Aria pov
I didn’t argue. I lay against him in the dark, his arm heavy and warm across , the city humming forty floors below and Noah breathing safely down the hall, and I felt the weight of a decision already made settle into my bones.
Two days, two days and this would either be over, or it would be the worst thing either of us had ever lived through.
I pressed my face against Damien’s shoulder and chose, one more ti, not to be afraid.
His phone lit up on the nightstand.
He reached for it, and I felt his entire body go rigid beside , every muscle locking at once. I sat up, looked at the screen, and the air left my lungs in one slow exhale.
Another photo. The penthouse window, shot from sowhere high and close, the two of us visible in the golden light — lying together, my face turned into his shoulder, exactly as we’d been thirty seconds ago.
At the bottom, in plain text, two lines.
I see you making your little plans.
I’ll see you before you see .
Damien was already dialing Reyes, his voice going sharp and controlled, but I sat there staring at that image and felt sothing harden in my chest, past fear, past anger, into sothing much colder and much more deliberate.
He’d been watching us plan.
He knew what was coming.
Which ant in two days, we weren’t walking into a trap.
We were walking into his.
Damien’s POV
They wouldn’t let past the periter. I’d known they wouldn’t. Barnes had been explicit — civilian clearance ended at the second barricade, two blocks north of the restaurant, and even my money and my na and the fact that the woman inside was going to be my wife didn’t move a single badge. I’d agreed to this. I’d sat across from Barnes and nodded and said close, not inside and believed, in the clean daylight logic of the planning room, that I could hold to it.
Standing behind the barricade tape at 9:14 PM, watching the river restaurant’s lit windows from yards away, I understood that I had vastly overestimated myself.
"Sir." The uniform nearest had a voice deliberately calibrated to project calm. "You need to stay behind the line."
"I understand," I said, which was the only safe answer, because what I actually wanted to say would have gotten removed from the vicinity entirely.
My earpiece was live — Barnes had conceded that much, patching into the operational channel so I could hear without being inside. Aria’s wire ca through as a separate feed, slightly warr in frequency, her voice reaching across two blocks and static and the particular hell of standing still while every instinct I possessed scread at to move.
I could hear her. She was good, she was so impossibly good — her voice steady and controlled, making conversation with the agent playing her dinner companion, maintaining cover with the ease of soone who had spent years surviving things that should have broken her. I heard her order wine she wouldn’t drink. I heard her laugh at sothing, light and social, and I knew that laugh wasn’t real because I knew every version of her laugh now, and this was the armor one, the one she wore like a weapon.
The restaurant windows glowed warm and ordinary against the night.
Co on, I thought, though I wasn’t sure who I was talking to. Co out. Co into the net and let this be over.
Twelve minutes later, the operational channel went taut. Barnes’s voice clipped through the earpiece: "Subject sighted. East side entrance. Moving to confirm."
My hand closed around the barricade tape hard enough to whiten my knuckles.
"Confird, Marcus Blackwood. He’s inside."
And then Aria’s voice through the wire, still even, still perfect: "Soone just sat down at the bar, please don’t look."
I closed my eyes for exactly one second. I’d held my brother on the ground in a warehouse. I’d looked into his face and seen what years of rage and abandonnt had made of the boy I’d grown up with.
I’d spoken to him — real words, honest ones, the kind I’d spent most of my life incapable of — and I’d believed, stupidly, that it had ant sothing. That the progress Dr. Hale reported that the visits ant sothing.
And then I’d let life get comfortable and stopped going, and now Marcus was twenty feet from my fiancée with a gun and a grudge I had helped to build, and there was not one single thing I could do about it from behind a barricade tape.
The guilt of that sat in my chest like sothing with weight to it. I had made a decision, years ago, that I didn’t believe in anything outside of what I could see and asure and control. The Blackwood’s household had no patience for faith, and I’d inherited that along with everything else I’d spent the last years trying to unlearn. I didn’t pray, in fact I had never prayed. The concept felt foreign in the way so entirely natural human thing can feel foreign when it’s been deliberately removed from your life.
But standing behind that tape with Aria’s voice coming through a wire and my brother twenty feet from her with a docunted willingness to destroy everything I loved — I found sothing moving in my chest that I didn’t have another word for.
Take anything. The thought ca out strange and raw. My company, my money, whatever debt still exists from everything I failed at before. Take any of it. Take all of it. Just not her. Please. Not her.
The night air was cold off the river, and I stood there in my good coat making bargains with a god I’d never believed in, because there was nothing else left to do with my hands.
"He’s approaching her table." Barnes again said. "All units hold. Hold positions."
I could hear it through the wire — the subtle shift in ambient sound as soone moved close, the slight change in Aria’s breathing that she controlled almost imdiately, almost but not quite, and I knew she was scared. I knew because I knew her now, all the way down to the places she never showed anyone.
Then I heard his voice, my brother’s voice. The sa voice that had scread at in a warehouse while his hands were around my throat.
"Ms. Monroe, what a coincidence."
Sothing moved through that wasn’t quite anger and wasn’t quite grief. It was the particular feeling of recognizing a thing you made and wishing you hadn’t.
"Is it?" Aria’s voice was perfect. Calm, carrying just the right note of controlled wariness. "What do you want, Marcus?"
"I want a lot of things," he said. "But right now I just want to look at the woman my brother chose over everything else, over . Over his better judgnt."
"People keep underestimating ," Aria said. "It never works out well for them."
My chest was so tight I could barely draw a breath. That’s her, I thought. That’s my woman, yards away and she’s the calst person in the building.
"He’s reaching into his coat," soone said on the operational channel. "Possible weapon. Sniper, do you have a shot?"
The response was a single word: "Confird."
"Hold," Barnes said. "We want him alive if"
"Gun." A voice, sharp and imdiate. "Gun, he’s drawing"
The world happened very fast after that. I heard Aria’s voice say sothing I couldn’t parse — one word, sharp, followed by the crash of sothing overturned — and then the operational channel exploded into clipped commands and movent, and sowhere in the middle of it, crashing through the static and the distance, I heard a gunshot.
One shot.
Then another.
Then Aria stopped talking.
The wire went to noise.
I was moving before I’d made any decision to move, ducking under the barricade tape and breaking into a run before the uniform officer behind had finished shouting, and I didn’t stop, didn’t slow down , didn’t think about anything except the fact that her voice had stopped.
Stay with , I thought, running. Aria. Stay with .
Two officers caught at the next line. I fought them — elbows, body weight and when they held, I stopped fighting and started shouting, which was worse.
"Get your hands off ." My voice didn’t sound like mine. "That’s my — she’s in there, let go of right now."
"Sir, you cannot"
"I don’t care." Sothing tore loose in my chest that I had no na for. "I don’t care, do you understand ? Let through or I will"
"Blackwood." Barnes’s voice rose sharp and close.
I spun on him and my hands moved before my mind did, as my hands held his collar, and I had him shoved back against the wall before either of us processed it.
"How." My voice ca out quiet, which was sohow worse than shouting. "How did that happen? You had a team in there, you had eyes on him, you had a sniper" my grip tightened "and you still let it get to shots fired? How were you all so careless with her?"
"Blackwood"
"You better pray." I got closer, close enough that he couldn’t look anywhere but at . "You hear ? You better pray she is not hurt in there. Because if she is" I couldn’t finish it, I didn’t need to.
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