Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Ayanna
Tassilo’s driving like the road personally offended him, knuckles white against the steering wheel, every muscle in his body drawn tight enough to snap.
My heart hasn’t slowed since the gunfire. Since Aric shoved me down. Since his body covered mine and his blood seeped into my dress.
“That bullet—” I whisper, fingers trembling. “It was meant for me.”
Tassilo doesn’t even glance at me. “We don’t know that.”
I look at him instinctively. He speaks. I didn’t even know the silent executioner who usually communicates in grunts and murderous stares had full sentences in him.
For a long moment, neither of us speaks again.
I turn and focus on the road ahead, which winds through dense forest before briefly spilling onto the edge of the fjord, its black waters glimmering beneath the northern lights.
Then we’re swallowed by the trees again, until the mountains rise beyond them.
The entire time, my pulse is still in my throat, choking me. “Someone tried to kill me,” I mutter involuntarily.
“Whoever it was is now at war.”
My breath stutters. “Because of me.”
“No, because they were stupid.”
I focus my attention on him again.
His jaw twitches before he adds, “They will pay for it.”
I swallow hard. The car hits a curve, and my stomach roils. “Where are we going?” I ask, voice thinner than I’d like.
“Home,” he says.
Home.
Strange word for a place that feels like a beautiful cage. Stranger still that part of me wants to be taken anywhere Aric is.
“And what about Aric?” My voice breaks on his name, and I hate it. “Where did he go? He was bleeding, and you just”—I gesture wildly—“you just drove off!”
Tassilo exhales through his nose, the sound halfway between annoyance and reluctant reassurance.
“Boss knows what he’s doing.”
I clench my jaw, fingers digging into my knees. “He was shot.”
“He’s had worse.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better.”
Tassilo finally flicks his eyes toward me, though barely for a second. But his gaze is sharp and intentional, like he’s weighing the truth he can give me against the truth he has to keep.
“You’re safe,” he states plainly. “That’s my job. His job is staying alive.”
The mansion is glowing when we pull up. Warm lights leak through the windows like nothing bad could possibly happen here.
Lies. All of it.
But the moment I step inside, Ingrid rushes toward me, her face crumpled with worry as if she’s known me my whole life.
“Oh, kjaere,” she breathes, her hands immediately cupping my arms, my face, checking I’m whole. “You’re shaking. Come, come, let’s get you warm.”
She doesn’t ask what happened. She doesn’t prod or panic. She just…takes care of me. And I didn’t realize until now how desperately I needed someone to do that.
“I’ve prepared a hot bath for you.” She smiles while guiding me down the hallway. “To wash off the remnants of this dreadful situation. And I’ll have tea ready by the time you come out.”
My throat tightens. Not a single person in the palace—not the maids, attendants, or tutors—ever touched me with this kind of warmth.
Ingrid does, like I’m family, and the thought is as comforting as it is painful.
Steam curls through the bathroom when I step inside, the bath perfumed with jasmine. I scrub the scent of smoke from my skin. The lingering warmth of Aric’s body wrapped around mine. The metallic taste of blood that still clings to the back of my tongue.
When I’m finished, I wrap myself in one of Ingrid’s impossibly soft towels before pulling on the oversized sweater she’d somehow known I’d love.
By the time I reach the living room, I’m warm but no less unsettled.
A moment later, the couch sinks beside me. Elske. The terrifying goddess-wolf-dog climbs up, convinced she’s lap-sized before depositing her head on my thigh like this has been her plan all along.
My heart stops. “Oh,” I whisper, frozen. “Um. Hi.”
She nudges me. Hard enough to make a point. I slowly place my hand on her head, and she sighs. Actually sighs. Like I’m the one comforting her.
“You scared me at first, you know,” I murmur, stroking her velvety fur. “But maybe we’ll be friends after all.”
Her tail thumps once. Approval, apparently.
Footsteps approach, and Ingrid appears carrying a tray. She sets a steaming mug of tea in front of me. Her eyes linger on Elske. Then on me. The fondness in her smile is impossible to miss.
“Well, would you look at that…”
“What?” I ask, still petting the beast who has apparently adopted me.
“That is the first time Elske has ever let anyone—anyone who isn’t Aric—touch her.”
I blink down at the wolf-dog whose eyes are now closed in bliss as I scratch behind her ear.
“She doesn’t even let Tassilo near her,” Ingrid adds with a chuckle. “Or me, most days.”
I pause mid-stroke, my heart giving a strange, confused jump. Elske shifts closer, her weight pressing against me as if staking a claim by saying, “You’re one of us now.”
