The CEO's Rejected Wife And Secret Heir novel Chapter 166

Chapter 166: Chapter 166 – The Shooting

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 me completely as I let go of his collar. I stepped back but my hands were shaking. "Let me through," I said. Barely a whisper. "Barnes, let me 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 emergency agent moving with controlled urgency, two paramedics 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 came 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 me 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 came 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 time," I said, and it came out almost inaudible. "You said you’d be okay and I heard the shot"

"Damien." She squeezed my hand, firm despite everything. "Look at me."

I looked at her.

"I kept my word," she said. "Now let the paramedics do their job and stay right next to me while they do."

I moved aside exactly as far as was necessary and not one centimeter further, and I held her hand the entire time, 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 me," I said as they loaded her into the ambulance. I climbed in without asking for permission, and nobody stopped me.

She looked up at me from the stretcher, pale and tired and somehow 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 mercy 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 something 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 outcome. I’d heard those same footsteps in a warehouse at midnight when he had a gun pressed to my head. I heard that voice at 11:47 PM telling me I’d stolen his brother. I’d lived for months in the shadow of a man who had put hidden cameras in my home and watched me in my most private moments like I was something he owned, something he could use.

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