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thefangirlofhp · 1 year

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Apaixonar-Chapter 25

“How was I to know, I’m not strong? I should have saved you.” -Brighton, Forest Fire.

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“I promise,” he vowed while he gently twirled them around to the sweet tune blaring through speakers. “No guns in the house. And Winnie will never see one. When this is over, I’m done. For good.”

Her smile squeezed her eyes as she held onto his shoulder and his hand, her skirts flaring around them and settling heavily back down. “Sounds to me like you’re promising me to get out.”

“I swear,” his forehead pressed to hers, she’d felt like the whole world was given to her. “The second this is over, I’m turning in my badge.”

“But what will you do then?” she deflected the tightness in her chest that came from hope by a teasing grin. “How will you quiet your overthinking mind? I can’t see you being a trust-fund boy.”

His lips smiled, staring her in the eyes with the kind of devotion that people had when sacrificing the world for their love. “I’m hoping to focus on my personal life. The people I love. My family. My three girls.”

“Three?” Elain raised a brow as he gently tipped her back.

He grinned. “You really don’t expect me to abandon Rebel?”

Her giggle came straight from her chest, easy and delighted. “So we’re your girls now, are we?”

“If you’ll have me,” said Azriel, softly, his hands on the small of her back, around her hand, while looking like he needed nothing else in the world. “I really, really am hopelessly in love with you. And I know it hasn’t been long enough for me to say it, or expect it from you, but God help me, I know it in my bones as if I’ve never known anything else. I never looked forward to anything before you. It really is a mix of agony and hope but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Her breath stuttered in her chest, they’d stopped dancing while the couples around them carried on, as if Elain’s life wasn’t changing. As if she wasn’t about to put her hands on it, about to raise it high up for the world to see and shout: here it is. I found it.

“And what about your job?” she breathed, her voice faint. “How’re you going to carry out your dream but still be there after?”

“I’ve put plans in place,” he pulled her against him, laid his arm across her back and held the back of her head. Her heels allowed her to easily hold his eyes, to not crane her neck when she settled her hands on his shoulders. “Insurances. I want to stick around for the after, Elain. There’s a fuckton of things I want to do with you.”

She smiled, a little shaky, a little watery. “Like?”

“Grow old,” he whispered, his eyes soft. “Grow old together and sit on the porch after our grandkids leave and complain about the headaches they gave us all day and do it all over the next day. I want to be shouted at for screwing the jam jar to tight—“

“I’ll kick you if you do that,” she cut through, her eyes damp.

He grinned. His arm tightened. “I really just want you, Elain. Whenever, wherever, however. I want to buy you new rings on our anniversaries because I can’t decide. Fucking hell, I want everything.”

She shushed him with an index against his lips. “The potty mouth has got to go.”

His entire face softened further, if possible. Kissed her finger. “Okay.”

“Just to be clear, that was not a proposal, was it?”

“Do you want it to be?”

“Are you kidding?” Elain smiled. “Propose on someone’s engagement party? There’s nothing tackier than that. Besides, that’s a lazy proposal.”

“Oh, so I have free reigns to be creative?”

Elain looped her arms around his neck, feigning thinking about it. She shrugged. “I guess. Nothing tasteless, though.”

“I’ll just consult Winnie. She’s got some strong opinions on us. Pretty sure she’d advocate for something Disney-like. Hey, what’s your favorite—”

Winnie.

“They were getting ready for bed,” Alis manages to voice quietly. “Win—Winnie woke up a few hours after going to bed, she couldn’t sleep. I let them stay up a little to wear out…”

Her breath stuttered in her chest, they’d stopped dancing while the couples around them carried on, as if Elain’s life wasn’t changing. As if she was—

“How’d they get in?” Rhys asks darkly, arms folded over his chest, body stiff and tense and inches away from knocking someone to death.

Felix. Winnie. Her babies.

“I’m hoping to focus on my personal life. The people I love. My family. My three girls.”

“Three?” Elain raised a brow as he gently tipped her back.

“..I was fetching the kids some milk, and next thing I knew I was on the floor and the world was going in circles. I—I saw them go upstairs, and Felix was shouting…putting up a fight. I saw them take them. I was t-told to pass on a message.”

“To who?” Feyre murmurs, drained.

Alis looks up. “Only to tell Mr. Blackwood to expect a phone-call. And—And to the detective, that this is what happens when you don’t lay off.”

“I promise,” he vowed. “No guns in the house. And Winnie will never see one.”

