Chapter 65 I don’t care about my reputation

Chapter 65 I don’t care about my reputation
Adrian’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel, the city lights outside the rain-streaked windshield blurring into a smear of orange and grey. All that existed in his chest was a single, jagged thought that echoed like the striking of a bell: I will kill you with my own hands. It was not a prayer. It was not a promise he imagined he’d ever keep. It was the raw, animal pulse of someone who had been stripped of logic and left with nothing but the hot iron of retribution.

He drove like a man trying to outrun himself red lights swallowed, horns a distant, useless chorus. Every pothole, every sudden swerve, felt like a note in a frantic drumbeat drawing him toward the police station. He didn’t remember thinking about consequence. He didn’t remember deciding anything other than the look he wanted to put on Blake’s face when it finally settled into his sights.

When he pushed through the station doors, the fluorescent hum and the smell of disinfectant hit him like cold water. Blake sat in a metal chair under an interrogation lamp, hands cuffed, eyes hooded with a calm so practiced it made Adrian’s skin crawl. For the briefest second Blake blinked when he saw Adrian, and the tremor in that split-second was everything Adrian needed: the man was not innocent of intent, only of motive; he had not meant to hurt Zara maybe he had only meant to hurt Adrian. And yet the bullet had found Zara.

Adrian’s legs carried him forward with a step that had no memory of politeness. He crossed the room in three long strides, and then all the months of fear, of watching Zara shrink inside herself, of night terrors and whispered apologies, folded into the motion of his fist. He swung. The blow landed with a thud that sounded both too small and impossibly loud in the cramped room. Blake slumped, more surprised than pained, eyes glassy, utterly unreadable.

“Mr. Voss, don’t ” a uniformed officer started, hands lifting in the practiced, neutral posture of someone trained to defuse rather than to judge.

Adrian barely heard him. He leaned over Blake, the words carving out of him in a low, dangerous rasp. “Look you bastard,” he said. His voice was torn from some place inside that had never learned to be gentle. “If anything happens to Zara I am going to remove all your teeth. I will make your death so painful that it will be hard for you. You will ask for forgiveness.”

There was no swagger in his threat, no bravado. It was bone-deep, the guttural sound of a man who felt the world had been stolen from him and had nothing left but the right to howl. Blake looked down, and for the first time Adrian saw the thing the other man had been wearing these past weeks guilt, settled like a film over his features. “Mr. Voss, calm down. Leave the rest to the police,” Blake said, voice small and oddly contrite.

Adrian wanted to rip words from him, wanted explanations hammered into him like nails. But explanations would not push a bullet from a body or smooth the lines of a face that might never wake. He stormed out then, leaving the fluorescent light and the low hum behind, the promise of violence still warm in his mouth.

The hospital was a blur of antiseptic and the muffled sounds of televisions and walking shoes. When he rounded a corner, porcelain-faced and raw from the station, Adrian nearly collided with Alaric. Alaric stood in the corridor, eyes rimmed red, his face drawn into a map of grief and fury neither of which belonged wholly to him. Seeing him there was a sudden theft he had not expected to meet Zara’s father, had not wanted anyone else to know the depth of the catastrophe. Yet there he was, a man whose grief anchored the air around him.

“Why did you do this to my daughter?” Alaric’s voice was shredded to a whisper that carried across the small distance between them. The way his hands trembled, the way he fought for composure, made each word rawer than a lawsuit or a savage accusationthis was a parent’s core torn open and exposed.

Adrian stared at him, wordless. He could have explained. He could have tried to stitch together explanations that would make sense of the madness: But when the mouth opens to explain in the face of a man’s grief, explanations sound flaccid and small, like flapping wings against a storm.

Alaric’s voice was thick with something Adrian couldn’t name. “I was the one that wronged you by giving you the wrong daughter,” he said, as if reciting a confession that had perhaps only just occurred to him. “Why did you have to punish my daughter for it?” He swallowed hard. “Adrian Voss, I am done being weak. If anything happens to my daughter you gonna pay for it. I don’t care if it costs my reputation or not. There is a point where humanity kicks in you didn’t have to go this far.”

Each sentence pushed a nail deeper into Adrian’s guilt. The strange, halting admission about the wrong daughter felt like a revelation and a barb at once. Adrian had no right to untangle whatever past mistake Alaric was dragging out now; there was no moral ledger where his sins could be balanced with Alaric’s. All he knew was the one brutal fact: Zara had bled for him.

Alaric turned away, shoulders stiff, the kind of man who had thought himself invincible until the world proved otherwise. He left without looking back. Adrian watched him go, understanding in a way that made his stomach churn that any words he offered would be inadequate. Alaric’s exit left a hollow that sounded to Adrian like  like accusation that would follow him for the rest of his days.