Chapter 268: Chapter 270: What He Won’t Say
Harold had asked about Aria before they put him in the car.
It was not a smart thing to ask. He knew that the moment the words left his mouth. But he asked anyway, and Marcus had looked at him the way a man looks at someone who has already lost and just hasn’t accepted it yet, and said she was alive. That was all. She was alive.
Harold got in the car.
He didn’t say anything else after that. There were two guards with him in the backseat and a driver in front and tinted windows on all sides, and fourteen hours of road between wherever they were and wherever they were going, and he sat with his hands in his lap and thought about those two words.
She was alive.
He had spent six weeks in that motel room in Nevada waiting for the opposite. Had paid for the opposite. Had built an entire plan around the opposite. Aria Chen was supposed to be dead and Damien Blackwood was supposed to be broken and Harold was supposed to have his revenge and then figure out the rest from there.
That was the plan.
She had identified the compound herself. While she was still half conscious. He’d read that in one of the hospital reports he’d been monitoring from the motel, and he had sat with that particular piece of information for three days straight and still didn’t know what to do with it.
He looked at the window.
There was nothing to see. Just the Nevada desert going dark outside the tinted glass, flat and empty and completely indifferent to the situation.
He thought about Victoria, His daughter sitting in an apartment on the other side of the world with white scars on her hands, wiring money to a father who had no right to ask for it.
She had sent it anyway.
He didn’t know if that made him proud or ashamed. Probably both. Probably it was the kind of thing you didn’t get to feel proud about when you were the reason she was in that apartment in the first place.
He closed his eyes and decided to get as much possible rest he could get now because he knows that ones he enters Damien’s territory, things like rest becomes a luxury.
***
Damien was in his office when the final call came in.
He could hear Aria somewhere down the corridor. Her voice and then Lucy’s laugh and then Mrs. Chen telling both of them to eat something. He had been listening to that on and off all day without meaning to.
His phone lit up.
Marcus. Approaching the perimeter. Your call.
Bring him in, Damien said. South entrance. He sits overnight and we do this properly in the morning.
He set the phone down.
Down the corridor, Aria laughed at something again.
He let himself listen to it for another moment. Then he stood up and went to find her.
****
They brought Harold in through the south entrance at just past midnight.
The facility was one of Damien’s properties on the outskirts of the city. Not an office, not a house. Just a building that existed quietly and did not advertise what it was used for. But the moment they walked Herold through the door he seemed to understand the kind of place it was, because his shoulders went up and his jaw tightened and he stopped asking questions he had been asking on and off for the last hour of the drive.
They put him in a room and left him there overnight.
In the morning Damien arrived.
He came alone, which Marcus had argued against and Damien had rejected. He walked into the building and down the corridor and into the room where Harold had been sitting for the last nine hours, and he closed the door behind him and sat down across the table and looked at Harold Ashford for the first time since the warehouse.
Harold looked like a man who had aged ten years in six weeks. The grey in his hair had spread. His face was drawn and tired and carrying the specific weight of someone who had run for a long time and finally stopped and was only now feeling all of it. His hands were on the table. He wasn’t restrained. There was no point. There was nowhere for him to go.
Damien didn’t say anything immediately. He sat there and he let the silence do what silence did in rooms like this, which was make everything heavier.
Harold broke first.
"I know what you want," he said.
"Then tell me," Damien said.
Harold looked at the table. "His name is Matthew. That’s all I’m giving you."
"That’s not all you’re going to give me."
"You can do whatever you want to me." Harold looked up. "I’m not telling you anything else about him."
Damien looked at him steadily. "Why."
"Because he lost everything too." Harold’s voice was flat. Not emotional, just factual. "His father’s company. His inheritance. Everything his family built. She destroyed all of it. The same way she destroyed mine."
"So that makes it acceptable. What you did."
"I didn’t say it was acceptable." Harold shifted. "I said I understand why he did what he did. And I’m not giving him to you."
Damien leaned back in his chair.
He had expected defiance. Had prepared for it. Harold Ashford was not a man who had spent six weeks running and planning and surviving to fold the moment someone sat down across from him. The defiance wasn’t the problem. The problem was the particular kind of defiance this was, the kind built not on arrogance but on the specific conviction of a man who had decided there was one thing left he could do right, and protecting Matthew was apparently it.
"Matthew gave you a substance," Damien said. "An unidentified compound. You had a nurse inject it into Aria while she was unconscious in a hospital bed."
Harold said nothing.
"That nurse has a daughter. Eight years old. Matthew used that child to coerce her. Threatened her life." Damien’s voice didn’t change. "The nurse came forward after Aria was stabilized. She’s been cooperating with our investigators. She told us everything about the arrangement, about the threats, about what Matthew told her would happen if she refused."
Harold’s jaw moved. Something flickered across his face that was not quite guilt and not quite anything else Damien had a clean name for.
"She did that," Damien said, "because she had no choice. Matthew put her in a position where there was no good option. Her child or a stranger." He paused. "You knew about the child."
"I found out after," Harold said.
"Did you."
"I found out after and it was already done." The words came out rough. Like they had been sitting in his chest for weeks and were not coming out the way he’d intended. "I didn’t know he was going to use a child. That wasn’t part of what he told me."
"But you didn’t stop it."
Harold looked at the table again.
"No," he said. "I didn’t."
The room was quiet.
Damien stood up.
Harold’s head came up. He watched Damien move toward the door.
"That’s it?" Harold said. "That’s all you’re going to do, just walk out?"
Damien stopped at the door. Didn’t open it yet.
"I’m not going to kill you," Damien said.
"Then what." Harold’s voice came out rough. "What is this. What are you going to do, lock me away somewhere and leave me to rot? Is that it? That’s your version of justice?"
"Yes," Damien said simply.
Something went through Harold’s face then. Not fear exactly, but the cousin of it. The recognition of a man who understood what that meant, who had heard enough about Damien Blackwood over the years to know that locked away by Damien was not a metaphor and was not a minimum security situation and was not something you came out the other side of in any reasonable timeframe.
"You can’t do that," Harold said. "You can’t just..."
"I already have," Damien said.
"Then kill me." Harold stood up. The chair scraped back and his voice went up with it, all the flatness gone, just raw and stripped and loud in the small room. "Kill me instead. You hear me? Just kill me. I’m not sitting in some room for the rest of my life, I’m not doing that, just kill me and be done with it you bastard!"
Damien opened the door.
"Kill me." Harold’s voice followed him into the corridor. "You hear me? Kill me instead. KILL ME INSTEAD...."
Damien walked down the corridor.
Behind him Harold was still shouting. The sound bounced off the walls of that building, off the floors and the ceiling and the narrow corridor, and it followed Damien all the way to the exit. The guards stepped aside when he reached the door. He pushed it open and walked out into the morning air and kept walking until he got to the car.
Marcus was waiting beside it. He looked at Damien’s face and didn’t ask how it went.
Damien got in.
From inside the building, even through the walls and the distance and the closed door behind him, Harold’s voice was still going. Still shouting the same thing. The same two words over and over in the voice of a man who understood, finally and completely, that this was worse.
Marcus got in the driver’s side and started the engine.
