---
Time was a blade. Damien paced the control room like a trapped animal, each step a question. Forty minutes had passed since Sean vanished into the garden, and nothing good came of silence.
Sean burst in, breathless and pale. "Sir, we caught it on CCTV — he was taken. But we couldn't get a fix on the vehicle's exit point."
"What do you mean?" Charles demanded.
"The cameras were tampered with. The footage cuts out at the car park," Sean said, dropping the remote on the console.
Something on the table toppled with a thunderous crash — Damien's fist. The sudden noise snapped everyone's heads toward him.
"Calm down, Damien," Charles said, hands up, trying to ground his brother.
"Check every camera outside the building now. Every angle. If anyone missed something, you'll lose your head," Damien barked, voice low and cold.
---
Aiden woke with a scream already caught in his throat. Light stabbed through a narrow slit; his wrists were bound. The scarf was gone, but his vision swam and the room felt wrong — a private suite in a hotel, unfamiliar and draped in shadows.
"You're awake," a voice said from the dark.
He tried to speak, but his mouth was dry. Panic pushed at him. "Where am I? What do you want?"
The man leaned closer, face still obscured in shadow. "You were in the wrong place at the wrong time," he said. "Nobody will come for you."
Aiden thrashed against his bonds, heart pounding. Footsteps receded, voices murmured outside the room. The stranger's hand brushed Aiden's arm; Aiden froze, then fought harder. He forced himself to breathe, to listen, to remember.
Somewhere down the hall a phone rang. The kidnapper answered, voice low and taunting. "Say hello to Daddy," he said into the screen — and Aiden recognized Damien's face in the small window of the video call, fury carved into every line. For a heartbeat the kidnapper held the phone so Aiden could see Damien's lips moving: "Don't you dare hurt him."
"Don't touch him," Damien hissed into the line, voice breaking with a raw edge.
The kidnapper laughed, cruel and easy. "You can try to save him, old ice prince — but he belongs to me now. You have twenty-four hours."
Then the line went dead.
---
Back in the control room, the news of the video call had the team scrambling. "Who called from an unknown number?" Damien demanded.
Charles pointed at a lanky student standing awkwardly by the back wall. "Drake can trace phone metadata — he's a whiz. He can try, if he has a terminal."
Drake swallowed, suddenly thrust into the light. "I can try, sir, but I need a workstation and access to the telco logs," he stammered.
"Get it," Damien said. "Now."
Sean raced for the comms, barking orders into his earpiece. Cameras were spun and re-spun; feeds were fed into every monitor. Team members pinged guards, checked entrances, and cross‑checked the vehicle manifests. The hotel security insisted no car had left on any official log — but someone had engineered a clean exit.
Drake slammed his laptop open, fingers moving in a blur. Lines of code scrolled. "Give me any ping, any tower handoff from an unknown outbound call," he muttered. "I can triangulate — but it will take a minute."
Damien's jaw throbbed. "Make it thirty seconds," he said.
Aiden lay on the bed, every noise a thunderclap. He tried to steady his breath and think — where had they passed on the way from the garden? A service corridor? A valet area? He forced his memory to run backward, mapping the path he had taken.
The kidnapper moved around the suite, muttering to himself, smug in the quiet. "He'll remember me," the man murmured, as if comforting himself more than threatening Aiden.
On the monitors, Drake's terminal blinked. A single trace route lit a dot on the city's map — a ping, faint but real. "There's something," he announced, voice hoarse with concentration. "It's weak, but it's westbound from the port district. A car's phone handed off to a cell tower pattern…"
Damien didn't wait for more. "Gear up. We leave now," he said, already heading for the door, every second a knife. Charles followed, Sean trailing, and Drake grabbed his laptop and a portable hotspot.
They were minutes from pulling out when Drake's screen flickered and a new inbound call lit up: the unknown number again. Drake stared, fingers hovering. The labored calm in the room collapsed into a single breath of resolve.
"Pick it up," Damien ordered.
Drake answered with trembling hands.
On the other end, the kidnapper's voice purred, "I told you, ice prince — he's mine. Catch me if you can."
---