Chapter 233: Chapter 234: Herold Escaped
Damien was moving before Marcus had fully processed the message....toward the southeast door, toward the outside, toward Aria. Marcus watched him go and then turned back to Harold and the two remaining team members.
"Watch him," he said. "Don’t let him move."
He stepped away and raised his earpiece. "Hargreaves."
"Here," came the immediate response.
"I need you inside. Northeast corner. We have a situation that needs your particular skill set."
A pause. "On my way."
Marcus looked at Harold one more time.
Harold looked back at him with the eyes of a man who understood, finally and completely, that everything had gone wrong.
"You should have stayed in whatever hole you climbed out of," Marcus said quietly. "For what it’s worth."
He walked toward the door.
Behind him, Hargreaves came in.
****
DAMIEN’S POV
The night air hit him when he came through the southeast door....cold and sharp and real in a way the warehouse hadn’t been. The medical team had set up thirty feet from the building entrance, portable lighting casting a circle of clinical brightness in the surrounding dark.
Aria was on a stretcher.
Conscious....barely, her eyes half-open, her face pale beneath the swelling along her jaw. An EMT was running a light across her eyes, checking pupils, asking her questions in the measured tone of medical professionals managing a head injury. Another was at her wrist with monitoring equipment.
Alexander was beside the stretcher, his hand wrapped around Aria’s, his face carrying the specific devastated relief of someone watching their child be hurt and helped simultaneously.
Damien crossed the distance in twelve steps.
Aria’s eyes found him when he was still several feet away....tracked to him with the unfocused but determined attention of someone fighting to stay present.
"Hey," she said. Her voice was barely there.
"Hey." He was at the stretcher, his hand going to her hair, impossibly gentle against the side of her head that wasn’t injured. "I’m here. I’ve got you."
"Harold...."
"Handled." The word came out flat and final. "Don’t think about Harold."
She searched his face. Whatever she found there....whatever the thirty seconds in the warehouse had left on him....made something move in her expression. Not fear. Recognition.
"Damien." Her voice was very quiet. "Tell me you didn’t....."
"He’s alive," Damien said. "That’s all you need to know right now."
She held his gaze for a moment longer. Then something in her face eased.... not entirely, not completely, but enough. She trusted him. Even now, even hurt and disoriented and running on the fumes of an adrenaline crash, she trusted him.
That trust was the most devastating thing he’d ever been given.
"Okay," she said softly. Her eyes were getting heavier. "Okay."
"Don’t go to sleep yet," the EMT said firmly. "Miss Chen, I need you to stay with me for a few more minutes...."
"She’s a doctor," Damien said without looking up from Aria’s face. "She knows."
"I know," Aria confirmed, her voice slightly slurred. "Concussion protocol. Stay awake. I know." A pause. "I’m so tired."
"I know you are." His thumb moved gently against her hairline. "You’ve been holding on for hours. You can stop now. I’ve got you."
Alexander’s hand tightened around Aria’s from the other side. She turned her head slightly....winced at the movement and found her father’s face.
Something passed across her expression that Damien couldn’t entirely read. The complicated, layered emotion of a woman who had woken up alone and frightened in a warehouse and found, at the end of it, that two people who loved her had moved the world to get to her.
"You came," she said to Alexander. The words were simple and entirely not simple at all.
"Of course I came," Alexander said. His voice was doing something it hadn’t done in the entire time Damien had known him....cracking, quietly, at the edges. "Where else would I be?"
Aria looked between them....her father on one side, Damien on the other.
"Don’t fight," she said. Faint but firm. "While I’m unconscious. Promise me."
Despite everything, Damien felt something almost like a smile.
Alexander nodded once. "Don’t worry Aria."
"Good," Aria said.
And then her eyes closed.
"Miss Chen...." the EMT started.
"She’s okay," Damien said. He was watching her face, watching her breathing.....steady and even. "She’s okay. She just....." His voice caught. Just once. "She’s okay."
The EMT checked her pulse, her pupils, the monitoring equipment. "Stable. We need to get her to the hospital. There’s a possible concussion, maybe a hairline fracture at the orbital.....she needs imaging."
"Then let’s go," Alexander said immediately. He was already standing. "I have a medical team on standby at...."
"Mont Senai," Damien said. "Her hospital. Her colleagues. People she knows and trusts." He looked at Alexander across the stretcher. "She goes to her hospital."
A pause. Alexander assessed him. Then nodded.
"Mont Senai," he agreed.
The stretcher began to move.
Damien walked beside it, his hand still at Aria’s hair, his eyes on her face, his mind running through everything that still had to happen.
But first this. First her.
Everything else could wait.
****
MARCUS’S POV
He got the message from his perimeter team at 9:47 PM.
He read it twice. Then he stood very still for three seconds in the way he did when information arrived that required him to recalibrate significantly before he responded to it.
Then he walked back into the warehouse.
Hargreaves was exactly where Marcus had left him. Harold’s two team members were secured. Everything was exactly as it should have been.
Except for one thing.
"Where is he," Marcus said. Not a question.
Hargreaves turned. His expression was doing something unusual....something Marcus had never seen on the face of a man who had been managing difficult situations professionally for thirty years.
"There’s a third door," Hargreaves said. "Behind the east wall panel. Hidden. He knew about it. We didn’t."
Marcus looked at the east wall. At the panel....industrial, flush-mounted, indistinguishable from the surrounding wall unless you knew it was there. Open now, swinging gently on its hinges.
Harold had known this building.
Had prepared it. Had known about the hidden door and had been waiting, patient, calculating, managing his own fear for long enough to find the moment when attention shifted. The moment when Damien left for the stretcher and Marcus stepped out and Hargreaves was occupied.
Three seconds. Maybe five.
That was all it had taken.
Marcus stood in front of the open panel and looked at the darkness beyond it and felt something that in a less disciplined man might have been called dread.
He raised his phone and called Damien.
The call connected on the second ring.
"Boss," Marcus said. "We have a problem."
