Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Aric
The meeting with Leandro drags on.
The Gods want the Monsera route locked down—shipments bound for North America, cleaner ports, officials who look the other way for the right number, and a coastline where customs inspections turn conveniently inconsistent.
I tolerate it rather than agree with it.
Narcotics have never been my currency. Guns, information, territory—those behave.
They follow rules. Drugs rot everything they touch: communities, loyalties, the men who get rich off them.
But orders out of Olympus aren’t suggestions, and until my father steps down or stops breathing—whichever comes first—I play by those rules.
Finally, we trail Leandro’s car, Eero driving while I scroll through the reports on my tablet.
“Still can’t get used to the wrong side,” I mutter, sneaking a quick look at the traffic coming at me from the wrong direction.
“Right? Wildly overrated.” He flicks me a glance, then sits on whatever he’s about to say a beat too long.
“Bror.”
“Hm.”
“Ayanna’s sister. What was her name?”
There it is. Should’ve seen it coming a mile back.
“Naomi.” My neck cranes toward him. “Why?”
He shrugs, but there’s that sheepish edge he only gets when something hits closer to the bone than he’ll admit.
“She’s beautiful. Isn’t she?”
My jaw sets while I exhale through my nose. Not out of anger, but rather the need to put my body between my brother and a bad idea. Ridiculous. I barely know the girl. She’s nothing to me.
Except she’s Ayanna’s sister, which apparently rewrites the math.
“Don’t,” I warn. “Leandro’s marrying her off. Some Gulf heir.”
Eero nods. “Right. I’m not an heir. Just decorative.”
“That’s not what I said.”
He gives me the look.
The truth is, I’d assumed Eero was the one of us the world had let off the hook. The brother who got to stay loose, careless, free. Watching his face now, I understand I was wrong.
“At least you get to choose,” I say. “Most of us didn’t.”
“Apparently not.” A quiet exhale escapes him on its own. “Does Ayanna know?”
“No,” I say. “There’s a lot about her father she doesn’t know.”
There’s a lot I didn’t know either, until recently. The deeper I dig into Leandro’s books, the less I like how easily he handed his daughter to the family who spent a decade trying to put him in the ground. How easily he’d do it again.
“So,” Eero continues, because Eero can’t survive a quiet car. “How’s married life treating you?”
My gaze follows the lights gliding across the glass as I take stock of what we are.
“She was a stranger. Daughter of a man my father wanted dead. Not exactly a fairy-tale setup.”
“That’s the press release. I asked for the real one.”
“You’re unbearable.”
“Occupational hazard of being the fun brother.” He winks. “So? Do you like her?”
“I like that she has a spine,” I tell him without hesitation.
He doesn’t need the rest—the way her sarcasm meets me blow for blow, the way she walked into the coldest house on earth and refused to shrink, the smile that broke across her face for her sister this afternoon that I haven’t managed to stop thinking about since. He gets none of that.
“She’s fierce. Sharp-tongued. Sometimes dangerously so.”
“And that bothers you?”
“No. If anything, it keeps things interesting.”
Eero gives me that knowing smirk, the one that he wears when he’s amused, which is most of the time in his case. “And the appearance? Is she your type?”
A faint smile pulls at my mouth. “Yes, she’s undeniably stunning. That part’s not exactly controversial.”
“Then what’s stopping you?”
My expression hardens, another, though this time quiet breath leaves my lungs.
“I don’t know if I can trust her yet.” I turn to him. “And she hates me.”
“Why would she hate you?”
I fix my brother with a look that should’ve been answer enough. “Let’s see. Maybe because I’m the son of her father’s sworn enemy. Or because she was forced into marrying me against her will. Tough puzzle, really.”
Eero laughs. “Nah, that’s bullshit. Had you been a tad more fun, like your adorable little brother here, she would’ve worshiped the ground you walk on.”
“Ha ha, very funny.”
He glances over again. “The Ice King,” Eero breathes, delighted, “just smiled.”
“I didn’t.”
“You absolutely did.” He grabs his phone from the center console and lifts it between us. “Hold still. This is a historic moment.”
“Don’t you dare.”
The flash goes off anyway.
“Too late. New lock screen.” He studies it like a man admiring his own war trophy. “Caption reads: Aric Vold, caught experiencing a human emotion. Posterity will weep.”
“Put the phone away, or it goes out the window.”
He pockets it, grinning, and I don’t have the heart to ruin it. He’s the one thing in my life I’ve never once wanted to control.
My attention returns to the tablet. My thoughts don’t. They drift back to her, only to be interrupted when the dashboard lights up.
Hyun-seok.
