Chapter 332 Ambush
Damian’s POV
I woke with Aria still curled against me, her hair spilling across my chest, her breath warm on my skin. Morning light was already pushing through the curtains, laying pale gold across the sheets. For a moment I let myself have it—the quiet, the weight of her body, the impossible fact that after twenty years she was here.
Then the phone on the nightstand buzzed, and reality came crawling back.
The name Byron Finch had been eating at me for days.
Aria stirred, propping herself up on one elbow. "You’re already somewhere else," she murmured, reading my face the way she always could. "Talk to me."
So I did. Over the next few days there was nothing else. Rick pulled every string the Blackwood name could pull, and still Byron Finch was a ghost. No property records. No travel logs.
"Nobody’s this clean," Rick said one night, dropping a folder onto the table hard enough to scatter the pages. "A living man leaves a trail. Unless someone’s sweeping it behind him."
"Then he’s alive," I said. "And he’s worth keeping alive. That’s something."
Aria worked beside me through all of it. She was better than any of us at reading the rot buried inside a ledger, and the cross-pack network Vincent Smith had left her turned out to be the crowbar we needed. Shell companies, offshore accounts, dummy leases—she followed the money the way a wolf follows blood.
It took the better part of a week. Dead ends, false names, hours that bled into each other until I lost track of what day it was. But on the sixth night, near three in the morning, she went still over the laptop, and I knew before she said a word.
"There." She turned the screen toward me. "Three years ago, Finch leased a warehouse out past the industrial line through a shell company. Rent’s never lapsed. Someone’s been keeping it current for him."
I looked at the address and felt something inside me lock into place.
The next morning, I made my decision.
I waited until she was in the shower. Then I pulled on my jacket and checked my weapon.
"You were going to go alone."
Her voice came from behind me. I turned. She stood in the doorway, sunlight from the window catching in her damp hair, her eyes were cold as steel.
"Aria—"
"You weren’t even going to tell me." She crossed the room and closed her hand hard around my wrist. "When were you planning to mention it? After?"
"This is different," I said, keeping my voice low. "Byron isn’t Ethan. He’s got bodies to his name. He doesn’t play by any rules. I’m not bringing you into that."
"So you lock me up here and let me sit somewhere safe while I wait to find out if you’re coming back?" Her jaw was tight. "Listen to me, Damian. If it ever comes to that—if something happens to you—I will not stay put. I’ll come looking. So either you take me with you, or you accept that you’ll never once know where I am."
I looked at her.
I’ve made grown Alphas drop their eyes with nothing but the weight of my presence. But this woman stood in front of me, those gemstone-green eyes cutting straight through me, and didn’t give an inch.
"What I’m afraid of," I finally said, and my voice came out rougher than I meant it to, "isn’t dying. It’s you. It’s turning around one day and finding you gone. I learned that fear twenty years ago through a chain-link fence—every afternoon you didn’t show up, I was certain you were dead."
She froze.
I reached out and tucked a wet strand of hair behind her ear. "I’m not trying to cage you. I just don’t know how to keep from losing you."
Her eyes went glassy. She stepped into me and wrapped her arms around my chest, pressing her face against me.
"Then don’t protect me by pushing me away," she said, muffled against my shirt. "I want to stand beside you."
I kissed the top of her head. "Okay."
We drove out together late that morning. Rick had a car waiting, and we took the quiet route past the edge of the city, avoiding the main roads. The warehouse sat at the far end of the industrial district. The farther we went, the emptier the road became, the sun climbing high and white over rows of shuttered lots.
Aria sat beside me, her hand laced through mine the whole way.
"It’s too quiet," she said suddenly.
I’d felt it too. The stretch of road ahead of us was completely empty. No traffic. No movement.
Then the tires blew out.
Both at once, a sharp double crack, and the car lurched hard to the right. Rick fought the wheel but the road was already spitting sparks beneath us. In the mirror I caught them—two dark SUVs, no plates, closing fast.
"Ambush," Rick snarled. "They boxed the route."
Gunfire cracked against the rear windshield. I shoved Aria’s head down and Rick threw the car sideways, tires screaming.
Up ahead a city bus sat idling at a lone stop, its doors still open, a midday line hauling a handful of passengers. It was the only cover for a mile in any direction.
"There," I said. "Move."
Rick slammed the wheel over and skidded us in behind it. We came out of the car low and fast under a hail of gunfire, and there was nowhere else to run.
We took the bus.