Elain’s hands shake around a ceramic mug. Azriel calmly stares into Alis’s face, strangely quiet and intensely still as if his body is not human anymore, slowly standing up in some detached way before facing Rhys who stares at Alis with an expression harder than stone, darker than night, gone the mirth and the haughty arrogance that he wields against his opponents, replaced by something dark and scared.

“Rhys—“ Azriel murmurs, stepping up to him, missing how Rhys’s eyes flash to him, the gleaming rage his only warning before a sudden blow dislocates his jaw, one that knocks his body to the side and yet, still, Azriel keeps his stand.

“I fucking warned you,” Rhys’s voice shakes as Cassian roughly grabs him by the arms from behind. “I TOLD YOU. AND YOU DIDN’T GIVE TWO SHITS—“

“I promise. No guns in the house. And Winnie will never see one.”

Winnie, currently probably dead or terrified out of her wits with murderers. Kidnapped. Her baby. Her fucking baby—

“I promise. No guns in the house. And Winnie will never see one.”

The mug tumbles from her hands, smashes into a million pieces on the floor and Elain can’t stop the shaking in her arms. In every inch of her body. Everything in her is screaming in agony, everything hurts, she needs to do something, she must get her baby back, she must. She must. Her baby.

The paramedic wraps her arms around Elain tightly, whispering soothing nonsense in her ear and Elain cannot think straight, or think at all. Her mind is fractured, everywhere, trying to pretend this isn’t real while listening to the police and the paramedics and Rhys shout on and on at Azriel, while an officer gets everyone to calm down and listen, some reasoning about needing to keep their heads because a phone call will be made any moment now and the kids will be safe home soon. But Elain cannot for the life of her wait for such a demanding phone-call, cannot for the life of her not be ill while stewing in this anxiety.

Her wrist aches.

She rocks herself back and forth, her arms wrapped around her chest, listening but not really focused. She hears Azriel talk to her, but all she hears is the promise he made about a new start. She hears Varian take him aside when she doesn’t respond, listens to Varian tell Azriel things will be all-right; that he will not be allowed to join this case in any capacity due to his attachment to the victims, but that the Anti-Kidnap and Extortion force is going to handle this seamlessly; she listens to him tell him that he is not to blame; argues that this has nothing to do with Azriel, but a sort of extra ‘fuck you’ because he is irrelevant to them now that their evidence is ruined and they have nothing incriminating anymore; he says that cutting a deal with Rhys is the final nail in the coffin ensuring no-one will bother the organized crime world in Velaris. They need the kids alive and well to strike a good bargain, so they will be safe and sound in their arms very soon.

Elain keeps rocking herself. Even as Varian tells Azriel to comfort her, to say something to alleviate her grief—“Her kid’s collateral damage, for fuck’s sake, Az’—as if anything other than her baby in her arms will calm her down.

The word clangs around in her head for far longer than it should, as Azriel sits next to her and stares quietly at her. Varian thinks Winnie’s collateral damage. Which would make sense, when kidnapping Felix is all that’s needed to extort the daylights out of Rhys. It’s not as if leaving Winnie be would have ruined their plans, as if the baby could be considered a witness and give them descriptions and names and—and—

She’s just a baby.

A sob escapes her. Arms wraps themselves around her and her voice is sobbing on and on about “bring her back” repeatedly to whoever is holding her as she trembles. Shakes.

Bring her back, she keeps saying. Over and over and over.

Azriel swears that he will. For every plea of hers, he swears it.

____

“You harm a single fucking hair on his head and I’ll rip you apart myself,” Rhys calmly threatens the voice on the phone.

They’re set up in his study. The Anti-Kidnap and Extortion force practically made Rhys memorize what he must say and do—keep his cool, keep them talking, do not fall apart. Azriel’s been clenching his teeth the entire time, and his stomach flipped over when Rhys’s phone finally rang. The task force is deadly silent, making no sound while they negotiate.

“The children are quite well,” replies the cool feminine voice of one Amarantha. Varian delivered Azriel a warning look the minute she piped up, and Azriel’s hands were too shaking for him to think straight. “Bit snotty and red-eyed but still in one piece.”

Rhys’s hands clench over a pen so hard, his white knuckles snap it in two. “What do you want.”

“I think you know.”

His lips tremble around words he stops himself from saying before snarling. “I don’t.”

A sharp sudden cry of pain has Rhys flipping over his office chair while Azriel jumps from his skin and Varian tightens the claw-hold he has on his shoulder.

