself.” He looked at me directly. “We couldn’t stop him. We tried once and he made it very clear what would happen to our families.”
Tears had gathered in my eyes before I noticed them, and I blinked them back and kept my face still.
One by one, the remaining witnesses came forward. Eleven people. Eleven different versions of the same pattern — the targeting, the isolation, the abuse sustained over months and years, the systematic removal of every exit. Each testimony was its own complete horror and each one connected to the next in the way that documented not individual incidents but the architecture of how he operated.
When the last witness had finished, the courtroom was quiet in a way that felt physical.
I looked at Damon. He was examining the table in front of him with an expression of mild boredom.
I stood up.
“To everyone who came forward today.” I spoke to the witnesses, not to the court, not to the Elders. To them. “What happened to you was not your fault. Not the circumstance that brought you to his door, not what he did after you arrived, not the silence you were forced to keep. None of it.”
I looked at each of them in turn. “You are not diminished by what he did. You are not defined by it. This court is going to do everything in its power to make sure he never has access to another person again, and every resource available to this kingdom is available to you — for your recovery, for your children, for whatever you need going forward.” I paused. “You came here and spoke when you had every reason not to. I will not forget that.”
I faced the Elders.
“I have heard enough. I don’t need another session to reach a determination on this case. The evidence is not ambiguous.” I looked at Damon one last time. “We’ll reconvene tomorrow for sentencing.”
He looked up at me then — finally, for the first time since the witnesses had begun — and whatever he saw in my face made the performance of boredom slip, just slightly, just enough.
Good. He should be paying attention now.
“Take him back,” I said to the guards.
I watched them remove him from the room, and then I turned back to the eleven people still sitting in the gallery, and I stayed in the room with them until every single one of them had left.