Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
Ayanna
Aric leaves within the hour. The low murmur of orders in the foyer. The front door closing. The growl of an engine swallowed whole by the snow. Then I’m left alone in this enormous mansion with nothing to do.
I spend the morning with Elske. At one point, she drops a stick at my feet and stares at me.
I stare back. “And I supposed to throw that?”
Elske huffs. The answer is apparently yes.
So I do, and she chases it. Bringing it back, however, seems to be entirely beneath her. Instead, she sits several yards away with the stick in her mouth and looks at me expectantly.
Right. Apparently I’m supposed to fetch now.
After lunch, I have tea with Ingrid. She tells me stories about Aric as a child. Most of them seem impossible. A young Aric hiding from tutors. A young Aric climbing trees. A young Aric sneaking Elske into the house despite Vidar’s objections.
I find myself smiling more than once, which is unfortunate, because every story somehow makes him feel more human.
And humanizing Aric Vold feels dangerous.
Later, I take a bath, sinking into jasmine-scented water (my favorite) until my my fingers wrinkle. I tell myself it’s relaxation. It’s not. It’s just one more way to kill an afternoon that refuses to die.
I sigh.
I’m useless here.
In Monsera, I had purpose. I had duties, responsibilities, a schedule carved down to the quarter hour. State dinners to attend. Diplomatic visits to prepare for. Charities to oversee. Languages to practice. I was a princess, and being a princess meant being useful.
Here, I’m a womb on a deadline.
Aric goes off to run an empire, Vidar plots from the head of his table, Eero comes and goes as he pleases—and I drift through this beautiful frozen house like a ghost who hasn’t been told she’s dead.
It’s maddening. It’s humiliating. It’s a slow, quiet erasure I don’t know how to fight.
What am I supposed to do with myself?
I don’t know how to be useless. I don’t know how to exist without function.
So my goal for today: find something to do.
I wander. Through corridors I’ve only half-learned, past doors I’ve never had a reason to open, deeper into a house that still feels like a stranger’s body I’ve been ordered to live inside.
Restlessness drives me one hall farther than I’ve gone before, and at the very end of it, I find a door left ajar.
I push it open, and the breath leaves my lungs.
The room is beautiful in a way nothing else in this house is.
The entire ceiling is glass, a single vaulted pane arching overhead, and beyond it the polar sky is on fire.
The Northern Lights. Ribbons of green and violet bleeding across the black, rippling and folding and alive, slow as something breathing.
It’s like an otherworldly performance, like the heavens themselves lean down to watch.
And beneath all that impossible light, at the dead center of the room, is a piano.
Black lacquer polished so deep it drinks the colors straight out of the sky.
A Steinway—the same model I trained on for fifteen years in Monsera.
It stands alone, framed by nothing, surrounded by empty floor on every side, as though the room was built to hold it and nothing else. A shrine with a single relic.
I approach it, drawn to it like a moth to a flame, and lift the fallboard with reverent fingers.
I haven’t touched a piano since Monsera.
The keys are cool beneath my fingertips as I play.
Nothing I learned from a tutor or performed for a hall of bored aristocrats.
A melody of my own. It starts low and slow like a minor ache rolling up from beneath my ribs, and then it builds like the grief of a life I didn’t choose and can’t escape.
Everything I can’t say out loud, everything I’ve swallowed since the day they told me I’d marry a stranger—it all pours out of me and up into that burning sky.
And this is the first time in weeks I’ve felt like myself instead of a ghost wearing my own face.
Until him.
I don’t hear him come in. I feel him, because somehow the air changes whenever Aric Vold enters a room. His scent reaches me a heartbeat later, and the steady, measured tread of him stops somewhere behind me.
How did he find me in here?
The thought cuts through the music before I can stop it. This room is tucked at the end of a hall I’d never walked, behind a door I stumbled on by accident. It felt hidden. Forgotten. Secret. Yet he came straight to it, straight to me, like he knew exactly where I’d be.
My hands keep moving until the melody folds in on itself and dies, and the silence that follows feels enormous.
I turn, and his pale eyes are fixed on me. He says nothing. He only watches.
“Sorry,” I say, my fingers curling off the keys. “I shouldn’t have… I didn’t ask if I could use it.”
“You don’t need permission.” His voice is low, rough at the edges.
He moves closer and stops at the curve of the piano, one hand coming to rest on the black lacquer.
