Chapter 253: Either one of them. Both of them
Amara couldn’t hear him. She was in it now, fully inside the horror her own mind was building for her, scene after scene, vivid and merciless and completely real to her in this moment, her daughter’s face, a face she had held, a face she had memorised in those first second before everything fell apart, and all the terrible things that could be happening to it right now, tonight, while she sat here and didn’t know and couldn’t reach her.
"No, no, no..."
Julian wrapped his arms around her.
All the way around. Both arms, pulling her fully into his chest, his hand going to the back of her head, holding her there against him as he could physically block whatever was playing inside her mind if he just held on tight enough.
He didn’t say stop. He didn’t say Calm down. He didn’t say any of the things that don’t help.
He just held her.
And then he started to talk. Low and close, his lips near her ear, his voice slow and steady and unbroken, the voice he used when nothing else was left except the voice.
"Nothing is going to happen to her. You hear me? Nothing. She is out there, and she is waiting, and I am going to find her. I know how to find her. I have a name, I have a lead, I have everything I need, and I will not stop, I will not sleep, I will not rest, I will not stop until I put her in your arms."
Amara was shaking.
"Safe," he said. "She is going to be safe. And sound. And I am going to bring her home, and you are going to hold her, and she is going to know her mother’s voice the second she hears it because that bond doesn’t break, Amara. That bond does not break no matter what."
The shaking slowed. Barely. But it slowed.
He kept talking. He didn’t stop. Every time she started to drift back toward the darkness, he pulled her back with his voice, steady, patient, certain. A rope thrown into deep water, over and over, until she had something to hold.
The room was very quiet except for him.
And then. A long time later. Long enough that Julian had stopped counting. A small, exhausted, barely there voice against his chest.
"We will find her, won’t we?"
It wasn’t quite a question. It was something a person says when they are choosing, deliberately and with great effort, to step back from the edge.
Julian closed his eyes for just a second. He tightened his arms around her.
"Yes," he said. No hesitation. No qualifier. "Yes, baby. We will find her." He pressed his lips to the top of her head. "I promise you. We will find her, and we will bring her home."
Amara didn’t say anything else. She just stayed there, in his arms, breathing.
And for now, just for now... that was enough. Julian didn’t move for a long time.
He sat with his back against the headboard, Amara curled against his side, her breathing finally slow and even.
The kind of sleep that doesn’t come easy, the kind that only arrives after the body has exhausted every other option. Her face was still slightly puffy, her lashes damp, one hand loosely gripping the front of his shirt even in sleep. Like she was making sure he was still there.
He looked down at her.
The woman who had sat across boardrooms and never blinked. The woman who had gone to war against Sebastian with a smile on her face and majority shares as her weapon. The woman who had built AP Enterprise quietly and carefully like a chess player three moves ahead of everyone else in the room.
Completely undone.
And it was his fault.
Not the switching, he hadn’t done that, he hadn’t known in time, he had told himself that a hundred times in the weeks since he found out.
But telling her like this, tonight, after everything else the evening had already put them through, that had been his fault. He should have chosen better.
He should have found a better moment, a better version of the words, a better way to hand her something this devastating without watching her shatter in front of him.
Except there was no better version of this. There was no soft way to tell a mother her baby was taken.
His phone vibrated on the nightstand.
He glanced at it. The screen lit up briefly, a name, a notification, then dark again. Then again. Then a third time, different name, same quiet insistence. Work. The company. Something that in any other moment of his life would have pulled him upright and reaching.
He looked back down at Amara. Left the phone where it was.
The beeping could wait. Every number in that phone could wait. There was nothing, not a deal, not a crisis, not a collapsing market, that outranked the woman sleeping against him right now.
Her sanity, her rest, the slow, careful process of her coming back to herself after what he had just put her through. That was the only thing that existed tonight.
But his mind wouldn’t stay quiet.
It moved the way it always did when he was sitting still, turning things over, examining edges, following threads.
He couldn’t go public with this. That was the problem that kept circling back. The moment this became known, the switching, the investigation, any of it, whoever had done it would know he was looking.
And if they knew he was looking, they would move the baby. Or worse. He had seen what these people were capable of. His uncle Kalian had spent thirty years teaching him exactly how far men with money and motive were willing to go to protect themselves.
His uncle Kalian. Julian’s jaw tightened in the dark.
He still didn’t have proof. Not the kind that held up. He had enough to know, enough to be certain in the way that sits in your bones before evidence catches up, but certain wasn’t the same as done.
And Sebastian. He couldn’t rule Sebastian out either. The timing, the motive, the particular cruelty of it, taking a baby, using an innocent child as leverage or punishment, or simply as a way to wound Amara in the one place she couldn’t armour up against.
Either one of them. Both of them.
