I’S POV — 8:42 AM
The call ca while i was making breakfast.
She’d been humming to herself....sothing she hadn’t done in years, hadn’t been able to do through the worst of her illness, cracking eggs into a bowl, preparing breakfast that she would be taking to the hospital for Aria that morning, sunlight streaming through the kitchen window of the small apartnt Damien had arranged for her near the hospital. She’d been thinking about Aria. About how her daughter had looked yesterday, bright-eyed and laughing, holding Damien’s hand on her hospital bed, she had look more alive, she was recovering well from the aftermath of the kidnapping.
She’d been happy. Genuinely, quietly happy for the first ti in longer than she could rember.
Then her phone rang.
She recognised the number and picked it imdiately.
Marcus’s voice ca through the line. Calm, asured, professional. The kind of voice trained specifically to deliver devastating news without causing imdiate panic.
It didn’t work.
By the ti he finished speaking, poisoned, unknown substance, critical condition, hospital working on antidote, i had already sunk to the kitchen floor, her back against the cabinet, the bowl of eggs shattered on the tile beside her.
She didn’t rember dropping it.
She didn’t rember calling a cab. Didn’t rember the ride to Mont Senai, didn’t rember the elevator, didn’t rember being escorted past the security station on the fourth floor by a man with broad shoulders and a earpiece.
What she rembered was the door to Aria’s room.
The way it looked from the outside, ordinary, white, with a small glass panel ...before she pushed it open and saw her daughter lying in the hospital bed, pale as paper, tubes attached to her arms, monitors beeping their relentless, chanical concern.
The sound that ca out of i Chen was not a cry. It was not a scream. It was sothing older than either of those things, a sound dragged up from sowhere deep and primal, from the part of a mother that exists before language, before reason, before anything except the absolute, devastating fact of her child being in pain.
"Aria...."
She was across the room before she knew she was moving, her hands finding her daughter’s face, cupping her cheeks, her eyes scanning desperately for signs of consciousness.
"Aria, baby, I’m here. Mama’s here."
Nothing. No flicker of eyelids. No twitch of fingers. Just the steady, chanical rise and fall of her chest.
Damien was on his feet imdiately, his chair scraping back. "i...."
"What happened?" Her voice ca out wrong, too high, too thin, like sothing being stretched past its limit. "What happened to her? She was okay when i left yesterday, What did they do to my daughter?"
"A nurse was blackmailed. The substance...."
"I don’t want the details right now." i couldn’t look away from Aria’s face. Couldn’t stop touching her, her cheek, her hair, the back of her hand. Needing to feel warmth. Needing proof. "I just need to know if she’s going to be okay. Is she going to be okay, Damien?"
A pause that lasted exactly one second too long.
"We have the antidote formula," he said carefully. "Aria woke up briefly this morning and wrote it down. The lab is synthesizing it now. Six hours."
"She woke up?"
"Briefly. She was conscious for maybe fifteen minutes. Long enough to give us what we needed."
i pressed her lips together, fighting the sob threatening to escape. Fifteen minutes. Her daughter had used fifteen minutes of borrowed consciousness to save her own life. Of course she had. Of course Aria had done exactly that ....had pushed through pain and confusion and dying to be brilliant one more ti, to be useful one more ti, because that was who she was. Because Aria had been solving impossible problems since she was fourteen years old and her mother was too sick to get out of bed.
The sob escaped anyway.
"She survived everything," i whispered, her hands trembling against Aria’s still ones. "Everything. She survived, she survived the years when I couldn’t protect her, when she had to take care of herself and both. She survived every terrible choice she had to make. She survived that kidnapping Damien, She survived everything that was supposed to break her." Her voice cracked completely. "And now this? Now soone poisons her in a hospital? In a place that was supposed to be safe?"
"i...."
"She should have had a normal life." The words ca out like sothing rupturing. "She should have had a normal, boring, beautiful life. School plays and birthday parties and college and falling in love slowly, safely, without any of.....without any of this. Without people hunting her. Without people trying to hurt her because of choices she had to make when she was barely more than a child."
She was crying fully now, tears streaming down her face without any attempt to stop them.
"That’s my fault." She turned to look at Damien and let him see all of it....the grief, the guilt, the twenty-five years of accumulated weight. "I got sick and I left her alone to face the world and she did what she had to do to survive. To save . And now the things she did to save are the things that are killing her and I...." She pressed her hand over her mouth. "I did this to her."
"You didn’t...."
"I was her mother and I failed her."
The room was quiet except for the monitors.
And then, from the doorway, a voice i hadn’t heard directed at her with anything other than coldness or controlled distance in twenty-five years.
"You didn’t fail her."
****
He’d been standing in the doorway for three minutes, watching i fall apart.
He’d arrived from the private lounge down the hall the mont Marcus told him i had arrived, had intended to be formal, and give her ti to see Aria. He and i existed in a careful détente for Aria’s sake: civil, cautious, and emotionally uninvested, at least for now. until he wins back her trust.
That was the plan.
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