Chapter 246: Chapter 248: Damien and Alexandra Clashed
And underneath that, driving everything with a pressure that had been building since the moment he’d arrived at this hospital to find Aria in a bed with tubes in her arms, the single, unavoidable, burning fact:
This had happened on Damien Blackwood’s watch. Again.
"This happened because he couldn’t protect you."
The words came out before he’d fully decided to say them. Not quietly, not the way he might have chosen to phrase it if he’d been thinking clearly, if he’d been operating with the careful precision he usually brought to confrontation. They came out with the raw, unfiltered force of a man who had been holding it together for sixteen hours and found, in the specific relief of Aria being conscious and speaking, that the thing he’d been containing had found an opening.
The room went very still.
Aria’s eyes moved to him slowly, heavy-lidded, exhausted, but sharp. Still sharp. The mind behind them working even now.
Damien’s hands, which had been gentle on Aria’s, went to the bedrail. His knuckles were white.
"Alexander..." Mei’s voice held a warning.
"Twice." Alexander heard himself continuing, heard the anger and the fear and the twenty-five years of helplessness driving each word, and could not fully stop it. "She has been in danger twice since being with you. Kidnapped once. Poisoned in a hospital, in the same hospital Blackwood, while your security was supposedly in place. While she was supposed to be safe."
"This is not the time...." Damien’s voice was controlled in the specific way of a man exercising tremendous restraint.
"When is the time? After the next incident? After whatever comes after poisoning?" Alexander took a step forward, and then stopped himself, because Aria was in the bed between them and this was not.....he knew this was not...he knew even as the words kept coming that he was doing exactly what he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do. "I’m not attacking you. I’m stating a fact. She has been hurt on your watch and she will keep being hurt on your watch because you have enemies she is now absorbing as her own, and the people who love her most are supposed to simply accept that?"
"Dad, stop." Aria’s voice. Quiet but clear.
He looked at her.
She was watching him with an expression he recognized because he’d seen it in the mirror his entire adult life, the expression of someone who has a great deal more to say and is choosing, with effort, not to say it yet. Her face was pale and drawn and she had tubes in her arms and she had been dying twelve hours ago and she was still the most composed person in the room.
"Stop," she said again, softly. "Please."
He stopped.
The silence that followed was a different kind of silence than before. Loaded. The kind that had weight and shape.
Damien had not looked away from Aria. Was not, Alexander noticed, looking at him at all, was looking only at her, his expression doing something complicated, the guilt she’d probably never fully see moving across his face before he locked it down behind the careful opacity he used as armor.
There it was, Alexander thought. The guilt. The knowledge that Blackwood already carried this, already held himself responsible in ways that no accusation from Alexander could sharpen. The man was not indifferent. The man was devastated.
That, somehow, made it worse.
Because there was no satisfaction in the guilt of a man who already knew. No relief in the anger. Just the bare, uncomfortable fact that Alexander’s fear had needed somewhere to go and had chosen the nearest available target and Aria had paid the cost of it, again, lying in a hospital bed too exhausted to do more than ask him to stop.
"Aria...." he started.
"I said stop." Her voice had no anger in it, which was almost harder to absorb than anger would have been. Just exhaustion, and something underneath it that sounded like disappointment. "I can’t....not right now. I can’t do this right now."
She turned her face away from both of them, toward her mother, and Mei gathered her daughter’s hand in both of hers and did not look at either man.
The message was clear.
****
DAMIEN’S POV
He stood at the window twenty minutes later, his turn at the window, apparently, the room’s designated position for men who had said or felt too much and needed somewhere to put themselves.
Behind him, Aria had drifted into a light sleep, Mei still at her side. Morrison had returned briefly to check on the monitors, declared himself cautiously satisfied, and left with instructions that she needed rest above all else.
Alexander had moved to the small seating area near the door. They had not spoken since the outburst.
Damien stood at the window and looked at the city coming to life in the early morning, the first gray light touching the tops of buildings, traffic beginning its tentative accumulation, ordinary life resuming its ordinary rhythms.....and thought about what Alexander had said.
She has been hurt on your watch.
He thought about what she went through at the warehouse and how she still got poisoned at the hospital room under his watch.
He thought about what it meant to love someone who the world kept trying to take from you and whether love alone was ever sufficient armor against a world that didn’t care about love.
He had no answers. Only the awareness, sitting low and heavy in the center of his chest, that Alexander had been wrong about the delivery and right about the essential fact.
He closed his eyes and each time he did all he could see was Aria’s face, bruised and dangerously pale.
He pressed his hand flat against the window glass, cold and solid.
Give her space to heal, he thought. Whatever else....give her that.
Behind him, the monitors beeped steadily. Each one a small, ordinary miracle.
He stayed at the window, and he let her sleep.
