Chapter 247: Chapter 249: The Blame Game
The nightmares started on the second night.
Aria would wake up at 2 AM, 3 AM, 4 AM, heart hammering, blankets twisted around her legs, the dream dissolving before she could catch it....leaving nothing behind except the feeling of it. Cold and suffocating and wrong.
She never told Damien.
He was already sleeping in the chair beside her bed every night, already watching her with that look he tried to hide whenever he thought she wasn’t paying attention....the one that sat somewhere between guilt and devastation. Adding the nightmares to that felt unnecessarily cruel.
So she’d lie in the dark and breathe through it and wait for morning.
The panic attacks were harder to hide.
The first one happened when a orderly dropped a metal tray outside her room. Just a tray. A perfectly ordinary, harmless metal tray hitting a perfectly ordinary linoleum floor. And Aria’s entire body responded like she’d been shot , her heart exploding, her lungs seizing, her hands gripping the bed rail hard enough to whiten her knuckles.
By the time Damien looked up from his phone she’d mostly composed herself.
"You okay?" he asked.
"Fine," she said. "Startled me."
He looked at her for a moment too long. Then he nodded and went back to his phone, and she knew, she absolutely knew....that he didn’t believe her. But he let it go, and she was too exhausted to decide whether that was a kindness or not.
Morrison came by that morning with her updated results. Liver function improving, kidney function stable, all the numbers moving in the right direction. He sat at the edge of her bed with his clipboard and talked her through everything with the careful thoroughness she appreciated, and then at the end he said, very casually, "I’d like you to speak with Dr. Reeves before you’re discharged. She’s a trauma specialist on staff. Excellent."
Aria opened her mouth.
"Before you say you’re fine," Morrison said, not unkindly, "I want you to consider that you were kidnapped and then poisoned within a two month period. Your body is recovering beautifully. Your mind deserves the same attention."
She closed her mouth.
"I’ll think about it," she said.
Morrison nodded and left, and Aria stared at the ceiling and thought about a metal tray and what it had done to her heart rate, and decided she would do more than think about it.
She heard them arguing before she saw them.
She’d been half asleep, drifting in that comfortable shallow place between consciousness and rest, when their voices filtered through the door....low and controlled the way men like Damien and Alexander argued, all the violence contained beneath the surface. She couldn’t make out the words but she didn’t need to. She knew the shape of it by now.
She pressed her eyes shut and waited for it to stop.
It didn’t stop.
She reached over and pressed the call button. The nurse appeared within two minutes.
"Could you ask the gentlemen in the corridor to either come in or move further down the hall?" Aria said pleasantly. "I’m trying to sleep."
The nurse disappeared. Thirty seconds of muffled conversation. Then the door opened and both men came in wearing matching expressions of controlled guilt....the specific look of two people who had been caught doing something they knew was wrong.
Damien crossed to her immediately. "I’m sorry. Did we wake you?"
"You’ve been waking me," she said, keeping her voice mild. "Every day. Multiple times." She looked between them. "Sit down. Both of you. I want to talk."
Alexander sat in the chair by the window. Damien perched on the edge of the small sofa. Her mother, who had been reading quietly in the corner, folded her book closed and said nothing, which meant she was paying very close attention.
Aria looked at Damien first. "Tell me what Marcus said this morning."
Damien’s jaw tightened slightly. "Harold is still unlocated. Last confirmed position was Baltimore, two days ago."
"And the hospital security?"
"Holding. Three times the normal staff on this floor. Two of our people in plain clothes."
She nodded slowly. Then she turned to Alexander. "And what were you suggesting to him in the corridor just now?"
Alexander met her eyes without flinching. "That a hospital is a fixed, public location that becomes harder to secure the longer you remain in it."
"He wants you to move to his property," Damien said flatly. "Outside the city."
"I presented it as an option," Alexander said. "For after you’re discharged."
Aria looked at her father. "And how far from the city?"
"Twenty minutes. Private, gated, full security team." He paused. "Your mother would be accommodated. Damien as well, if that’s your preference."
She felt Damien go very still beside her at that....the particular stillness of a man receiving an offer he hadn’t expected and wasn’t sure how to process.
"That’s generous," Aria said.
"It’s practical," Alexander replied. "I want you safe. I’m not particular about the method."
The room was quiet for a moment.
"I’m not making any decisions about after discharge right now," Aria said. "I have five more days of monitoring and I’d like to spend them not negotiating my living arrangements." She looked between them again. "What I am going to ask is that whatever this is...." she gestured between the two of them ".....gets handled somewhere that isn’t my corridor. Because I can feel it from inside this room and it’s making my recovery harder than it needs to be."
Alexander looked at the floor. Something shifted in his expression....the particular discomfort of a man recognizing his own behavior from the outside.
"She’s right," Mei said quietly from the corner.
"I know she is," Alexander said.
Damien said nothing. But he reached over and took Aria’s hand, and she felt the guilt in his grip....the way he held on just a fraction too tight, like she might slip away.
"Twice," Alexander said, very quietly. He wasn’t looking at anyone in particular. "She’s been hurt twice."
"Alexander...." Mei started.
"I’m not saying it to start a fight." His voice was strange. Tired. "I’m just.....I need to say it. Because I spent twenty five years trying to find her and I’ve been here three months and already...." He stopped. Pressed his lips together. "She has a panic attack every time a door opens too fast. She thinks I don’t see it. I see it."
The room went completely still.
Aria kept her face neutral because she’d had practice at that, but she felt the heat rise in her face anyway.
"That’s temporary," she said. "It’s a normal stress response and it’s already improving."
"I know it’s temporary," Alexander said. He looked at her then, and the expression on his face was something she still didn’t quite have the vocabulary for raw and careful at the same time, like a man learning a language he wished he’d learned twenty years ago. "That doesn’t mean watching it is easy."
Damien’s hand tightened around hers again.
