Marcus picked up before the second ring.
"Seb already called ," Marcus said without preamble. "I’m pulling the hospital cara network now. Seb’s plate partial is in the system. I’ve got three n on their way to the hospital and two more running the plate through every database we have access to...legal and otherwise. Boss." A pause. "I’m going to find her."
"I know you are." Damien moved to his desk. "Harold Ashford. Start there. Every property he has access to....owned, rented, borrowed, anything connected to anyone in his network. That paynt he made three weeks ago, the fifty thousand....I want that identity in the next hour. Cross-reference any industrial or comrcial properties within fifty miles of the plate’s last known location."
"Already running it."
"I want everything, Marcus. Every resource. Every contact. Every favor anyone in this organization has ever accumulated...call them in. All of them. Tonight."
"Understood."
"And Marcus." Damien’s voice dropped. "Keep this contained for now. No police. Not yet." He didn’t explain why....Marcus would understand. Police ant jurisdiction, protocols, chain of command, press leaks. It ant tiline controlled by people who didn’t love Aria the way he did and therefore couldn’t be trusted to prioritize correctly. "We find her first. Then we decide what cos next."
"Copy that." Marcus hesitated. "Boss, She’s resourceful. She’s smart. If there’s any way to signal her location or leave trace....she’ll do it."
"I know." The certainty of that steadied sothing in him. She would not panic. She would assess, strategize, adapt. She was a woman who had infiltrated a billionaire’s heavily secured estate with nothing but intelligence and determination. She would not simply wait to be found.
She would fight. He knew that down to his bones.
He ended the call.
And then he was alone in his office, and there was nothing to do yet but wait for information to co in, and the waiting was where the composure cracked.
It started small. He set his phone on the desk and his hands were shaking. Not visibly...not the gross tremor of panic...but a fine, deep vibration like sothing underneath his skin that had too much energy and nowhere to go. He pressed his palms flat on the desk and breathed.
She’s alive. He had to believe that. Harold wanted sothing....wanted to punish, to gloat, to make her suffer in so calculated way that served his obsession with revenge. n who went to this much trouble didn’t intend to simply end it quickly. Which ant she was alive. Which ant there was ti.
He kept telling himself that.
He was still telling himself that two minutes later when his phone rang again, and it was an unknown number, and he answered it in one motion with his heart slamming against his ribs....
"Blackwood." The voice on the other end was smooth, cold, and instantly recognizable. Alexander Wei. "I just received a call from a contact at Mont Senai. Tell right now....tell it isn’t true."
Damien closed his eyes briefly. "Alexander—"
"Tell my daughter has not been taken."
The silence that followed lasted exactly three seconds.
It was all the answer Alexander needed.
What ca through the phone then was not rage...not the explosive kind. It was sothing quieter and therefore significantly more terrifying. The sound of a man who had waited twenty-five years to find his daughter, who had found her six weeks ago, who had just been told she was gone.
"Who," Alexander said. One word. Completely flat.
"Harold Ashford. Forr CEO of Ashford Technologies. Aria was involved in exposing financial cris at his company. He’s been...."
"I know who Harold Ashford is." Another silence. "Where are you?"
"My office."
"I’ll be there in twenty minutes." The line went dead.
Damien set the phone down.
He stood there for a mont in the silence of his office, forty floors above Manhattan, and let himself feel it...all of it, the terror and the fury and the helplessness and the guilt....for exactly thirty seconds. He gave himself thirty seconds of it because he was human and she was everything and pretending otherwise would have been a lie.
Then he picked up his phone and called Marcus back.
"What do we have," he said. "Tell everything."
The office beca a war room within the hour.
Marcus arrived first, laptop open, three phones going simultaneously, his team feeding information through every channel they had. Two of Damien’s senior security analysts set up at the conference table, screens open, running database searches and cross-referencing property records with Harold’s known network..
Damien stood at the window. He’d been standing there for twenty minutes, watching the city below, his phone in his hand and his mind moving through every piece of information as it ca in.
The plate had been a dead end...switched twice before they lost it entirely, both switch points captured on street caras but yielding nothing beyond confirmation that the operation had been professional and prepared. The paradic uniforms had been legitimate....stolen from a supply company three weeks ago, a theft that had been reported but not connected to anything until now. The ambulance was registered to a shell company that dissolved itself forty-eight hours ago.
Soone had planned this ticulously. Had anticipated every counterasure.
The fury was still there...pressed, cold, enormous. It had moved past the shaking stage and settled into sothing harder and more useful. Damien recognized the transition and let it happen. Rage that burned hot was destructive and imprecise. Rage that ran cold was sothing else entirely.
It was the thing that had made him what he was in the business world. The ability to channel emotion into absolute, surgical focus.
He would use it now.
"Harold’s property records," he said without turning from the window.
Marcus looked up from his laptop. "He sold his primary residence four months ago. Secondary property in Connecticut was repossessed by the bank. As of six weeks ago his official address is a rental apartnt on the Upper West Side....we’ve already confird he’s not there." A pause. "But he has a brother. Gregory Ashford. Largely off the grid....no significant digital footprint, small comrcial real estate interests in New Jersey and outer Brooklyn. Three industrial properties. Two warehouses and a forr manufacturing facility."
Damien turned.
"That’s where we start," he said.
"Teams are already mobilizing. I’ve got...."
The office door opened.
Alexander Wei walked in without knocking. He was dressed like a man who’d been in a eting when the call ca....suit, tie, everything precise...but his face was stripped entirely of the asured, careful performance he’d been maintaining since his dinner with Aria. The man who walked into Damien’s office was not the reford, reflective father carefully rebuilding a relationship with a daughter he’d lost.
This was Alexander Wei without the mask.
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