Chapter 222: Chapter 223: Baby. Come home
He turned back toward the room. Damien was at the table, leaning over Marcus’s screen, his jaw tight and his focus absolute. The two men were different in many ways....different generations, different styles, different approaches to the particular problem of being someone who loved Aria Chen and wanted to protect her.
But in this moment they were the same.
Alexander crossed the room and stood beside Damien at the table.
"My team has a contact inside Gregory Ashford’s network," he said quietly. "A former employee who has access to Gregory’s property management records. I can have a confirmation on which of the three properties is active within the next fifteen minutes."
Damien looked at him. Something passed between them....not warmth exactly, not yet, but the specific acknowledgment of two people who had decided that the thing they shared mattered more than the friction between them.
"Make the call," Damien said.
Alexander nodded and raised his phone.
****
MEI’S POV
She sat on the floor.
She didn’t mean to. She’d been standing at the kitchen counter when Alexander’s call ended, and then her legs had simply stopped cooperating and she’d gone down slowly, her back against the cabinet, the phone still clutched in both hands.
She’d survived things. In twenty-six years of being Aria’s mother she had survived things that should have broken her....the years of hiding, the years of building a life from nothing, the terrifying months of Neufeld-Zhao Syndrome eating through her health while she tried not to let Aria see how frightened she was.
She had always held on. Always found the floor beneath her feet and the breath in her lungs and the next thing to do.
But sitting on the cold kitchen tiles with the afternoon light coming through the window and her daughter somewhere unknown and in danger.....the holding on felt very, very far away.
She’s my baby.
She had said it to Alexander and hearing herself say it had cracked something open. Because it was true in a way that never diminished regardless of how old Aria got or how capable or how extraordinary. Aria was physician and a strong woman who had infiltrated a billionaire’s security and saved her mother’s life with a stolen plant and loved with her whole heart and fought with everything she had.
And she was still the two-month-old that Mei had packed into a bag in the middle of the night and run with. Still the five-year-old who’d climbed into Mei’s bed after nightmares. Still the fifteen-year-old who’d sat at the kitchen table with her mother’s medical bills spread out in front of her and said Mama, I’m going to fix this with a certainty that had broken Mei’s heart and filled it simultaneously.
Still hers.
The doorbell rang twenty minutes later....Alexander’s people, two of them, quiet and efficient, settling into her apartment with the unobtrusive competence of people who’d done exactly this before. They set up a laptop on her kitchen table and connected it to a live feed of the coordination happening in Damien’s office.
Mei sat at the table and watched the screens and pressed her hands flat on the table to stop their shaking.
On the screen she could see Damien....could see the controlled devastation in every line of his body, the way he was running on something beyond normal human functioning, the way his eyes went to his phone every thirty seconds as if expecting the update that would change everything.
And she could see Alexander. Standing beside him. Two men who had every reason to be at each other’s throats working in perfect, grim-faced parallel.
For Aria.
Mei watched Alexander and felt the complexity of twenty-five years pressing down on her.....the fear she’d run from, the love that had complicated the fear, the years she’d spent convincing herself she’d made the only choice available. Seeing him tonight, even through a screen, in this moment of crisis ....
He’d promised her. I am not going to lose her.
He’d said it with the absolute certainty of someone making a vow rather than a statement.
And despite everything....despite twenty-five years of distance and justified wariness and the complicated grief of their history....she believed him.
She pressed her hand to her mouth and breathed.
Come home, she thought. Aria. Baby. Come home.
On the screen, Alexander raised his phone to his ear.
And thirty seconds later, she watched both men straighten with the specific alertness of people who had just received the information they’d been waiting for.
They had something.
Mei sat forward in her chair, her heart slamming against her ribs.
Come home, she thought again. We’re coming.
******
ARIA’S POV
Consciousness returned in layers.
First came sound....a distant, low hum of something industrial. Ventilation, maybe, or old pipes settling in a building that hadn’t been properly maintained in years. Then came smell.....concrete dust, chemical residue, the particular staleness of enclosed air that hadn’t moved freely in a long time.
Then came the pain.
Her wrists were bound behind her....zip ties, pulled tight enough to have cut off significant circulation while she was unconscious. Her shoulders ached with the sustained strain of having her arms wrenched back. Her neck throbbed precisely where the needle had gone in, a deep, localized ache that radiated up toward her skull when she moved.
She didn’t move again after that first instinctive test. She kept her breathing even and her eyes closed and spent sixty seconds doing what she always did when she encountered a problem....she assessed.
Wrists bound behind. Ankles bound. Seated....no, on the floor, concrete under her, back against something metal. Head covering.....no, she could feel air on her face. Blindfold.....no. Which means they’re not worried about her seeing the location. Which means either they intend to move her before releasing her, or they don’t intend to release her at all.
She filed that thought and kept moving.
Sedative was fast-acting, likely midazolam or something similar. No residual nausea, which suggests quality pharmaceutical grade rather than something improvised. This was planned by someone with access to medical-grade supplies. Professional. Which means Harold spent real money on this. Which means he’s serious.
She already knew he was serious. She’d known it the moment the needle touched her neck.
Okay. Okay. Think.
She opened her eyes again for the second time.