Ingrid settles into an off-white armchair beside the matching couch, across from my oversized bodyguard curled against my side. She folds her hands in her lap, a fond smile touching her lips as she watches the wolf treat me like her personal pillow.
“You must be terrified, kjaere,” she says gently. “Especially considering… well. You grew up in palaces. Far from this world.”
My stomach tightens. That’s not entirely true. Palaces, yes. Luxury, yes. But also secrets. Men who visited my father who I knew weren’t part of the royal society. Deals whispered behind locked doors.
Still… I’ve never had a gun pointed at me. I’ve never seen someone bleed for me. Not until today.
“I’m just… really stressed out,” I manage.
“That is natural, Mrs. Vold.” She smiles warmly. “But you are safe here.”
I nod, though safety feels like a myth tonight.
Ingrid continues, almost wistfully, “I remember Mrs. Angelique fainting the first time she witnessed Mr. Vidar being shot. Although she fainted because she was pregnant with Aric…we learned that later.”
“Angelique?” A frown tugs at my brow. The name strikes like a spark on dry tinder. “Was she…Aric’s mother?”
Ingrid goes stiff, eyes widening like she’s just realized she’s stepped on a landmine she forgot was buried there.
“I… should not have mentioned her,” she murmurs sheepishly. “We do not speak of her. We cannot speak of her.”
I stare at her. Bluntly.
We cannot speak of her?
What is she, Voldemort? She Who Must Not Be Named?
I swallow down my sarcasm. “Why?”
She hesitates like she’s violated some ancient blood oath—which, knowing this family, she very well might have. “It’s a complicated story.”
“I can handle complicated. And this stays between us,” I assure her.
Ingrid sighs, folding her hands tighter.
“Mrs. Angelique…did not want to be with Mr. Vidar. She was in love with someone else, but Mr. Vold forced her to be with him.” Her voice drops to a sad whisper.
“He was obsessed with her, to an unhealthy extent. And she…she was deeply unhappy. She didn’t deserve what she had to endure. ”
My chest aches unexpectedly. A woman trapped in a marriage she didn’t choose. Forced to bear a child for a man she didn’t love. The parallels aren’t lost on me—they’re screaming.
“The only way out was to leave,” Ingrid continues. “So after giving birth, she escaped the country.”
I stare at her, waiting for the rest. For the part where she took her baby with her. For the part where she fled with Aric bundled in her arms, protected him from the monster who fathered him, raised him somewhere safe and warm and far from this frozen hell.
But that part doesn’t come.
“That means she…” The words taste wrong before they even leave my mouth. “She abandoned Aric? She just…left him here? With Vidar?”
Ingrid’s silence is confirmation enough.
“Why didn’t she take him with her?”
I can’t wrap my mind around it. I can’t make the pieces fit into any shape that makes sense.
You carry a child for nine months. You feel them move inside you, hear their heartbeat, count their fingers and toes the moment they’re born.
You look into their eyes—those brand-new eyes that don’t know cruelty yet, don’t know betrayal, don’t know that the world can be cold and brutal and unforgiving—and you’re supposed to protect them.
That’s the one unbreakable law of motherhood, isn’t it?
The one thing that transcends culture and circumstance and survival instinct.
You don’t leave your child behind.
You don’t hand them over to the monster you’re running from and disappear into the night like they were never yours to begin with.
“I am not certain,” Ingrid says, and a despondency washes over her face at the memory—the kind of sadness that’s been carried for decades, worn smooth like a river stone.
“Perhaps because he was unwanted. Or perhaps she feared taking Mr. Vidar’s heir would doom both of them.
He would have hunted them to the ends of the earth. ”
Unwanted.
The word lodges itself beneath my ribs like a splinter I can’t reach.
Suddenly, so many pieces of Aric click into place.
The coldness. The control. The scars you can’t see.
The way he flinches from warmth like it burns him.
The way he speaks of love like it’s a disease he’s been vaccinated against. The way he holds people at arm’s length, even when his hand is pressed to my waist or his body is shielding mine from bullets.
He wasn’t born this way. He was made this way. By a father who treated him as property and a mother who decided he wasn’t worth the risk of saving.
“I can’t imagine what Aric must be thinking,” I whisper.
Ingrid lets out a quiet breath. “He doesn’t want to talk or hear of his mother.”
A strange ache blooms in my chest. Because beneath all that discipline, all that distance, was a little boy who learned far too early that love wasn’t something he could count on.
The thought of him as a boy, believing his mother had abandoned him, never understanding why…
It shouldn’t hurt this much. But it does.