His Private Hell - Chapter 97: Chapter 97

The sirens inside Eella weren’t screaming anymore. They were singing.
Soft. Sweet. Deadly.
Like the calm before a massacre.
Garrison hadn’t touched her in hours, and yet she could still feel the burn of his hand around her throat, the taste of his name bleeding down her throat like a swallowed scream. He hadn’t said a word since the call. The one that made his jaw twitch. The one that darkened the already ruinous storm behind his eyes.
Darcie was alive.
Worse.
Darcie had been in his penthouse.
The thirty-third floor—his hell, his sanctuary, his burial ground. And now she understood why no one ever opened that door. Because once you did, nothing came back the same. Not even a man like Garrison Wolfe.
He didn’t pace. He didn’t shout. He stood by the wall of windows, shirt undone, blood on his knuckles, and shadows cutting jagged lines across his naked chest like wounds he hadn’t earned but insisted on wearing.
“You saw her.” Eella’s voice cracked the silence like a gunshot.
He didn’t answer.
“I know you did. I know what she means to you.”
He turned slowly, not like a man but like something built from ice and vengeance. “You don’t know anything about what she means to me.”
Eella took a step toward him anyway, barefoot, in his shirt and nothing else. She was trembling, not from fear—but because she needed to taste the truth like poison on her tongue.
“She’s not dead,” she said quietly.
“No,” he whispered. “She’s not.”
“But you are, Garrison.” Her voice fractured. “You’ve been dead since her blood was on your hands.”
A long pause. Then:
“I didn’t kill her.”
“But you buried her. Didn’t you?”
The slap didn’t come. But it was there—in the flicker of his hand, the twitch of his jaw, the war he waged not with her, but with himself. And when he finally moved, it was to crush her mouth with his, teeth colliding, breath a firestorm.
She should’ve fought him.
Instead, she kissed him harder.
Let him pin her against the window, glass cold against her spine, skin flushed and burning. His mouth moved down, down, down until she wasn’t sure if he was worshiping her or punishing her for getting too close to the corpse he kept hidden inside.
“You want to know what hell is, Eella?” he rasped, lips at her throat, hips between hers.
She moaned as his hand slid beneath the shirt, fingers hooking her panties and yanking them aside like a man unhinged.
“Hell is wanting someone more than you hate yourself.”
Then he was inside her.
No warning.
No mercy.
She gasped, arching as he buried himself to the hilt, growling against her ear like a beast who’d waited too long to feed. She clawed at his back, his shoulders, his name falling from her lips like a broken prayer. He slammed into her over and over, her legs wrapped tight around his waist, the window threatening to shatter beneath their weight.
But nothing shattered.
Except her.
“Say it,” he hissed. “Say whose you are.”
“Yours,” she cried. “I’m yours.”
“And Darcie?”
“I don’t care,” Eella gasped. “I don’t care about her—”
“You should.”
He gripped her jaw, forced her to look at him, even as he kept thrusting, even as she came around him in waves of heat and white noise.
“Because the only thing more dangerous than me…” he whispered, breathless, voice raw, “…is the woman I failed to bury.”
He pulled out before she could respond. Walked away. And left her against the glass, shaking.
He didn’t come back that night.
And he didn’t call the next day.
When she arrived at Ally’s Inc, her badge wouldn’t work. Her elevator access had been revoked. Security gave her a tight smile and told her she’d been reassigned to a remote branding project.
She knew what that meant.
She was being shut out.
Locked away.
Like Darcie.
But Eella wasn’t about to be forgotten.
She made it to the thirty-third floor anyway.
Bribed the night guard. Took the stairs. Found the door unlocked—left ajar, like a whisper begging to be heard.
The room wasn’t what she expected.
It was worse.
Paintings on the walls. Twisted. Bleeding. Familiar.
Because one of them was her.
A portrait. Unfinished. But unmistakably her. Eyes hollow. Mouth torn. Like he’d painted her in his nightmares and left the terror to dry.
Darcie’s name was etched into the back of every canvas.
Even the one that looked like Eella.
Then came the closet.
She shouldn’t have opened it.
But she did.
Inside were relics. Not of a woman—but of a ritual.
Hair ties. Lipsticks. A ripped bra. Shoes. A wedding ring in a velvet box.
The name engraved inside?
Darcie Wolfe.
Her real name.
His wife.
Not ex-wife.
Not dead.
Just erased.
Eella staggered back, breath caught in her throat.
Behind her, the door creaked.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
His voice.
Low. Lethal.
She turned and met eyes with the devil.
“You married her,” Eella whispered. “And then what? You locked her in here?”
“She wanted it.”
“No woman wants to disappear.”
“She was never a woman. She was a weapon.”
He stepped closer. His voice soft now. Almost tender. Almost.
“She burned the world down for me, Eella. Then she turned the match on herself.”
“I’m not her.”
“No,” he agreed. “You’re worse.”
And with that, he kissed her again.
Soft this time.
Sweet.
And that’s when she knew—
This wasn’t the climax.
This was the prelude.
To something darker.
To something that was just beginning.
And as his hands slid down her back and her knees gave out beneath the weight of everything she didn’t understand, she whispered into the hollow of his neck:
“Show me hell.”
He smiled against her skin.
“I already have.”