The front door to Nicole Pearce's house is still half-open, by the time Damien gets there. It's a little sad somehow, like the photograph of a house left abruptly empty in the wake of a disaster, found decades later, and a little poetic, considering by the time Aiden gets here, this too will be too little, too late. It's also a little irritating, how haphazard it all is, likely to draw attention if he hadn't already made sure no one would be calling the cops, a hundred little tricks to keep them away all in the palm of his hand, but he supposes you get what you pay for, so to speak. At least they did the job. At least Nicky is gone, spirited away somewhere where Aiden will never find her, not until he wants him to. He made sure of that, too.

This is where they are, now, this is what their relationship has become, kidnapping and blackmail, and it's all Aiden's fucking fault. Him and his bullheaded refusal to just work with him, now and before, at the Merlaut, both. If he'd just listened.

Sighing, Damien takes a moment, trying to dismiss his anger, then starts forward, hobbling towards the door to let himself in. He, unlike his hired help, closes the door behind him and drifts through the living room, taking it all in. It's all so suburban. He's not sure what he was expecting, knowing that Aiden's sister had two children, neither of them even teenaged yet, but it's jarring still, being able to hold Nicky and her living space next to Aiden and his. There are fucking crayon drawings on the refrigerator, even, and Damien all but scoffs as he rounds a chair, presumably tipped over when his people dragged Nicky out, to get to them.

He takes a moment to study them, and -- well, wasn't his life so simple, so white picket fence, once, too? He's had his fingers in people's digital closets since the internet got big, thumbing through their virtual skeletons, he's always been a hacker, but there were children's drawings hung on his refrigerator, too, once upon a time. And then it all fell apart. And then he went to prison. And then Christina served him their divorce papers from the other side of a glass partition. And then she took custody of their fucking son, his son.

Mood tanking again, he wonders bitterly if Aiden realizes everything that he has here. He wonders if he realizes how much he's about to lose, now, for not wanting to play ball, just for a little bit, just long enough to catch the other hacker. Guess he'll find out. They both will.

Stepping away from the refrigerator, he starts in a slow circle around the rest of the kitchen and reaches for his phone, tucked away in his pocket. After checking the time, making sure that Aiden's had time to run the gauntlet of wild goose chases he's led him on to keep him away from here, he thumbs through his contact list to find his number. He doesn't even get a hello, when Aiden answers the phone. Instead, he leads with, "Where are you?"

"I don't think you're going like my answer," Damien tells him, tone still unhappy.

"You know what? Forget it," Aiden tells him. Damien pauses, as something on the wall, some odd imperfection in the crown molding catches his eye. He beelines for it, trying to put his finger on what grabbed him, here, as Aiden continues to rant. "I don't need whatever you've got. You brought me nothing but trouble. We're done talking."

"Oh, too late, Aiden," he snaps back, and that's when he sees it. There, cut into the molding is a small but perfectly round circle. It's almost unnoticeable, if you're not used to looking for surveillance tech, if you're not used to using it. Nicky probably didn't even know her brother was spying on her, and it has to be Aiden's, because who else would care about suburbia? He puts his phone on speaker and pulls up one of his hacking programs to trace the feed, just to be sure. "You won't believe where I am."

And all roads do lead to Rome, to Aiden. He smiles, and hits a few more buttons, gearing up for the big reveal. "Never mind. I'll send you the feed. Find a TV and look."

Somewhere halfway across town, in the little plaza Damien sent Aiden to, a line of screens built into the side of a building, for advertising purposes, spring to life. Damien, on every one of them now, leans up into the camera on Nicky's wall and waves, grinning wolfishly. He's pretty sure he hears Aiden's breath catch and the grin widens.

"That's Nicky's house! What are you doing?" he demands.

"You should hurry, my boy. Your pretty sister needs you."

He waits for that reaction, for Aiden screaming his name, and then he hangs up. The feed he's bouncing to dies about the same time, and he settles in to wait, feeling much lighter. Aiden really should have taken him seriously, the first time around.