Chapter 234: Chapter 235: The One That Got Away
DAMIEN’S POV
The call lasted forty-seven seconds.
He knew this because he was standing beside Aria’s stretcher when it came through, his hand still at her hair, watching the EMTs prepare to load her into the waiting ambulance, and he counted the seconds the way he counted things when he needed something to hold onto.
When the call ended he stood very still.
The ambulance doors were open. The EMTs were packing up and getting ready to leave for the hospital. Alexander was on the other side of the stretcher speaking quietly to the lead medic, asking questions about Aria’s condition with the focused intensity of a man who intended to understand exactly what had happened to his daughter and exactly what was being done about it.
Aria was unconscious. Her face in the ambulance light looked young and pale and so achingly familiar that looking at it for too long did something to his chest that he couldn’t afford right now.
He looked away from her face and stared at the middle distance and processed what Marcus had just told him.
Harold was gone.
The hidden door. The prepared exit. The patient, calculating decision of a man who had spent weeks preparing this building and had known, somewhere underneath the performance of the evening, that things might go wrong. That he might need a way out that nobody else knew about.
Harold had planned for this. Had planned for being found, Had planned for all of this to happen.
Damien was aware of Alexander watching him from across the stretcher, reading him the way powerful men read each other, looking for information in stillness and expression that words would never voluntarily provide.
He met Alexander’s eyes.
"Harold is gone," he said. Flat. Precise. Two words carrying the full weight of what they meant.
Alexander went very still.
"Gone," he repeated.
"Hidden exit in the east wall. He prepared it. We didn’t find it in the sweep." Damien’s jaw tightened. "He’s in the wind."
The silence between them lasted four seconds.
Alexander looked down at Aria’s unconscious face. Looked back up at Damien. And what moved across his expression in that moment was something that Damien recognized intimately because he was feeling the exact same thing, the specific, consuming fury of a man who had just been told that the person responsible for hurting someone he loved was currently free and moving and unaccountable.
"Find him," Alexander said. His voice was very quiet. "Whatever it takes."
"I intend to." Damien looked at the ambulance. At Aria. At the EMT who was attaching a monitoring lead and checking her pupils one more time with a small light. "But first..."
"Go with her," Alexander said immediately.
Damien looked at him.
Damien looked at him.
"Go with her," Alexander said again. His voice had shifted, the fury still there underneath but something else on top of it, something deliberate and decided. "I’ll follow in my car. She needs you in that ambulance, not me." He paused. "She loves you. When she wakes up, you should be the first thing she sees."
The words landed somewhere unexpected. Damien absorbed them, absorbed the specific quality of what it cost Alexander to say them, the deliberate stepping back of a man who wanted to be the one in that ambulance and was choosing not to be.
"Alexander...."
"I’ve had twenty-five years of not being there," Alexander said simply. "I know how to wait a little longer." Something moved in his face. "Go. Be with my daughter. I’ll be right behind you."
Damien looked at him for one more second.
Then he climbed into the ambulance.
****
The ride to Mont Senai took eleven minutes.
He sat beside the stretcher with Aria’s hand between both of his and watched the monitors and listened to the EMT’s running commentary and said nothing. The fury about Harold was still there.....compressed, contained, running underneath everything like a current he’d deal with as soon as she was safe and stable and surrounded by people who could take care of her.
Right now he just held her hand.
Aria stirred once, halfway through the ride, a small movement, her fingers tightening around his with the involuntary grip of someone surfacing briefly from unconsciousness.
"Damien." His name, barely voiced. Eyes still closed.
"Here," he said immediately. "Right here. I’m not going anywhere."
A small exhale. Her grip loosened again as she went back under.
He pressed his lips to her knuckles and stayed exactly where he was.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it. Then it buzzed again, and again....and he released Aria’s hand carefully, making sure her arm was supported, and pulled out the phone.
Three messages from Marcus. One from Richard.
He read Marcus’s first.
Perimeter sweep complete. Harold had a vehicle staged two blocks east...picked up on camera six minutes after he exited the building. Partial plate. Running it now.
His phone went dark at 9:51 PM. Either powered off or destroyed. We’re tracking last known ping.
Boss....we’ll find him. I promise.
He read Richard’s message next.
Hargreaves tells me there was a complication. Call me when you can. She’s more important right now. But call me.
Damien put the phone away.
Outside the ambulance windows the city moved past....the ordinary, indifferent city going about its ordinary business, entirely unaware that somewhere in it Harold Ashford was running.
I’m going to find you, Damien thought. The thought was completely calm. Completely certain. Wherever you go. However long it takes. I’m going to find you.
He picked up Aria’s hand again.
But first this.
******
MARCUS’S POV
The warehouse was quiet now.
Harold’s two team members had been transferred to a different location.
He turned around and saw that the recording station Herold had set up.
The camera on its tripod was still recording.
Marcus crossed to it, stopped the recording, removed the memory card, and put it in his pocket. Whatever was on it, Aria’s hours in this space, Harold’s performance, the footage Harold had sent to Damien, none of it would exist in any form that anyone outside this operation would ever access.
He stood in the empty warehouse and did a final sweep.