And there it is again—that flicker behind the frost, that shadow of something moving deep below the surface.
I’ve spent days trying to read this man and failing.
Whatever this is, I can’t crack it either.
“What is this place?” I ask, because the silence is unbearable and the question has been clawing at me since I stepped through the door.
His gaze lifts to the burning sky above us, then drops back to me.
“My hideout.” His head angles. “Well… was. You found it.”
Something in my chest pulls tight. His. This impossibly beautiful room, this single secret softness in a house built of cruelty—is his hideout?
I glance at the piano between us. “And this?” I run a fingertip along the edge of the keys. “Who plays?”
He approaches with that predatory grace of his and lowers himself onto the bench beside me. The heat of him bleeds into my side, making my heart skip a beat. Then he lifts his hands and sets them on the keys.
Those hands. Scarred across the knuckles, heavy with silver, hands I’ve watched hold a gun without a flicker of hesitation. And he plays.
It’s nothing like mine. Where I bled all over the keys, he is precise, controlled, every note placed exactly where he means it.
But it’s beautiful—dark and slow and aching, a piece I don’t recognize, drawn-out of him with the same discipline he wears like armor.
Control over chaos. Even here. Even in this.
“I didn’t expect you to play,” I admit, the words quiet, unguarded.
His hands don’t stop, but the corner of his mouth tips, faint and humorless.
“No one does,” he drawls. “A man like me is expected to have his hands on a trigger, not a keyboard.” The melody darkens beneath his fingers. “A man like me is supposed to take beautiful things apart. Not make them.”
For a moment I forget to breathe. Forget who he is, what he is, what we are to each other.
Then the last note fades, and he lifts his hands from the keys. The cold slips back into place as though it had only stepped aside for a moment.
“You should sleep with me tonight,” he says without looking at me.
A jolt runs through me. I knew this was coming sooner or later. It had to. There’s a deadline hanging over us—or over me, at least. Even so, it catches me off guard, because he says it so abruptly, so impassively, as though it’s nothing more than business.
“Alright,” I say with the same businesslike tone.
“Alright,” he repeats.
“I’ll need a few minutes.” I rise from the bench, and my legs feel strange, distant, like they belong to someone else. “To prepare.”
He watches me, still unreadable, still carved from ice.
“Take your time.”
I walk past him, my heart pounding like a hummingbird.
I spend far too long getting ready for something I keep telling myself doesn’t matter. I put on black, ridiculous, lacy lingerie—sheer enough to leave absolutely nothing to the imagination. The matching robe does precisely nothing to help. If anything, it makes it worse.
I stare at my reflection and feel like a stranger looking back.
What are you doing, Ayanna?
Darkening my lashes, staining my lips a shade deeper than I’d normally wear, smoothing highlighter across my cheekbones like I’m preparing for a photo shoot instead of... whatever this is.
For him. The man who speaks in monosyllables and watches everything with those cold, pale eyes.
Get a grip.
I refuse to do anything more. I let my hair stay loose, still damp from the bath, curling into waves that spill past my shoulders and down my back.
I draw a breath and leave my room. Aric’s bedroom door is already open. He stands at the window with his back to me, and the breath catches somewhere behind my ribs before I can stop it.
He’s shirtless. I’ve seen him shirtless before, but under very different circumstances, and I’d forbidden myself from thinking of him that way.
Now, though, I can’t help but notice the broad sweep of his shoulders, the long muscled lines of his back tapering to a narrow waist, the ink crawling over all of it.
He looks less like a man and more like something a sculptor lost his mind trying to perfect.
It’s unfair. Genuinely unfair that a man this cold gets to be built like that.
Then he turns, and it gets worse…
This man has an actual six-pack.
I bite my lower lip without thinking, and immediately regret it when his gaze lifts and catches the motion, because there’s that infuriating spark, like he knows exactly what just happened.
I straighten at once, heat rushing to my cheeks, and I enter the bedroom, closing the door behind me.
His eyes roam over me, taking in every inch. Nothing like the quick, stolen glance I’d allowed myself earlier. Unapologetic. Like he has every right. The corner of his mouth tips up, and my body reacts before my pride can.
I hate it. I hate the effect this man has one me, the way my body has its own desires whenever he’s around. I hate it and I’d never admit it out loud.
I clear my throat, square my shoulders, then reach for the tie of my robe and pull it loose. The sheer fabric parts.