“Right,” Amarantha comes back. “Let’s set this straight. That was a taster—“

“You fucking bitch,” Rhys’s voice trembles.

“—of what will continue to happen to your little bundle of joy, Rhys, every second you delay and involve the police. Now, I’m told Daniel knows how to dislocate bones without breaking them, but I wouldn’t really count on it, would you?”

“What the fuck do you want,” Rhys repeats.

“Not so fast, darling,” she softly says. “You and that treasonous bitch are going to stew over a little in this before I hand in my demands.”

Feyre murderously stares at the phone set on the desk, her hands covering her pursed mouth.

Rhys runs his hands through his hair, wets his lips before trying again. “Felix has nothing to do with this.”

“Isn’t that what makes it so tragic?” Amarantha croons. “Poor thing, crying all alone surrounded by strangers while Papa tries to save him. Could he? We’ll see.”

Feyre’s nostrils flare, her eyes a particular shade of deadly. She meets her husband’s eyes, communicating something no-one else can understand.

Rhys forcefully calms his voice. “You harm a hair on his head, I swear to God, nothing of you will be left.”

“Hm,” the woman replies shortly, unimpressed. An agent holds up a notebook, Winnie?? Written in bold across the page.

“What about Winnie?” Rhys asks. “I need to know she’s okay.”

“Oh right, the other one,” Amarantha remembers before asking someone. “What did you do with her?”

Azriel might throw up right there.

“Ah,” she voices. “We’ll find out soon. Do stay by the phone, Rhys. I’d hate for you to miss a call.”

“Wait—!”

The line promptly disconnects, and they all look to Helion and Tarquin, the head of the task force trusted to lead this. Azriel has some trust in him because Varian vouched for him, but he doesn’t think he can stay collected for much longer.

“It’s how people like them extort,” Tarquin firmly, but gently, reminds Rhys. “They let you think the worst, they give you that impression, to get everything they need out of you. Most likely, the children weren’t even in that room and I assure you Amarantha is only making you anxious.”

It makes perfect sense. It should instantly alleviate any concerns anyone has. It is the same reasoning Azriel himself would use to calm a parent down, but fucking hell his mind has short-circuited to even think reasonably. Still, his gut churns. His blood boils.

“She won’t hurt them,” Feyre speaks up, quiet but calm. “Despite her history with us, she doesn’t gain anything from revenge. She’ll make us wait, and worry. Because she’ll get what she wants, then.”

“Right now I’m ready to give her every-fucking-thing.”

Feyre blinks at her husband. “..Yeah, you say that now.”

Azriel rakes his fingers through his hair and tugs down his black tie. Varian meets his eyes when he turns to him, monitoring every miniscule movement of his.

“Smoke,” he mutters, side-stepping him to step out of the room.

“What happened?” Cassian and Nesta immediately jump him. Morrigan watches him quietly. “What did they say? Are the kids all-right? What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Azriel answers, feeling his head throb. “Just pressing Rhys. They’re going to call again. Felix’s fine.”

“Winnie?!” Nesta demands, latching onto his shoulders. He cannot look her in the eyes.

“Dunno,” he whispers. “No mention of her.”

“Oh my God,” Nesta drops her hands and clutches her forehead. “What are you going to do?”

It is only there, under their respective gazes, that Azriel realizes they’re all looking to him for solutions. Not the entire team in there created specifically for such a purpose. Not the qualified professionals. Him—the homicide detective who got them in this situation.

Sometimes, like now, Azriel really fucking hates himself. He burns with it.

He takes out his cigarette packet and walks past them without a word. Cassian watches him go—he practically feels his gaze on him as he hurries down the stairs and crosses the entryway for the front doors.

It’s snowing.

Peacefully. Large thick snow drifting in the air before him, hauntingly beautiful as it covers the surfaces of police cars, gravel and bushes. It builds up on the fence, on the iron-wrought gates and the steps.

A small block of black snaps his attention to the stairs, where Elain’s sat in her black dress, her arms taught around her knees and her eyes distant. Snow gathers in her hair, melts against her bare freckled shoulders and she doesn’t make any gesture that she’s noticed him.

His feet jolt before he realizes it, yanking off his suit jacket to drape it over her with mystified horror. “You’ll freeze out here,” he breathes out, before dropping down next to her.

She’s still as a statue. Doesn’t acknowledge the warmth around her.

