In the dead of the night, Damian walked into his underground den.
His footsteps were steady and measured.
As he moved through the dim corridor, the lights flickered on one by one, slowly illuminating his path.
Xavier was silently following behind him.
The deeper they went … the quieter the surroundings became.
Soon, a glass-walled room came into view.
Through the glass, Damian could see a man sitting with his back to the door.
His expression hardened.
He didn’t stop.
He simply walked forward, pushed the door open, and stepped inside.
The moment the man sensed his presence, he shot to his feet.
“Sir.”
His head remained lowered —partly out of respect, and partly out of fear.
Damian didn’t acknowledge the greeting.
He walked past him and took the chair across from him.
Then he lifted his eyes.
His gaze was dark, yet his expression remained completely controlled.
“Do you know why you’re here?” His voice was low, but there was no mistaking the authority behind it.
The man trembled slightly.
He didn’t dare raise his eyes.
“I dared to do something I wasn’t supposed to do,” he said.
“And what was that?” Damian asked.
His voice remained level —so level that it felt almost like the silence before a storm.
“Nobody was supposed to speak about your marriage plans.
Especially not in front of Madam Callahan.”
“And yet my mother heard about it.”
Damian wasn’t asking anymore.
He was simply stating the consequence of the man’s mistake.
The man quickly lifted his eyes.
“I didn’t mean for—”
“I never asked what you meant.” Damian cut him off.
The man immediately fell silent.
Excuses were the last thing that could save him —he knew it.
Yet he had still tried.
His palms grew clammy.
“Who did you tell?” Damian asked again, his voice turning colder.
“And who did that person tell?”
The man knew exactly what he was being asked.
He didn’t dare give the names.
So, in the end, he could do nothing but obey and reveal the chain of people involved.
Once that was settled, he looked at Damian, dreading what would come next.
But Damian remained calm.
There was no haste in his expression.
And somehow, that made the atmosphere even more dangerous.
Every man under Damian knew one thing—
His silence could be far more terrifying than his anger.
Damian remained quiet for a long moment, as though weighing the appropriate punishment.
Then, finally, he looked straight at the man.
“You’re relieved of your position,” he said.
The man stiffened.
His face drained of color.
He looked up in devastation, as though something more precious than his life had just been taken away.
He wasn’t merely losing his job.
He was being removed from Damian’s inner circle —something he had spent years earning.
“You’ll never enter the Callahan Estate again,” Damian added.
The moment he heard those words, the man dropped to his knees.
“Sir, I swear I never intended for Madam to hear about it like that.”
Damian listened.
But he didn’t answer immediately.
Instead, he stood and walked towards him.
“You didn’t intend to hurt her,” he said, stopping directly in front of him.
“But you didn’t care enough to obey me.”
The man understood immediately.
They had been explicitly forbidden from discussing the marriage.
Madam Callahan wasn’t supposed to learn about it through gossip.
His negligence had broken that order.
He knew the punishment could have been death.
The fact that he was being allowed to live was already a mercy.
But Damian wasn’t offering him forgiveness.
He was leaving him alive to live with the consequences of what he had lost.
His position.
His place within the Callahan family.
His future.
Everything he had spent years earning.
Damian wanted him to understand one thing—
In this world, sometimes a single mistake was enough to destroy everything you had built painstakingly.
Damian stared down at him.
“You were entrusted with my family’s privacy,” he said coldly.
His eyes narrowed.
“Since when did you get to decide which secrets are harmless and which are not?”
“Sir—”
The man tried once more to speak … to explain.
But Damian had already turned away.
“Strip him of his merits and send him away,” he ordered Xavier.
“He’s finished with the Callahans.”
Xavier’s expression remained equally serious.
He nodded.
“Yes, sir.”
Damian paused before adding, “And deal with everyone else involved in the chain the same way.
By tomorrow morning, I don’t want to see any of them around the estate.”
Xavier nodded again.
He understood exactly what Damian was doing.
It might have seemed cruel to wipe away years of merit over what could be dismissed as a single unintentional, harmless mistake.
But Damian didn’t see it that way.
If such negligence went unpunished, it would only encourage others to take similar risks in the future.
Sometimes, setting an example at the beginning was the only way to prevent a much greater problem later.
Having given his orders, Damian didn’t stay any longer.
He turned and walked out, leaving Xavier to handle the rest.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Meanwhile—
At almost the same time, on the other side of the city, Charles Beaumont was losing his composure.
Never in his life had he suffered such humiliation.
Since when had the Beaumonts become a name someone could trifle with?
His fists clenched against the surface of his study desk.
And his chest rose and fell heavily as fury burned through him.
“Who exactly is that brat?” he demanded, glaring at one of his trusted men.
“That bastard walked into my territory today as though he owned the ground beneath his feet.”
His eyes narrowed.
“How dare he?”
The man remained silent.
Charles’s anger only intensified.
“Go.” His voice dropped into a dangerous command.
“Find out exactly who he is.”
He leaned forward, his gaze turning colder.
“How did he manage to build such confidence in my territory?”
He wasn’t letting this slide so easily —not under his watch.
All these years, he and his presence have threatened others.
He couldn’t allow someone else to threaten him the same way.