Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Aric
We fly in silence. She’s good at it—I’ll give her that.
Most people can’t sit inside quiet without trying to fill it; they fidget, they talk, they crack under the weight of their own thoughts.
Ayanna just stares out the window at the clouds, with that signature royal mask of hers bolted into place.
To anyone else, she’d look composed. Bored, even.
But I’ve spent weeks learning the difference between her stillness and her silence, and this is the second kind.
The kind that carries grief, and it clings to her like a second skin she’s determined no one will ever see.
She’s burying her first love today, and she’d rather do it alone than let me witness the weight of it.
So I let her. I swirl the Scotch and pretend I’m not tracking every shallow breath she takes.
The cabin pitches hard, and before I’ve finished registering it, her hand shoots out and clamps down over mine on the armrest, gripping hard.
She doesn’t even look at me. I doubt she knows she’s doing it.
“Careful, Princess.” I keep my voice flat, edged with just enough mockery to bite. “Hold on any tighter, and I’ll start to think you like me.”
Her head snaps toward me. The fear in her eyes curdles into something hotter, sharper—and she rips her hand back like mine’s turned to coals.
“In your dreams,” she hisses, and the fear and grief go with it.
Perfect.
If hating me is easier than drowning, then let her hate me. I’d rather be the asshole she curses for the rest of her life than the man who stood by and watched her come apart over someone I already let walk away once. If I have to be the villain in her story so she can keep breathing, so be it.
I’ve been worse things for worse reasons.
The plane breaks through the cloud, and Monsera opens up beneath us.
I came here once—for the wedding. I stood at an altar in this country and didn’t see a single thing past the woman walking toward me with hate in her eyes.
Didn’t notice the city. Didn’t notice the sea.
Didn’t notice the country she was leaving behind.
At the time, she was a contract. A problem.
Now I look at the place she calls home and, for the first time, understand exactly what she lost when she married me.
Where Norway is dark this time of year—locked in its polar night, all black fjord and white silence and a sky that forgot the sun exists—Monsera burns gold.
Light pours over everything. White stone cities, terracotta roofs, citrus groves climbing the hills in neat green rows.
The sea throws the brightness back up at the sky, blue on blue, and even from here the heat shimmers off the tarmac. A country built for warmth. For life.
For her.
The Almaviri estate isn’t a house. It’s a palace—white marble and arched colonnades, fountains running in the courtyards, the air thick with jasmine and something citrus bright. The instant Ayanna steps from the jet, the whole place rearranges itself around her.
Staff appear from doorways and drop into bows. “Princess Ayanna.” A line of servants folds at the waist as she passes, and a gardener three terraces down stops his work to incline his head toward a woman who hasn’t so much as glanced at him.
I knew she was a princess. I signed a contract that said as much. But watching an entire household tip toward her like flowers toward the sun—that’s the first time I understand it.
A girl flies down the marble steps as we approach the entrance—younger, eighteen at most, all open delight and bare feet slapping the stone. “Ayanna!”
“Naomi.” My wife smiles.
Not the diplomat’s smile. Not the cold, practiced curve she aims at my father over breakfast. A real one—wide, helpless, lighting her whole face as she catches her sister and folds around her like she’s been holding her breath for weeks and can finally let it go.
I’ve never seen that smile before, and I’m irritated by how much I want to see it again.
Lunch is laid on a terrace above the sea—a long table under a canopy, cold wine and citrus and dishes I don’t recognize, sunlight cutting gold bars across the cloth.
Leandro sits at the head of it, his wife at his side.
Naomi across from her sister, leaning into Ayanna’s space like she can’t stand the distance between them.
Eero beside me, already halfway through a plate.
“It’s too quiet without you,” Naomi says, and the brightness in her cracks for half a breath. “The whole house. Like someone turned the volume down on everything the day you left.”
Something flickers across Ayanna’s face. She drowns it in a sip of wine.
“You could visit, you know,” Eero chimes in, looking at Naomi. “Ayanna could use some company. Stay a while. Stay as long as you like.”
I catch the way his gaze holds on Naomi a beat too long, because my brother doesn’t linger on anything without a reason.
“Naomi has obligations here.” Leandro doesn’t lift his eyes from his plate. His tone shuts the subject like a door. “She won’t be going anywhere.”
The light in the girl dims. Ayanna’s jaw tightens, but she says nothing.
Leandro sets down his fork and turns to me, the smile sliding back into place. “Vold. You and I have matters to discuss. The men should excuse themselves, I think.” His gaze sweeps the women dismissively. “Business.”
I rise. Eero with me. But before I follow Leandro inside, I turn to my wife.
“Maylin stays with you.”
Her brows pull together. “I’m home, Aric. I’m safe here. I don’t need a guard trailing me through my own house.”
She says home like the word still belongs to her. Like these walls can protect her. They can’t. The world changed the day she married me. Whether she accepts it or not. Whether she hates it or not.
The only place she’s truly safe is where I can reach her.
She can argue. She can glare. She can threaten to stab me with a dinner fork. Maylin is still staying. Some things aren’t negotiable. Her safety is one of them.
“Maylin stays.”