Chapter 274: Chapter 276: Alexandra and Damien’s Talk
DAMIEN’S POV
It happened by accident.
Or at least that’s what he told himself.
Aria had gone to the hospital for her first day back....half day, Morrison’s orders, non-negotiable.....and Mei had come to the estate to keep herself busy while she waited for Aria to come home because apparently that was something Mei Chen did, arrived at his house and made herself at home in his kitchen and he had stopped having feelings about it sometime around week three.
He hadn’t known Alexander was coming.
He found out the same way he found out most things about Alexander Wei’s movements.....Marcus appeared in the study doorway at half ten with the specific expression he wore when he was delivering information he expected Damien to have feelings about.
"Wei is here," Marcus said.
Damien looked up from his laptop. "Aria isn’t."
"I’m aware. He knows. He said he’ll wait."
"He’ll wait."
"In the garden." Marcus paused. "With Mrs Chen."
Damien looked at his laptop screen. The contracts he’d been going through suddenly felt less urgent.
"Does he know I’m here," he said.
"Yes."
He sat there for a moment.
Then he closed the laptop.
Alexander was sitting at the garden table with a cup of tea that Mei had presumably made him, because Mei made tea for people the way other people breathed.....automatically and without needing to be asked. Mei herself had disappeared back inside, which Damien suspected was not accidental.
He walked out.
Alexander looked up when he heard footsteps. Something moved across his face and then composed itself.
"Damien," he said.
"Alexander." He pulled out the chair across from him and sat down. "She’s not back until one."
"I know. Mei told me." He looked at his tea. "I came to see Mei actually. And then she disappeared into your kitchen."
"She does that."
"I’ve noticed."
They sat in the kind of silence that had its own texture.....not comfortable, not hostile. Just two men at a table in a garden with nothing between them except the fact of Aria, which was not a small thing.
A bird landed on the garden wall, looked at them both, left.
"How did she seem this morning," Alexander said. "Before she went in."
"Nervous." Damien looked at the garden. "Not in a way she showed. But I could tell."
"She doesn’t show it."
"No. She never does." He paused. "She’ll be fine once she’s in there. Once she’s working. That’s where she makes sense to herself."
Alexander was quiet for a moment. "You know her well."
It wasn’t an accusation. Just an observation, delivered with the particular evenness of a man acknowledging something that cost him something to acknowledge.
"Yes," Damien said. Simply.
Alexander nodded once. Looked at his tea.
Mrs Abel appeared with another cup and set it in front of Damien without a word and went back inside. He picked it up.
"I owe you an apology," Alexander said.
Damien looked at him.
"The discharge day." Alexander kept his eyes on the garden. "The four men. I went around both of you and I framed it as a security decision when it was a control decision." A pause. "I’ve been thinking about that. The difference between those two things." He looked at Damien then. "You called it correctly. In the room. What I was doing."
"You were scared," Damien said.
"That’s not an excuse."
"I didn’t say it was. I said it was true." He held Alexander’s gaze. "I know what it is to be scared for her. I know what that does to your decision making."
Alexander looked at him for a moment.
"You were there every night," he said. "In the hospital."
"Yes."
"I was down the hall." Something moved across his face. "In a very comfortable private lounge that I’d arranged specifically so I wouldn’t be in anyone’s way, because I understood I didn’t have the right to be in that room the way you did." He looked back at the garden. "I’ve spent twenty four years looking for her and when I finally found her and something happened to her I was down the hall."
Damien said nothing.
"You don’t know what that’s like," Alexander said. Not aggressively. Just stating it.
"No," Damien said. "I don’t."
"I’m not saying that to make a point about what I deserve. I’m saying it because I need you to understand why I keep....." He stopped. Chose the word carefully. "Overreaching. I know it’s overreaching. I know every time I do it. And I do it anyway because twenty four years of not being able to do anything has apparently built something in me that doesn’t know how to stop trying to compensate."
Damien sat with that.
He thought about what Richard had said on the phone. The man is operating from fear. Fear makes people do foolish things.
He thought about himself, in the early weeks after the kidnapping. The way he’d tightened everything around her. The way Marcus had had to talk him down from three separate decisions that would have made her feel suffocated instead of safe. The way he’d had to actively learn the difference between protecting someone and controlling the space around them because you couldn’t stand the alternative.
He was still learning it.
"The first time she was taken," Damien said. "The kidnapping. Before the hospital." He looked at the garden. "I had every resource I had looking for her and I couldn’t find her fast enough and there was a period of approximately six hours where I didn’t know if she was alive." He paused. "I made four decisions in those six hours that Marcus later told me were the worst calls he’d seen me make in six years of working together."
Alexander looked at him.
"Fear," Damien said. "That’s all it was. Not strategy. Not good judgment." He met Alexander’s eyes. "So I understand the overreaching. I don’t like it. I’ll tell you when it’s happening. But I understand it."
The garden was quiet.
Alexander looked at him for a long moment.
"She said we needed to figure out how to be in the same room," he said finally.
"She did."
"Without her refereeing."
"Yes."
Alexander picked up his tea. "How is that going."
"We’re in a room," Damien said. "Without her."
Something shifted in Alexander’s face. The closest thing to a genuine expression of amusement she’d seen from him that wasn’t connected to Aria.
"We are," he said.
They sat in the garden.
Not comfortably exactly. But not the grinding tension of the hospital room either. Something else. Something that was maybe the early shape of two people who had decided that the same woman mattered enough to make the effort.
"The foundation," Damien said after a while.
Alexander looked at him.
"The Vitalis Radix foundation I’m setting up. I have the botanical infrastructure. Morrison has the medical protocols." He looked at Alexander. "I need someone who understands international pharmaceutical regulation. Who has contacts in the right places to move things through channels that would otherwise take years."
Alexander was very still.
"That’s a significant ask," he said carefully.
"Yes."
"You’re asking me."
"I’m asking you," Damien said. "Because you have resources I don’t and because it would be good for the foundation and because...." He paused. "Because she’d like it. The two of us doing something that isn’t about territory."
Alexander looked at the garden for a long moment.
"She named the plant," he said. "Vitalis Radix. Root of life." He was quiet. "She came to your estate for a root and she left with a life." He glanced at Damien. "She’d say that was overly poetic."
"She would," Damien agreed.
"She’d also be right."
"Also yes."
Alexander set his cup down.
"Send me what Morrison has on the protocols," he said. "I’ll have my team look at the regulatory landscape in three jurisdictions. We can start there."
Damien nodded.
They sat in the garden until Mei appeared with more tea and the news that Aria had texted to say she was leaving the hospital and did anyone want lunch, and Alexander said yes before Damien could answer, and Mei looked between the two of them with the expression of a woman clocking something she was going to think about later.
She went back inside without saying anything.
Damien looked at the gate.
Forty minutes until she was home.
"She was good," Alexander said quietly. "Today. At the hospital. You said she’d be fine once she was working."
"She will have been."
"You’re certain."
"I know her," Damien said.
Alexander looked at him.
"Yes," he said. After a moment. "You do."
He picked up his tea.
