And underneath that, driving everything with a pressure that had been building since the moment he'd arrived at this hospital to find Aria in a bed with tubes in her arms, the single, unavoidable, burning fact:
This had happened on Damien Blackwood's watch. Again.
"This happened because he couldn't protect you."
The words came out before he'd fully decided to say them. Not quietly, not the way he might have chosen to phrase it if he'd been thinking clearly, if he'd been operating with the careful precision he usually brought to confrontation. They came out with the raw, unfiltered force of a man who had been holding it together for sixteen hours and found, in the specific relief of Aria being conscious and speaking, that the thing he'd been containing had found an opening.
The room went very still.
Aria's eyes moved to him slowly, heavy-lidded, exhausted, but sharp. Still sharp. The mind behind them working even now.
