Chapter 44
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
ADDIE
Magnus stepped into a pair of dark pants and crouched down over me.
I hadn't let Vidar touch Nell, but for some reason I trusted Magnus to lift her limp weight from my arms with a gentleness that had no business existing in those hands.
I let her go because my legs were still working and hers weren't, and Magnus was large enough to carry her without effort.
I watched Gunnar put his hand on Elias's back and walk him away from what was left of our father.
I did not look at what was left of our father as Vidar led me away.
Vidar didn't say anything. He put his hand at the small of my back and walked me out of the park. I let him because I didn't have anything left in me that wanted to argue about direction.
We were silent in the car. Silent in the elevator to the penthouse. Silent as he closed the front door behind us. The lock engaged, and I stood in the center of the living room and looked out at the skyline and breathed.
Vidar came to stand beside me. Not behind me. Not blocking me. Beside me.
A plane moved across the gray sky. I counted to ten. Then I turned to face him.
"Nell," I said.
"Yes?"
"Anchorage."
"Yes."
He wasn't going to make me perform the full accusation.
I'll give him that; he knew what he'd done, and he wasn't going to pretend he didn't. He stood there in the remains of what had been a very good suit and looked at me with those gold eyes steady and gave me the acknowledgment without waiting for me to extract it.
"The closer she is to you, the closer she is to this world. The more she knows, the more danger she's in. Getting her out of the city—"
"Was protection," I interrupted. "For you. Not for her. Not for me."
He was quiet.
"You want my loyalty. You have been very clear about that since the first day I walked into your office. Loyalty is the Blackwood currency; I understand that. But Vidar, you have been systematically removing every person I am loyal to."
His jaw tightened. His lips parted, but I was not done.
"My father took everything from me and replaced it with nothing. You're doing the same thing but with better furniture and putting Nell in Alaska instead of nowhere."
"That's not what I'm doing."
"Then tell me what you're doing. Because from where I'm standing, I have my brother inside your estate under supervision, my best friend being shipped three thousand miles away, my career gutted and rebuilt under your name.
I have spent this entire marriage proving myself to you.
Proving I'm not my father. Proving I'm not a liability.
Proving my brain is worth something to your empire.
And I'm done. I'm done proving myself. I don't have anything left to prove.
The question I'm waiting for you to answer is whether you can do the same. "
"You left."
The words were quiet. Not an accusation exactly; something more exposed than that. Raw at the edges in a way I hadn't heard from him before.
"You slipped your detail. You went to meet your brother and that woman, and you didn't tell me."
"I went to protect you. Elias had information about the Ironwood seizure.
About the silent partners who backed the play against your family.
I was trying to figure out how to bring it to you — how to give you something useful without blowing up everything I've spent the last week trying to hold together. I was trying to find a compromise."
Something moved across his face. It was the faintest fracture in his composure as the pieces rearranged behind his eyes.
"You don't compromise," I continued. "I've watched you operate for days now.
It's your way or no way. You decide what's best, and you move, and you don't ask, and you don't explain.
Your brothers know how to read you. Your mother knows what you mean when you don't say things.
I don't have years of being a Blackwood behind me.
I'm still learning the language. And when I can't read you — when I find a relocation order with my best friend's name on it and I don't know if it was malice or strategy or something you didn't think would matter to me — I have nothing to work with. "
Vidar lowered himself onto the edge of the couch with the careful deliberateness of a man who had just found the ground closer than expected. His elbows went to his knees. He looked at the floor for a long moment.
"How can love grow in that kind of environment?" I asked.
The four-letter word stopped him. He winced as if I'd spat a curse.
I watched the word move through him the way a current moves through water; a visible disturbance, a change in the quality of the stillness.
He looked up at me, and for once, the gold eyes weren't calculating anything. They were just looking.
"My father had a brother," he said. "Not blood.
A man he'd fought beside for twenty years, built with, trusted with the kind of information that can end a family if it falls into the wrong hands.
When I was nineteen, that man smiled at my father across a table and gave the order for the ambush that killed four of our pack.
He'd been planning it for three years. He sat in our kitchen on Christmas. He was in the photos on our wall."
I sat down. Not across from him — beside him, close enough that our knees touched.
"My father survived. My brothers and I were strong enough to hold the pack together while he recovered.
I was still a kid. I decided that night that family was the only safe unit.
Blood was the only reliable bond. Anyone outside of that was a variable I couldn't control, and variables I couldn't control were threats. "
"My father hurt Elias and me our entire lives.
Both of us stayed long past the point where we should have left, because he was blood and we had been taught that blood was the highest obligation.
" I held my husband's gaze. "Blood didn't protect us, Vidar.
It held us in place while he hurt us. Family isn't a guarantee.
It's a choice that gets made over and over again. "
His jaw was tight. I could see him processing it — not dismissing it, actually working it through, the way he worked through everything, with the full weight of that machinery turned on a thing that resisted his categories.
"The people I love are not a threat to you. The way you treat me looks like a threat in their eyes. So can you blame them for fighting so hard to save me?"
He didn't answer.
"If you keep making choices that hurt me and the people I love, I will leave. I want to be clear about that. I will not compromise on that."
The silence that followed was different from the silence in the car, or the elevator, or the locked door. It had texture. It had weight. It was the silence of a man who had just had something he believed in since he was a teen turned over in his hands and shown to him from the other side.
Vidar looked at his watch. He looked at the skyline. He looked at his hands. Then he looked at me.
"You should get some rest." He nodded his head towards my door. Not his bedroom.
I was too tired to fight. So I got up and went to my room.