Chapter Thirty-Five
Elena
She ran until her lungs burned, until the tree line gave way to open field, and it was there — stumbling into moonlit pasture with her hands still half-bound and her breath tearing ragged in her chest — that she saw headlights cutting across the dark, moving fast along a farm road in the distance.
For one terrible second she thought it was Dubois's men, circling to cut her off. Then the lead vehicle's spotlight swept across the field and found her, and a voice she would have known anywhere, distorted through a car's external speaker, cut across the cold night air.
"ELENA."
She was already running toward the lights when the car skidded to a stop and Damon was out of it before it had fully halted, closing the distance between them at a dead sprint, and Elena collided into his arms with enough force to nearly take them both to the ground.
"You're here," she gasped, her bound hands finally giving way to whatever adrenaline had left in her, her whole body shaking now that the running was over and there was nothing left to do but feel everything at once. "How did you—"
"Anya's team traced the property two hours ago.
" Damon's hands were shaking as he worked at the restraints on her wrists, his voice raw, wrecked, unlike anything she'd heard from him before.
"We were thirty seconds from breaching the farmhouse when the alarm went up.
I thought—" His voice broke entirely. "Elena, I thought I was too late. "
"You weren't." She pressed her face into his chest, breathing in the cold night air and the wool of his coat and the specific, steady sound of his heartbeat hammering beneath her ear. "I got myself out. I wasn't waiting to be rescued."
"I know." Something in his voice cracked between pride and anguish. "God, Elena, I know exactly who you are. I just also know I would have burned that entire building to the ground if they'd hurt you before we arrived."
Behind them, Anya's team had already moved on the farmhouse, and within the hour, both of Elena's abductors and a shaken, cooperative Serge Dubois were in federal custody, the last loose thread of Concord's network finally, fully accounted for.
Elena sat wrapped in a blanket in the back of Damon's car on the drive back toward the city, his arm around her, his lips pressed to her hair every few minutes as if he needed the repeated confirmation that she was actually, physically there.
"It's over," she said quietly, more to herself than to him. "Damon, I think it's actually over now."
"It's over," he agreed, and for the first time since the phone call four hours earlier, allowed himself to fully believe it.