Azriel lights a cigarette in the peaceful, beautiful quiet and sits with the quiet love of his life in the wake of the disaster he’s brought on them. Another one.

“I’m sorry,” smoke mixes with fogging hot breath and his apology is not acknowledged.

His dress shoes crunch against the soft snow beneath them as he shifts them, and leans his elbows on his knees. Nicotine and loss make for a peculiar combination. His eyes sting. Winnie would have been making snowballs in them by now, throwing them at his head.

He desperately breathes in the cigarette smoke, holds it in. How long does he sit there, trying to find a sensible trail of thought?

“Hey,” Cassian’s rough gravelly voice eventually disturbs the silence. “Both of you, inside. Now.”

“Cass,” Azriel softly pipes up, tracing his lower lip with a scarred thumb. “You don’t know Amarantha, do you?”

His friend pauses, under the shelter of the estate, before walking out towards them. His voice is practically frowning. “The bitch from years ago?”

“The bitch from years ago,” Azriel echoes, staring at the distant point where the sky meets the road. “What do you know about her?”

Cassian stands next to them, steps down several steps and faces them both with a scowl. “Barely anything. Didn’t she have it out for Feyre? Went after Rhys?”

“That’s not what I’m asking.”

“You gotta help me out, then, man.”

“People close to her call her Natha,” Azriel announces quietly, watches Cassian’s face for a flicker of recognition. “Red hair. Marine.”

Cassian’s face twitches. “What year?”

“If I had that kind of information, we wouldn’t be here.”

“Look, man, I don’t know every soul in the Corps.”

“Could you find out?” Azriel requests and Elain turns her head towards him. “Ask around, nothing obvious. I think she’s your year, but that’s just my guess. Could be older—really likely, too.”

“I’ll ask the guys but don’t hold your breath,” Cassian promises. “Woman like that doesn’t fly under the radar.”

“Just in-case,” Azriel breathes.

Cassian studies his face with a tight strange expression, before he nods. “Come inside. Freezing to death doesn’t bring the kids back.”

He gets Elain to stand up, clutching Azriel’s jacket with a pale blue-tinged-nailed hand. Cassian murmurs words of reassurance as he helps her up the stairs and at the top, she pauses to look over her shoulder at him. His cigarette glows fiery red as he breathes it in, holding her doe-eyes in a quiet stare.

She is beautiful in her grief. It is a peculiar thought to have. Standing there on the top of the steps in the faint light of the early dawn, snow flurries in her unbound hair drifting over her face in the gentle breeze, nose and eyes red, mouth pursed together. Azriel looks up at her, craning his neck over his shoulder and somehow finds himself memorizing the lines of her.

“Be careful,” are the only hoarse words leaving her lips before she walks inside.

___

The conditions were crystal clear, and yet they were still breaking them. Rhysand is to meet them, alone, to be reassured of his son’s wellbeing and sign off on incriminating documents that will forever bind his hands and prevent him from ever pursuing any member of the Heptad. The blackmail is simple, efficient and provides the kind of hard evidence capable of locking Rhys up for all his life they don’t in turn have of the Heptad.

Azriel curses its brilliance. Not only have they eliminated any threat, but they’ve also handled any possible future chance of being persecuted. While Rhys is renowned for responding to blackmail with efficient fangs, Felix has cried in pain on the phone too many times for the father to handle. Azriel cannot get the sound of his nephew’s sobs out of his head, when Rhys delayed picking up the phone for the two rings in the time it took for the task force to connect to the call in order to pinpoint a location on it.

Azriel sits in the communications van with the team while they pull up the live footage they have from variously placed agents and cameras roughly surrounding the agreed-upon meeting place.

“What if they find out?” he quietly asks Tarquin.

“They won’t,” he responds surely. “Worst case scenario, they don’t show up.”

“Worst case scenario, they kill one of the kids,” Azriel retorts hotly.

“I understand your trepidation, Bougainvillea, I truly do,” Tarquin turns his eyes on him. “But they gain nothing from it. The way I see it, we let the President-appointed district attorney actively sign his own death warrant, we’re not faring so good. We have no idea what they want him to sign off on. It could be anything. It could bring down anyone.”

“They could kill the kids,” Azriel repeats. “These people have no fucking fear. They don’t give two shits, Tarquin. Ask me, the things I could tell you—”

Tarquin’s glance is encoded with several meanings. “Yes, we’ve heard a lot about you, Shadowsinger.”

His mouth dry, Azriel keeps his head. “Then you better believe me, nothing about this is going to be textbook.”

