The CEO's Rejected Wife And Secret Heir novel Chapter 164

Chapter 164: Chapter 164: The Trap

Aria’s POV

From the living room came the sound of Noah narrating an elaborate dinosaur battle to an audience of stuffed animals, his voice rising and falling with dramatic intensity.

Damien caught my eye over my shoulder, and the corner of his mouth lifted.

"Together," he said.

"Together," I agreed.

That single word, worn smooth by use, was somehow enough. Then his phone buzzed on the counter.

He picked it up with one hand still resting on my waist, and I felt his whole body go rigid before I’d even seen the screen.

I turned. An unknown number. No message — just a video clip, ten seconds long, shot from somewhere close. Our kitchen window. The two of us at the counter, him with his arms around me, me looking up at him. Close enough to see our faces. Clear enough to read our lips.

And at the bottom of the screen, a single caption.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

Damien was already dialing Reyes, his voice going sharp and immediate, but I stood there staring at that video and felt something go cold in my stomach that had nothing to do with fear.

Detective Barnes came to us on the fourth day of lockdown, and the fact that he made the trip himself told me everything about how serious it had become.

Barnes was not a man who made house calls. He arrived at ten in the morning with his tie slightly crooked and a folder under his arm, carrying the expression of someone about to propose something they already knew would cause a fight.

He wasn’t wrong.

"We want to draw him out," he said, spreading photographs across our dining table — surveillance images, location scouting, three scenario briefs paper-clipped together like this was a business proposal and not a plan to use a human being as bait. "Marcus’s patterns since his escape tell us he’s staying close. The video he sent last night, the call to Ms. Monroe — he wants to be seen. He’s taunting, not hiding, which means he’s ready to move. We need to give him something to move toward."

"A decoy," Damien said, his voice already going flat.

"A controlled situation," Barnes corrected carefully. "We choose the location, the timing, the variables. We control everything except him, and when he shows"

"Who’s the decoy?" I asked.

Barnes glanced at me, then at Damien, then back at me. Which told me everything.

"No." Damien’s voice cut across the room, hard and absolute. "You are not using Aria as bait. Find another way."

"Mr. Blackwood, with respect"

"There is no version of this conversation where I agree to put her in Marcus’s path intentionally." He set his hands flat on the table. "None. So if that’s your proposal, you’ve wasted the trip."

Barnes’s jaw tightened with the patience of a man who had dealt with protective partners before. "Ms. Monroe," he said, redirecting deliberately. "Do you want to hear the operational details?"

"She doesn’t need to," Damien said.

"Damien." I put my hand on his arm, and he looked at me with something barely controlled, barely contained — all that fear and fury compressed into the space behind his eyes. "Let me hear it."

"Aria"

"Let me hear it," I said again, quietly, and held his gaze until he sat back. It cost him something, I could see it costing him, but he stayed quiet.

Barnes laid it out in clean, professional terms. A public appearance at a restaurant near the river, somewhere Marcus had already surveilled twice. The cover story: a business dinner, routine, plausible. FBI inside, at every exit, on rooftops across the street. A wire, a vest, an abort signal. Marcus would see his target and walk into a net.

"He wants me specifically," I said when Barnes finished, spreading my hands over the photographs. "He said so himself — I took his brother’s love. He’s not after Damien. He’s after me because I’m what Damien chose over him. Which means a decoy that isn’t actually me won’t work. He’s too smart for that."

"That’s our read," Barnes confirmed, nodding.

"So this is the fastest option." I looked at Damien directly. "Not the most comfortable one. The fastest one. And every week this drags on is another week Noah asks about the park and we say soon."

Damien’s jaw went tight, and he looked away from me, staring at the wall like it had answers in it.

"There are slower alternatives," Barnes offered. "But Marcus could go underground entirely if he senses we’re closing in, and then we’re looking at weeks. Possibly months."

Months. I thought of Noah on my lap, counting soons. I thought of this penthouse becoming a fortress that a little boy stopped being able to tell apart from a cage.

"Two days to prepare?" I said to Barnes.

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