Chapter 220: Chapter 221: You said she was protected
And Richard Blackwood had been absolutely right. Underneath the careful presentation was something formidable, something cold, something that had been running a global empire for three decades and had never once lost.
His eyes found Damien immediately.
"Tell me what you have," Alexander said.
"We’re running down three industrial properties connected to Harold’s brother. Teams mobilizing now." Damien held his gaze steadily. "We’re going to find her."
"You said she was protected." Alexander’s voice was perfectly controlled, which made it worse than shouting would have been. "You have security on her around the clock. How does a woman with round-the-clock protection get taken from a hospital corridor in broad daylight?"
"Alexander....."
"She was safe for twenty-five years, Blackwood. She was anonymous and safe and nothing had found her." He took two steps forward. "And then she came into your world. And now she’s been kidnapped."
The words were designed to land, and they did. Damien felt each one with precise accuracy.
"You’re right," he said quietly.
Alexander blinked.....barely, but Damien caught it. He hadn’t expected that.
"The failure is mine," Damien continued. "I knew Harold was planning something. My team was tracking him. I should have moved faster, should have put more resources on identifying the threat before it materialized. I didn’t. That’s on me." He held Alexander’s gaze without flinching. "And I will spend the rest of my life making up for it after she’s home safe. But right now, we need to focus on finding her."
The silence between them was dense with everything unsaid....Alexander’s rage, Damien’s guilt, the particular complicated tension of two men who both loved Aria in completely different ways and were currently experiencing the most terrifying possible consequence of that love.
Marcus’s phone rang. He picked it up immediately, listened for thirty seconds, and looked up.
"Traffic cameras on the BQE," he said. "A vehicle matching the ambulance description, heading toward outer Brooklyn. Forty-three minutes ago."
Something shifted in the room. The waiting...the terrible, helpless waiting...cracked open.
Damien was already moving toward the table, Alexander right beside him, both of them standing over Marcus’s screen as the satellite imagery loaded.
"Gregory Ashford’s Brooklyn property," Marcus said, pulling up the property record. "Former textile manufacturing facility. Been sitting empty for eighteen months." He looked at Damien. "It fits."
"Mobilize," Damien said. "Everything. Now."
"Already done." Marcus was typing with one hand, his phone at his ear with the other. "Team is forty minutes out. I’ll have eyes on the perimeter in thirty."
Thirty minutes. Aria had been gone for nearly two hours. Two hours of being unconscious in the hands of a man who blamed her for destroying his life.
Damien pressed both hands flat on the conference table and breathed through the image his mind supplied....of Aria waking up alone somewhere, frightened, bound. Of Harold looking at her with that specific grievance-soaked entitlement that men who’d lost everything always carried.
He breathed through it and converted it into something functional.
"I want a full tactical plan before anyone breaches that building," he said. "If Harold is cornered and believes there’s no exit, he becomes more dangerous, not less. We go in smart. We go in controlled." His voice dropped. "And we bring her home."
Alexander’s hand came down on the table beside Damien’s. Different from his own...broader, slightly older...but the posture was identical. The same contained, lethal focus of a man running his rage through a disciplined mind.
They looked at the screen together.
"Whatever resources you need," Alexander said quietly. "Whatever I have....it’s yours. All of it. Find my daughter."
Damien nodded once.
"We’ll find her," he said. "Together."
And for the first time since Alexander Wei had walked into his life, Damien meant that without reservation.
*****
ALEXANDER’S POV
He had been in a meeting with his CFO when the call came.
Thirty years of building Wei International Development had taught Alexander many things, but perhaps the most fundamental was this: when your instincts tell you something is wrong, you stop everything else and listen. So when his personal phone lit up with a contact he’d assigned specifically to monitor Mont Senai’s security channels ....a precaution he’d put in place the moment he’d confirmed Aria worked there, because that was the kind of man he was and had always been....he felt the wrongness before he even read the notification.
He’d excused himself from the meeting with four words and no explanation.
By the time he was in his car and dialing Damien’s number, his security chief Liang was already on a separate line, pulling every resource Alexander had in New York into immediate deployment.
When Damien’s silence confirmed what the notification had already told him, something happened in Alexander’s chest that he had no adequate language for.
He had found his daughter six weeks ago.
Six weeks. He had sat across from her at dinner and watched her eyes....his eyes, her eyes....fill with cautious curiosity. He had listened to her talk about medicine with the kind of passionate precision that told him exactly how her mind worked. He had watched her look at Damien Blackwood with a love so complete and unguarded that it had simultaneously broken his heart and repaired something in it.
He had found her. After twenty-five years of searching, of two failed marriages and an obsession that had hollowed out significant portions of his life....he had found her.
And now she was gone.
The car moved through Manhattan traffic and Alexander sat in the back seat with his hands folded in his lap and his face completely still and let the fury move through him like weather. He didn’t fight it. Didn’t try to compress or redirect it the way he might have in a business context. He let it be exactly what it was...the rage of a father who had already lost twenty-five years and was now being told that the universe intended to take more.
Then he put it away.
Not extinguished. Just contained. Stored somewhere he could access it later when it would be useful.
Right now he needed to think.
Harold Ashford. He knew the name....had followed Aria’s involvement in the Ashford Technologies case with the careful attention of a man cataloguing every significant event in his daughter’s recent life. He knew what she’d done. Knew the scale of the exposure. Knew that Harold had lost everything and that men who lost everything with someone specific to blame became dangerous in a way that comfortable, powerful men never quite managed to be.
He should have flagged it sooner. Should have had his own team monitoring Harold’s movements the moment he identified him as a potential threat.
He hadn’t because he’d been trying....genuinely, effortfully trying....to respect the boundaries Aria had set. To not be the possessive, controlling man her mother had fled from. To demonstrate through behavior rather than just words that he could love someone without suffocating them with that love.
And his restraint had cost his daughter her safety.
He would have to live with that. Later. Right now, he would focus on getting her back.
Liang’s voice came through his earpiece: "Three properties connected to the brother. Teams moving to assess all three simultaneously. I’ve got eyes going up on the Brooklyn location within twenty minutes."
"Good." Alexander kept his voice even. "I want real-time updates. Every two minutes."
"Yes, sir."
"And Liang." He paused. "Find her."
