Damien pov
Barnes held my stare, didn’t fight the grip, and said it fast and flat: "She’s hit, but she is conscious."
The air went out of completely as I let go of his collar. I stepped back but my hands were shaking. "Let through," I said. Barely a whisper. "Barnes, let through."
He straightened his collar and stepped aside without another word as I ran. The scene inside was chaos made of people and voices and the particular flattened light of an ergency agent moving with controlled urgency, two paradics crouched near an overturned table in the far corner, and I saw her before I’d registered anything else. On the floor, propped against the wall, her left hand pressed to her right shoulder, her jacket dark and wrong at the sleeve.
"Damien." Her voice was still there.
I crossed the room and hit my knees beside her and didn’t care at all what it looked like or who was watching or what the floor was doing to my suit.
"I’m here," I said, and the words ca out wrecked. "I’m right here." I reached for her free hand and took it in both of mine, held it hard enough that she’d feel it over the pain. "Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare."
"I’m okay." She was pale, visibly hurting, but her eyes were clear and fixed on my face with that direct, unguarded look she only gave when it was real. "It was a ricochet, the shot took Marcus" She stopped, drew a careful breath. "He’s gone. Damien. It’s over."
"You stopped talking." The words ca out too raw. "The wire went quiet and you stopped"
"I dropped the earpiece when the table went over." A line of pain crossed her face. "The angle was wrong, it caught my shoulder" She blinked, and I saw her eyes sharpen with the effort of staying present. "I’m okay. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere."
"You said that last ti," I said, and it ca out almost inaudible. "You said you’d be okay and I heard the shot"
"Damien." She squeezed my hand, firm despite everything. "Look at ."
I looked at her.
"I kept my word," she said. "Now let the paradics do their job and stay right next to while they do."
I moved aside exactly as far as was necessary and not one centiter further, and I held her hand the entire ti, and when they moved to take her out I walked beside the stretcher with my hand still around hers and did not let go.
"Stay with ," I said as they loaded her into the ambulance. I climbed in without asking for permission, and nobody stopped .
She looked up at from the stretcher, pale and tired and sohow still the most formidable person I had ever known. "You’re going to have to eventually stop saying that," she said quietly. "I’m clearly not going anywhere."
"Not tonight," I said. "Not on my watch."
She closed her eyes. I kept holding her hand, and I thought about my brother lying on that restaurant floor, and I felt the complicated, specific grief of a man who had run out of rcy and wasn’t sure yet whether to mourn that or accept it.
Thank you, I thought, to whatever I’d been bargaining with minutes ago at the barricade line. That’s all I needed, just that.
Aria’s POV
I heard him before I saw him.
I didn’t need to see him. I knew Marcus Blackwood the way you know sothing that has cost you — in the body, before the brain catches up. I knew the particular quality of his footsteps, unhurried and deliberate, the walk of a man who had already decided the evening’s outco. I’d heard those sa footsteps in a warehouse at midnight when he had a gun pressed to my head. I heard that voice at 11:47 PM telling I’d stolen his brother. I’d lived for months in the shadow of a man who had put hidden caras in my ho and watched in my most private monts like I was sothing he owned, sothing he could use.
I knew Marcus Blackwood’s presence the way prey knows a predator. When he sat down at the bar, I didn’t look.
I didn’t need to.
He’s here, I thought, Stay in the plan. Let Barnes run the play.
The wire at my collar suddenly felt very present — Barnes’s team on the other end, the sniper across the street with his confird shot, all of that invisible architecture that existed specifically to keep breathing through the next ten minutes. I’d morized the abort signal. I knew my exits. I’d done everything exactly right but I was still scared.
The kind I’d been running on since the night I found a hidden cara in the bedroom and understood exactly what kind of man we were dealing with. The kind that had gotten through a warehouse at midnight and a bullet to the chest and my son being taken from , and all the things that should have broken and hadn’t.
When Marcus finally crossed the room to my table, I was ready.
I looked up at him and felt nothing like surprise. I knew his face — the jaw that was Damien’s, the cheekbones that were Damien’s, the sa genetics worn rougher and aner. The scar across his cheek. The Blackwood eyes with none of the warmth Damien had. I had looked into those eyes in a warehouse while he pressed a gun to my head and told I was the price Damien paid for abandoning family. I knew this face and right now i hated this face.
"Ms. Monroe," he said, smiling like we were running into each other at a charity gala. "What a coincidence."
"Is it?" I held his gaze, steady and cool. "You called the night you broke out. You knew exactly where I’d be, Marcus. So let’s skip the performance."
Sothing shifted behind his eyes — surprise, quickly swallowed. He hadn’t expected to open with that, and the small advantage of it felt good in my chest even through the fear.
"You rember that call," he said.
"I rember everything you’ve done," I said quietly, and let him hear what was underneath it — not just the call, but the caras, the threats, the day he took my son, the bullet I’d worn a vest for. "Every single thing. So tell what you actually ca here for." I asked, though I already knew. n like Marcus didn’t co to talk. They ca to finish things.
"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." His eyes moved over the way they had through hidden caras, like I was sothing to be studied and taken apart. "You don’t look like much."
Sothing burned hot in my chest at that — not fear, not even anger, but the accumulated fury of every violation, every threat, every night I’d checked my son’s room for bugs and found them, every mont he had stolen from us and watched from a distance and used as ammunition.
"People keep underestimating ," I said. "It never works out well for them."
His hand moved to his coat. I saw it a half-second before the agent on the operational channel said possible weapon, and I made the calculation instantly — he’s not here to negotiate, he brought this to finish it — and I said "Now" into the wire as clearly as I could and threw myself sideways.
The table went over as the earpiece skittered across the tile floor.
The shot was loud and much closer than any version of it had been in my planning, and then I was on the floor behind the overturned table with my ears ringing and sothing burning in my right shoulder that told before I looked that I’d been hit.
It was dark and spreading, the jacket sleeve ruined — and the pain arrived a beat later.
Ricochet, I understood.
From across the restaurant I heard "Clear!" and I turned my head and saw Marcus Blackwood on the floor, utterly still, and I felt sothing move through that was too complicated to na and too raw to examine. Over, it was finally over.
I pressed my hand to my shoulder and breathed and let my heartbeat decide what it wanted to do. Damien reached before the paradics finished their assessnt.
I heard him first — a commotion at the entrance, voices, the particular quality of soone refusing absolutely to be stopped — and then he was across the room and on his knees beside before I’d fully processed he was there, his face doing sothing I’d never seen it do and hope to never see again. Pure, unguarded devastation.
"I’m okay," I said imdiately, because that expression was physically painful to look at. "Damien. I’m okay."
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