“I really appreciate your concern, but I have to remind you the only reason you’re in on the loop is a curtesy, Bougainvillea. Do not test me—“

“That’s my kid you’re risking,” Azriel clenches his hands into fists. “You have to listen to me: you need to expect the unexpected with those people.”

Their plan is protocol. With risks, as any plan is. It comes with the possibility that shit evidently could go horribly wrong, and every person working it has a certain degree of responsibility to see it through. Azriel, being a spectator, has jack shit to do except watch Rhys stand in a construction site, hands in his pockets as it snows, waiting for someone to show up with his kid and his doom.

The first ten minute delay is reasonable, Azriel figures. They want to further fray Rhys’s nerve. He gets it.

But then an hour goes past.

And nothing.

“Is—do we still wait or call it off?” one of the team asks a stone-faced Tarquin.

“Alpha team, do you see anything?”

“Negative, sir. All clear.”

“Omega, what about you?”

“Negative here too sir.”

“Anyone?”

Nothing.

“All teams stand by,” Tarquin orders, his jaw clenched. “Rhys, come back. It doesn’t appear they’ll show.”

His brother lets loose a strained breath. “I know it’s part of it, I really do, but I still want to tear the fucking cunts apart.”

Azriel’s phone buzzes, once, in his pocket.

In a sense, it is the start of a cassette tape unwinding following its clicking place home in the player. The beginning of a quiet, daunting melody that unwinds its tape with magnetic crackles making the hair on his arms stand. He draws it out, stares at the lockscreen for a long hard moment.

SHOULD HAVE LISTENED.

“Tarquin,” he looks up, as one of the camera feeds move.

“Sir this is Omega team 1, Viper speaking,” one of the agents speaks into the comms.

“What is it?”

“I have visual of something in the river canal. Permission to approach?”

“Granted. Be careful.”

“Copy that.”

“Tarquin,” Azriel tries again, holding out his phone, his eyes fixed on the feed from Viper’s cam. Tarquin takes the phone, frowning at the message from an unknown number.

“Sir, it—it appears to be an object in black plastic bag. It’s impacted on the bank, stopped drifting. Do I retrieve it?”

“Negative,” Tarquin orders, looking up from Azriel’s phone.

Azriel tries to make sense of what he’s seeing, or figure out exactly what the thing is in the murky waters.

“Sir,” the man’s voice tightens. “It’s a body bag.”

Azriel turns away from the screens, his hands slapping against his head while he turns his face towards the roof and clutches his hair tightly. The very air in the van thickens.

“Can you retrieve it?” Tarquin calmly asks.

“Yes. Easily.”

“Do it.”

Azriel’s ears are actively tuned in to the comms, the water splashing and sloshing when Viper reaches in, the dragging and hauling of the body out of the water. His heart jumps with every sound, and it leaps out of his chest when the van door opens and Rhys steps in.

He closes his eyes when his brother’s eyes meet his and frown.

“What--?” Rhys begins, before falling quiet.

A zipper pulled down. So fucking loud over the speakers. Plastic shoved apart. Azriel cannot look while Viper reads off a card.

“Now will you listen closely, and save your niece?” his voice announces, and suddenly: the world goes quiet. His breath catches, audibly.

“Sir, i-it’s Felix Blackwood.”

___

Death wound have been kinder, to all of them.

The mortuary is a quiet place where the sleep of the dead is the only sound to be perceived, echoed by the nature of its existence and its emptiness, and the sacrality of where the dead are forever laid to rest. It is a place for silence, yet the echoes of Rhysand’s devastated screaming slices wounds in ears that even the dead cannot un-hear.

The body is bloated, burned and drowned. Half of him is unrecognizable, but it doesn’t stop the parents’ devastated screaming as they clutch what was once the light of their lives. That floppy black hair, those small hands. It takes both Cassian and Azriel to hold Rhys back, screaming the depths of his heart in the mortuary, while Nesta locks a hyperventilating Feyre in her arms, trying to stop her from going anywhere near the corpse on the table. Azriel’s ears are numb, and he doesn’t have any strength to keep standing anymore while Felix’s body keeps flashing before his watering eyes over Rhys’s shoulder and his brother is screaming, screaming himself hoarse, tearing his cords apart in a sound mankind has never heard before in its history.

Death is a much kinder fate than this.

_____

my computer, watching me type: 👁👄👁……why?

idfk man, i’m just wired that way.

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