Chapter 46
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
ADDIE
Islept soundly.
This surprised me when I surfaced into awareness and took stock of it.
In the last forty-eight hours I had been kidnapped, chemically suppressed, rescued by a man covered in someone else's blood, had more orgasms than a reasonable person should attempt to count, discovered my husband was trying to exile my best friend, watched my brother kill our father, and stood helpless while a man I barely knew carried my best friend's unconscious body to a car.
By any metric, my nervous system should have staged a formal protest.
Instead, I had slept as if I was made of stone. Deep and total and dreamless, the kind of sleep that only happens when the body has finally decided it had enough. I was still working out what I thought about that when I smelled it.
Chicken. Ginger. Something savory and slow-cooked. It came under the door and found me before I was fully awake. It did something immediate and involuntary to the tension I'd been carrying in my shoulders since yesterday.
Then the knock.
Two, then one, then two. Then his voice. "Can I come in?"
In the days since Vidar Blackwood had decided I was going to be his wife, he had walked into rooms I was in, appeared in doorways, materialized in offices and kitchens and hallways with the absolute certainty of a man who did not experience thresholds as barriers.
He did not knock and wait. He did not ask.
"Yes," I said.
Vidar was in yesterday's clothes; the same suit pants, jacket gone, shirt untucked.
His hair wasn't right. His eyes had the particular quality of a person who has been awake for a long time doing something that wasn't restful.
He was carrying a bowl of soup and a spoon, and he looked, for the first time since I had known him, uncertain.
Not afraid. Vidar Blackwood didn't do afraid. Or at least he'd spent twenty years making sure nobody could see it. But uncertain — yes. Standing in my doorway with a bowl of soup and looking at me the way a man looks at something he doesn't have a formula for.
He came to the bed. He didn't hand me the bowl. He sat on the edge of the mattress, dipped the spoon, and held it out to me.
"It's from my mother."
I looked at the spoon. I looked at him. I opened my mouth.
He fed me in silence. Slow, unhurried spoonfuls.
Between each one, he took a bite himself.
Back and forth in that way; him feeding me, feeding himself, the steam rising between us in the gray morning light.
He didn't look away. I didn't either. It was the strangest and most domestic thing that had ever happened to me.
Sensation moved through my chest like the broth was moving through my body, warming something that had gone cold in the night.
When the bowl was empty, he set it on the nightstand and looked at me.
"I know I'm supposed to give you my heart," he said.
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Decided to see how this played out.
"I've been told that's the correct answer.
" Vidar looked at his hands, then back at me.
"I'm not good with metaphors. Poetic language — it doesn't come naturally.
I say things and they come out like a legal document because that's what I understand.
" He reached into his jacket pocket and produced his phone.
He laid it on the bed between us. Then, from his wallet, a folded card — handwritten, dense with numbers and codes.
"Those are my passcodes. Financial accounts, security systems, access points for every asset I control.
" He held up a finger. "Not my family. That's the only condition.
Whatever you do with the rest of it, the family stays out of it. "
I looked at the card, at his unlocked phone screen. Then at him. "Out of what?"
"Mutually assured destruction." He said it simply, as if it was obvious.
As if it was the most romantic thing he knew how to say, which, I was realizing, it was.
"If you have that, you can ruin me. Not my brothers, not my parents, not the pack — but me, everything I've built, the financial architecture I've spent fifteen years constructing.
You could take it apart in a week with those codes.
" He held my gaze. "I know that's not how other men do this.
I know there are… words for it, and gestures, and I'm aware that's what's usually expected.
But I'm giving you the thing that would actually cost me something.
That's as close as I know how to get to what you asked for. "
"I don't want to destroy you."
Vidar breathed that in as if my words were chicken soup for his soul.
"I don't want us to destroy each other."
Something shifted in his face. "If you leave, it will destroy me, Addie."
Outside, the city was doing its indifferent thing: taxis and sirens and the low machinery of eight million people moving through their ordinary days.
Inside, there was just the empty bowl and the card on the bed and a man who had been awake all night and was sitting on the edge of my mattress, having given me, in his way, everything.
"Just give me a reason to stay," I said.
Vidar looked at me, lost.
"I thought all I wanted was recognition; to be seen as someone worth something. To have a seat at the table and be allowed to use my brain and not be someone's property. I want more than that. I want what your father has with your mother. I want that. Love me like that."
I watched my husband think. Watched him work through the problem.
"You mean the PDA in every room of the house.
In front of our children, which means I'd need to get you pregnant first. That will take some lead time.
Before that. I can touch you constantly.
Tell you I love you. Watch you like a hawk whenever you're in a room.
I watched my father do stuff like that for my mother my entire life. Is that what you want?"
I managed to swallow past the lump in my throat. "Yes, please."
He nodded as if the problem had been solved. "I can do those things. I know how to do those things."
Something cracked open in my chest. "That's a good start."
The expression that moved across his face then was not the smile from the morning after he made love to me for the first time. This was something newer and less controlled. It took up more of his face. It reached his eyes.
He leaned forward and kissed me.
It wasn't urgent. It wasn't the claiming pressure of the last week.
It was slow and careful and warm. It tasted like his mother's soup and something else underneath it that I was finally willing to name.
It was love. My husband, the man who forced me to marry him and then made me fall in love with him, loved me.
I broke the kiss.
Vidar made a low sound of protest.
"Nell," I said. "Nell stays. In New York. Running Sterling."
A muscle moved in his jaw. His eye did something complicated — a twitch, suppressed immediately, the specific micro expression of a man absorbing a condition he had not fully made peace with yet. Might not ever. But he nodded.
"Good," I said.
I kissed him this time. He made a different sound — lower, warmer, his hands coming up to frame my face with a gentleness that was still new enough to catch me off guard.
We moved together in the gray morning light with none of the desperation of before, just the steady, unhurried warmth of two people who had finally found the same page and were taking their time on it.
After he fucked me hard and the swell of his knot went down, he held me loosely. But I wasn't fooled. If I shifted, his hold would become two manacles.
When the light through the curtains shifted from gray to gold and his heartbeat had slowed under my ear to its deep, steady rhythm, he shifted beside me. His hand moved to the back of my neck. Slowly, deliberately, he turned his head and pressed my face to the side of his throat.
The skin was warm under my lips. His pulse beat against them, steady and unhurried, and alive.
He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. He just held me there — not forcing, not demanding, just offering the space, telling me without words that this was mine if I wanted it. That he was mine if I wanted him.
I opened my mouth. My teeth found the curve of his neck.
His whole body went still; the stillness of a long-held breath finally released.
I bit down, the claiming instinct rising through me, clean and absolute. The sound he made was low and broken and private; the sound of a vault that had been locked for twenty years finally opening all the way.
I licked the mark clean. Pressed my lips to it once.
Vidar exhaled. His arms tightened around me. He tucked my head into the hollow of his chest and pulled me close. My ear over his heart. His chin resting on my hair. The mark on his throat pulsed in time with the one on mine.