DAMIEN WEST ALMIGHTY SYSTEM

Chapter 8

Damien's jaw tightened, but he didn't say anything yet. He just listened.

Nathaniel continued, his voice getting darker with every word. "Right now, I'm standing at the graveyard where your mother is buried. And you know that both your parents are placed together in that same spot, along with your younger sister. I'm standing right here, Damien, looking at their graves, and I'm giving you just five minutes to bring your stinking self over here. Five minutes. Not six, not seven. Five. And you better bring those documents I asked for along with you, because if you don't show up in time, everything here is going to be destroyed. Yes, destroyed. I'm going to ruin this place. I'm going to crush every stone, break every marker, dig up every inch of ground. Not just that, even if there are skeletons remaining, I will crush those too. So you better get here within five minutes and bring those documents with you, or everything your parents left behind, everything they rest in, is going down. You have no room for negotiation. Five minutes, Damien. That's all you get."

The call ended.

Just like that, Nathaniel hung up, and the line went dead. Damien stood there with the phone still pressed to his ear, his breathing shallow, his entire body shaking with a rage so deep it felt like it was going to split him apart from the inside. His jaw tightened so hard that his teeth hurt. His fingers gripped the phone so tight that the screen almost cracked under the pressure.

 He couldn't believe it. He couldn't believe that Nathaniel would go this low, that he would stoop so far down into the dirt just to get what he wanted. Threatening to destroy his parents' resting place, threatening to dig up their graves, threatening to crush the only place where Damien could still feel close to them, that was beyond cruel. That was evil.

Damien was still grieving. Even after all these years, he was still carrying the weight of what had happened to his family. He hadn't been able to get justice for them. He hadn't been able to make things right. The incident that took their lives had been swept under the rug by people with power and money, people who didn't care about the truth as long as they could protect their own. A man named Marcus had been the one who killed them. Marcus, that good-for-nothing drunk who had run into Damien's parents while he was behind the wheel, too wasted to even see straight. Marcus had crashed into their car and taken everything from Damien in a single moment, and yet he was still walking free like nothing had ever happened.

The court had ruled that it was Damien's parents who were in the wrong. They said his parents hadn't been paying attention to the road. They said it was their fault for not looking properly. But Damien had been there. He had seen it with his own eyes. 

He had watched Marcus swerve across the lane, watched him lose control, watched him slam into his parents' car with so much force that the sound of metal crunching and glass shattering still haunted him in his sleep. Marcus had been drinking. He had been drunk. But none of that mattered because Marcus' father was the Chief Justice of the Federation back then, and that made Marcus untouchable. The case was closed before it even really began, and Damien had been left with nothing but grief and anger that had nowhere to go.

And now Nathaniel, the same man who was supposed to be family, wanted to destroy the one place where Damien's parents and younger sister rested. He wanted to tear it apart just to prove a point, just to remind Damien that he still had power, that he could still hurt him whenever he felt like it.

But Damien wasn't going to let that happen. Not now. Not ever. He clenched his fists and said out loud to himself, his voice shaking with fury, "I will not allow that to happen. Never. That is never going to happen."

Without wasting another second, he turned around and rushed out of the house. His heart was pounding in his chest like a drum, his mind racing with a thousand thoughts all at once. He didn't have time to think, didn't have time to plan.

 All he knew was that he had to get to that graveyard before Nathaniel did something he could never take back. He looked around quickly and saw a taxi parked on the side of the road just a few steps away. He ran toward it, yanked the door open, and jumped inside. The driver looked at him with wide eyes, startled by how fast he had moved, but Damien didn't care.

"Drive," he said, his voice hard and urgent. "Take me to the cemetery on the east side. Now."

The driver nodded quickly and started the engine, pulling out onto the road and heading straight toward the resting place of Damien's parents and younger sister.