Chapter 255: Chapter 257: Back to the estate
Alexander looked at her for a long moment. Then he took out his phone and made a call. A brief, quiet conversation. Through the glass panel, Aria watched the four men receive instruction through their earpieces and disperse.
"Thank you," she said.
Then she looked at Damien. "Your arrangements for the transfer."
"Marcus has the route. Our team is already in position." He held her gaze. "Everything you approved yesterday."
"Good." She picked up her bag. "Then let’s go."
She didn’t speak much on the way to the estate.
Damien drove, Marcus in the front passenger seat, Aria in the back with her mother. Alexander followed in his own car...she’d invited him to the estate for the settling in, and the invitation stood despite everything, because she was angry and she was also someone who understood that anger and connection could coexist.
Her mother held her hand in the back seat and didn’t try to fill the silence, which Mei had always been good at. Knowing when quiet was what was needed.
Aria watched the city go by outside the window and thought about the four men in the corridor and the look on Alexander’s face when she’d said that’s the same. The way it had landed. The way he hadn’t argued with it.
Progress, she supposed, looked like a man who could hear the truth even when it cost him something.
***
DAMIEN’S POV
His phone rang at seven.
He was in the study, going through the estate security review with Marcus, updating protocols, integrating the new monitoring systems Morrison’s team had sent over for Aria’s aftercare. Aria was upstairs with her mother, settling in. He’d checked on her twice. Both times she’d been okay.
He picked up the phone.
Richard Blackwood’s voice came through the line, dry and direct as always.
"You’re back at the estate."
"Yes."
"Is Aria with you?"
"Yes."
A pause that with anyone else would have been thoughtful but with Richard was simply the space between one precise sentence and the next. "I heard about the poisoning. Details came through Marcus. You should have called me yourself."
"You’re right. I should have."
"Yes." No softening it, no accepting the implicit apology. Just the fact of it, registered and filed. "I also heard about the father’s confrontation."
Damien leaned back in his chair. "News travels."
"I have good sources." Another pause. "Alexander Wei is worth forty billion dollars and he’s spent twenty five years looking for this girl. You understand what that means."
"It means he loves her."
"It means he’s been building toward this for twenty five years and now that he has her he will not let go easily." Richard’s voice was measured. Precise. The voice of a man who had spent seventy years reading people accurately and building empires on the assessments. "He’s going to try to separate you. Not necessarily maliciously. He’ll frame it as protection. Safety. What’s best for her."
"He already has," Damien said.
"And what did you do?"
"Said my piece. Let her handle it."
A beat of silence that felt, from Richard, like something approaching approval. "Good. That’s right. She’s not a possession to be fought over and the moment you treat it like that contest you’ve already lost her."
"I know."
"Do you?" Richard said. "Because I know what you’re like when something you love is threatened. I watched your father do it and I watched you inherit it. The Blackwood way is to close ranks, tighten control, remove threats." A pause. "That cannot be your way with her. You understand?"
"I understand."
"She chose you," Richard said simply. "With full knowledge of who you are and what your life looks like. She chose you anyway. Don’t make her regret the clarity of that choice by becoming the thing she has to fight against."
Damien was quiet for a moment. Outside the study window the estate grounds were lit in the evening light, familiar and secure and....for the first time in a long time...genuinely inhabited.
"He’s not entirely wrong," Damien said. "Wei. About the twice."
"No," Richard agreed. "He’s not. But being right about a fact doesn’t give a man the right to draw the wrong conclusion from it." A pause. "She’s alive. She’s in your home. She chose to be there." Another pause, shorter. "Come to the estate this weekend. Bring her if she’s well enough."
"I’ll ask her."
"Don’t ask. Tell her I’ve requested the pleasure. There’s a difference." And Damien could hear, underneath the characteristic dryness of it, something that sounded almost like warmth.
"Keep your head, Damien. Don’t let Wei provoke you into something drastic. The man is operating from fear. Fear makes people do foolish things."
"Including me."
"Especially you," Richard said, with the frankness of a man who had earned the right to it. "Which is why I’m calling." A pause. "Don’t be foolish. You’ve come too far."
The call ended the way Richard’s calls always did....without ceremony, without goodbye. Just the end of what needed to be said.
Damien set the phone down and sat in the quiet study for a moment.
Then he went upstairs to find Aria.
She was in the bedroom he’d had prepared....the east wing suite with the garden view, exactly as Marcus had arranged. She was standing at the window in the last of the evening light, her arms wrapped loosely around herself, looking out at the gardens.
She turned when he came in.
"My grandfather called," he said.
"What did he say?"
"He entered the room and crossed to her. He stopped in front of her, close but not touching, letting her set the distance. "That I should bring you to see him this weekend if you’re well enough."
"He wants to meet me."
"He requested the pleasure," Damien said. "His words. Which from Richard is approximately equivalent to anyone else getting down on one knee."
She almost smiled. "High praise."
"The highest he offers." He reached out and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, his hand lingering briefly against her face. "Today was too much. I’m sorry."
"It wasn’t your fault."
"Some of it was." He held her gaze. "I let it escalate in that room instead of stepping back earlier. I knew what was happening and I fed it anyway."
She looked at him for a moment. "We’re both learning."
"We are."
"Just..." She leaned her forehead against his chest and he wrapped around her carefully, mindful of how much her body had been through. "Can we just have one quiet evening? No security briefings, no Alexander, no planning." She exhaled. "Just this."
He pressed his lips to the top of her head. "Just this," he agreed.
Outside the window the estate gardens were going dark, the last light leaving the sky in long stripes of gold and grey. Inside the room everything was finally, blessedly still.
Damien held her and didn’t move and let the evening be exactly what she needed it to be.
