Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Aric
Iwake before Ayanna does. Sometime during the night, she drifted toward me and never drifted back.
She’s not tucked against my chest, but she’s close enough that I can feel her breath ghosting over my arm.
That’s new. Every other night we’ve shared a bed, she’s slept as far from me as the mattress allowed.
Grief exhausted her. I recognize that kind of exhaustion. The kind that hits after the adrenaline fades and reality settles like concrete in your lungs.
I should get up. Shower. Check messages. Review the transport reports Leandro sent through last night. Be productive. Be the man I’ve always been—controlled, efficient, detached.
Instead, I lie there, watching her.
I exhale slowly, careful not to wake her.
This marriage was supposed to be logistics. Alliance. Damage control. A calculated move in a war between families. Nothing emotional. Nothing personal.
And now?
Now her safety is my only religion. Her smile, my obsession.
That wasn’t part of the contract.
I slide out from under the covers an inch at a time, then ease my weight off the mattress so it won’t dip and stir her.
I take my shower cold. It keeps the head clear, and mine needs clearing this morning more than most. I let it work until the noise behind my eyes goes quiet, then dress halfway and step back into the room, toweling the water from my hair.
She’s awake, propped on one elbow, the sheet pooled at her waist, blinking the sleep from her eyes while the early Monsera light spills gold across the bed.
“Morning,” she murmurs, voice rough with sleep.
“Morning.”
For a moment, we just keep looking at each other. No words. Like none are needed.
And I realize, with a clarity I resent, that the part of me trained for war—negotiation, intimidation, all the things I do effortlessly—has absolutely no playbook for this.
For waking up beside my arranged wife and feeling reluctant to leave the room.
For wanting to make sure she eats. Sleeps. Doesn’t cry again.
For knowing the exact shade her eyes turn when the sunlight catches them.
It’s too much. Too quiet, too warm, too real—and I have no idea what to do with a thing I can’t control. So I do the only thing I know how to do with one.
I end it.
“I’m going down to find Eero.” I reach for my shirt.
It’s a lie. Eero can stay in bed until noon for all I care. But the room’s gone too small and the silence too honest, and retreat is the only maneuver I have left.
She doesn’t call me on it. Maybe she sees through it. Maybe she’s grateful for the exit too.
“I’ll meet you at breakfast,” she says, sinking back into the pillows and draping an arm over her eyes.
I leave before I can think better of leaving.
The estate is quiet at this hour, the white marble glowing soft in the morning light. I find Leandro in the living area, sunk into an armchair with a newspaper open in his hands, coffee steaming at his elbow, reading glasses low on his nose. The portrait of a decent man we both know isn’t true.
He looks up over the rims. “Aric. Sit. Have coffee with your father-in-law.”
Father-in-law. The word sounds absurd.
But I sit, and an attendant sets a second cup at my side before I’ve fully finished lowering into the chair.
Leandro folds the paper with meticulous, unhurried precision, as though the world has always adjusted to his pace.
“I’ll admit,” he says, “I didn’t expect to see you at the funeral yesterday.”
“Ayanna is my wife.” I take the coffee black. “I needed to be beside her.”
“Mm,” he hums. “Admirable. Though I doubt your presence did much for the optics.” He puts the newspaper away on a coffee table. “There’s talk, you understand. About the boy’s message. About what it implied. About who had reason to want him to never speak again.”
So that’s this morning’s game: coffee and a knife held under the table.
“Convenient, isn’t it?” I keep my expression neutral. “Whoever killed him knew exactly where the suspicion would land. Aimed it like a rifle. The husband. The rival. The Vold.” My head angles slightly. “Almost too clean.”
Something changes in his expression, and he drowns it in a sip of coffee.
“So.” He sets the cup down. “You didn’t do it.”
“No.” My eyes never leave his. “Did you?”
There’s a flicker of hesitation in his eyes before he smiles. The trouble with politicians is that they spend their lives learning how to lie with their expressions. The trouble with men like me is that we spend ours learning how to see through them.
Finally, he laughs, low and dry. “What a thing to ask a man in his own home.”
But I caught that flicker, and it tells me one of two things. Either he didn’t do it, and the question merely caught him off guard. Maybe it even offended him. Or he did. And the only thing that unsettles him is the thought that someone might believe him capable of it.
I don’t know which. Yet. But I know that look. I’ve put it on enough faces to recognize it on someone else’s.
I drink my coffee and say nothing more.
Whoever arranged that message at the graveside started something. And I’ll hunt the person who decided my name was a convenient place to hang a corpse, then I’ll make sure they never make that mistake again.