Where Darkness Learned Breath by Rylor Dusk 166

166 Chapter 166 – The Shooting 

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.” 

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166 Chapter 166 – The Shooting 

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 put hidden stolen his brother. I’d lived for months in the shadow of a man who had cameras in my home and watched me in my most private moments like I was something he owned, something he could use. 

I knew Marcus Blackwood’s presence the way prey knows a predator. When he sat down at the bar, I didn’t look. 

I didn’t need to. 

He’s here, I thought, Stay in the plan. Let Barnes run the play. 

166 Chapter 166- The Shooting 

The wire at my collar suddenly felt very present – Barnes’s team on the other end, the sniper across the street with his confirmed shot, all of that invisible architecture that existed specifically to keep me breathing through the next ten minutes. I’d memorized the abort signal. I knew my exits. I’d done everything exactly right but I was still 

scared. 

The kind I’d been running on since the night I found a hidden camera in the bedroom and understood exactly what kind of man we were dealing with. The kind that had gotten me through a warehouse at midnight and a bullet to the chest and my son being taken from me, and all the things that should have broken me and hadn’t. 

When Marcus finally crossed the room to my table, I was ready. 

I looked up at him and felt nothing like surprise. I knew his face – the jaw that was Damien’s, the cheekbones that were Damien’s, the same genetics worn rougher and meaner. The scar across his cheek. The Blackwood eyes with none of the warmth Damien had. I had looked into those eyes in a warehouse while he pressed a gun to my head and told me I was the price Damien paid for abandoning family. I knew this face and right now i hated this face. 

“Ms. Monroe,” he said, smiling like we were running into each other at a charity gala. “What a coincidence.” 

“Is it?” I held his gaze, steady and cool. “You called me the night you broke out. You knew exactly where I’d be, Marcus. So let’s skip the performance.” 

Something shifted behind his eyes – surprise, quickly swallowed. He hadn’t expected me to open with that, and the small advantage of it felt good in my chest even through the fear. 

“You remember that call,” he said. 

– 

“I remember everything you’ve done,” I said quietly, and let him hear what was underneath it not just the call, but the cameras, the threats, the day he took my son, the bullet I’d worn a vest for. “Every single thing. So tell me what you actually came here for.” I asked, though I already knew. Men like Marcus didn’t come to talk. They came to finish things. 

“I want a lot of things,” he said. “But right now I just want to look at the woman my brother chose over everything else. Over me. Over his better judgment.” His eyes moved over me the way they had through hidden cameras, like I was something to be studied and taken apart. “You don’t look like much.” 

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166 Chapter 166- The Shooting 

Something burned hot in my chest at that not fear, not even anger, but the 

– 

accumulated fury of every violation, every threat, every night I’d checked my son’s room for bugs and found them, every moment he had stolen from us and watched from a distance and used as ammunition. 

“People keep underestimating me,” I said. “It never works out well for them.” 

His hand moved to his coat. I saw it a half–second before the agent on the operational channel said possible weapon, and I made the calculation instantly – he’s not here to 

and I said “Now” into the wire as clearly as I negotiate, he brought this to finish it 

could and threw myself sideways. 

– 

The table went over as the earpiece skittered across the tile floor. 

The shot was loud and much closer than any version of it had been in my planning, and then I was on the floor behind the overturned table with my ears ringing and 

something burning in my right shoulder that told me before I looked that I’d been hit. 

It was dark and spreading, the jacket sleeve ruined 

Ricochet, I understood. 

— 

and the pain arrived a beat later. 

From across the restaurant I heard “Clear!” and I turned my head and saw Marcus Blackwood on the floor, utterly still, and I felt something move through me that was too complicated to name and too raw to examine. Over, it was finally over. 

I pressed my hand to my shoulder and breathed and let my heartbeat decide what it wanted to do. Damien reached me before the paramedics finished their assessment. 

a commotion at the entrance, voices, the particular quality of I heard him first 

and then he was across the room and on someone refusing absolutely to be stopped 

— 

– 

his knees beside me before I’d fully processed he was there, his face doing something I’d never seen it do and hope to never see again. Pure, unguarded devastation. 

“I’m okay,” I said immediately, because that expression was physically painful to look at. “Damien. I’m okay.”