For half a second, I hesitate. There was a time his name on a screen meant nothing more than a drink, a fight, a deal. Before he became the man marrying the woman I once meant to build a life with.
I answer through the car. “Hyun-seok.”
“I wanted to invite you myself,” he says, clipped. “To the wedding.”
Eero’s eyes cut to me. I keep mine on the road.
“Everything’s arranged,” he says. “I know the circumstances are… unconventional. But you’re still my closest friend. It wouldn’t sit right without you there.”
“We’ll be there,” I state without hesitation. None he’ll hear, anyway.
“Thank you.”
The line dies, and the engine fills the space it leaves behind.
Eero gives it five seconds. “You good, bror?”
“Fine.”
“You can drop it with me, you know.” He pauses as though waiting for me to fill the silence, but when I don’t, of course, he does. “You don’t have to act like a tough Viking all the time. I see what it’s costing you. The heir thing. Chiara. Carrying all of it like it weighs nothing.”
I say nothing. He doesn’t take the hint. He never takes the hint.
“You ever think about it? Just walking. Taking her and disappearing.”
That drags a scoff out of me. “I don’t run, Eero.”
I’m not the type to run because things aren’t going the way you planned.
“My focus stays where it belongs,” I add. “On my marriage.”
Ayanna.
The name means something different now. Not resentment. Something far more complicated.
“You blame her?” Eero asks. “For Chiara.”
“No.” I mean it. “We both lost something. Neither of us got a say.”
Maybe that’s what binds us. Two people stripped of what they wanted and told to build something from the wreckage. Neither of us was asked what we were willing to sacrifice. We were simply handed the bill for choices made by someone else.
We return to the estate. Leandro leads us through the front doors into a foyer. White marble underfoot, a staircase curving up both walls like a pair of cupped hands, a chandelier scattering fractured light across all of it.
We’re meant to leave for the funeral within the hour. I’m already counting the cars, the route, and deciding where Maylin sits, when the sound of heels striking the marble makes everything else go quiet.
Ayanna comes down the staircase in an elegant black dress, hair pulled back in a low ponytail, her face stripped to nothing but the grief she’s too proud to carry in the open and the fury that’s apparently arrived to keep it company.
“You promised me,” she seethes, glaring at her father. “I spoke to Naomi.”
Leandro’s expression settles into its familiar calm, the one he’s hidden behind all afternoon. “Ayanna—”
“She told me you’re arranging a marriage for her.” Her voice doesn’t rise. It sharpens, which is worse. “You looked me in the eye, and you swore. That was my condition. The one thing I asked. My life for your alliance, and Naomi left out of it. You promised she would never be used the way I was.”
Used. The word stung in my chest more than I’d care to admit. But what really bothers me is that she made a deal with Leandro, he took the trade, and he’s already breaking it.
And I don’t tolerate people breaking deals with my wife.
“This is not a conversation for the foyer.” Leandro’s composure falters. “You forget yourself. You’re a married woman. Naomi is my daughter, and what becomes of her is my concern, not yours. You will not question me in my own house like some—”
“Careful.” I offer Leandro the courtesy of a warning. “Watch your tone when you speak to my wife.”
Silence falls. Leandro studies me, baffled. Whatever he expected from me—agreement, indifference, the bored neutrality of a husband who married for leverage and nothing more—it wasn’t this.
“You,” he says slowly, the smile sliding back into place, “of all men, should understand the value of an arranged marriage. You’re living proof of its usefulness.”
“I understand them fine.” I study him. “I also understand that Naomi is eighteen. A daughter isn’t a resource.” Now his jaw tightens, while I cock my head slightly. “Or did you forget that after the first one?”
The temperature in the foyer drops several degrees.
Leandro’s teeth grit. Clearly, he isn’t used to being spoken to this way under his own roof—least of all by the son of the man he spent a decade at war with, standing in his own house telling him what his children are worth.
“What a long day it’s been for all of us.
” Nesrine, Ayanna’s mother, slides neatly into the space between her husband and me, her eyes finding mine, careful.
“Aric. I know you meant to fly back to Norway tonight, after… after the service.” A delicate pause around the word.
“But the hour will be late, and grief is exhausting. Perhaps the two of you might extend your stay. Take a room. Leave in the morning, rested.”
“We’re going home,” I say coolly.
“This is her home, Vold.” Leandro’s tone hardens. “It always will be. She was born in this house.”
I look at Ayanna. She’s watching me with that sharp dark gaze, trying to work out what I’m doing, and why.
“It used to be.” I look Leandro directly in the eyes. “Her home is with me now.”
I don’t wait for an answer. I turn for the door, and I feel her fall into step behind me without being told—not because she’s obeying, but because for once we want the same thing. Out.