Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Ayanna
For a moment, Aric just looks like himself.
Cold. Composed. The stone mask I’ve spent weeks learning to read, settled back over his features like nothing I said reached him at all.
But I’ve learned to look closer. And underneath the ice, the man is on fire.
It’s in his eyes—too bright, too fixed, his pupils blown wide until they’re almost all black.
It’s in his skin, stretched taut over the sharp bones of his face.
It’s in the way he breathes. Too controlled.
Too even. The way a man breathes when the only alternative is doing something that can’t be undone.
He is the calmest furious thing I’ve ever seen.
And the contradiction lifts the hair on my arms.
Then he turns on his heel and walks out without a single word.
For a beat, I just sit there, stunned. Then instinct takes over, and I’m on my feet to follow—and remember, all at once, that I’m wearing almost nothing. A sheer robe that covers nothing. I tear it off, drag an oversized sweater over my head, shove my legs into the first pants I find, and run.
The house is dark and quiet, but I know where he’s gone. The one door in this place that’s always closed.
His office.
I push it open without knocking, and the sight stops me on the threshold.
Aric is bent over his desk, weight braced on his fingertips, head bowed over a stack of pages I recognize at a glance.
The contract. Our contract. He’s already read it—I can tell by the set of his shoulders, by the way the fury isn’t banked anymore but pouring off him in waves, thinning the air until the room feels too small to hold it.
I open my mouth, but I don’t get the chance to speak because his hands close on the pages and tear them clean in two with a controlled and precise rip. He squares the torn halves, sets them in the heavy glass ashtray on the desk, and reaches into the drawer for a lighter.
The flame catches with a soft snick.
He touches it to the corner, and we both watch the fire crawl up the page—up my name, up his, up the clause that’s been counting down my life since the day I signed it. The paper curls, blackens, caves into ash.
“Tassilo.” His voice doesn’t rise.
The door opens behind me, and Tassilo steps inside, silent as ever.
“Every copy of my marriage contract,” Aric says, eyes fixed on mine. “Digital. Physical. Olympus’s archive, the lawyers’ files, whatever my father keeps in his safe. Find all of it. I want it gone by morning.”
“Yes, boss.” The door clicks shut.
And then it’s just us, and the smell of smoke, and fury burning behind his eyes—hotter than anything smoldering in the ashtray.
He comes around the desk and stops close enough that I have to tip my head back to keep our eyes locked.
“Listen to me.” His voice sounds rough. “You don’t carry a child because a clock tells you to. You don’t come to my bed because some clause says your life depends on it. And you don’t give yourself to me to satisfy the terms of a goddamn bargain—not ever.”
I stare at him, certain I’ve misheard. Men like Aric Vold don’t say things like that.
“If there’s a threat hanging over your head,” he goes on, every word carrying the weight of both a promise and a sentence, “I’ll find it.
I’ll tear it apart. I’ll burn it to nothing—every page, every signature, every rule that dares to put a price on your life.
I don’t care who wrote it. I don’t care if it was my own father’s hand holding the pen. ”
He leans closer, his voice dropping to a murmur that slips past every defense I’ve been clinging to.
“You can hate me, Ayanna. You can fight me every single day for the rest of our lives. But no one—no one—backs you into a corner. Not while there’s breath left in my body.”
The room has gone very small. There’s only him, and the heat rolling off him, and the fact that no one in my entire life has ever stood between me and the world.
I should be undone by it. I am undone by it.
“You didn’t have to destroy it.” My voice comes out thinner than I’d like. “You could’ve kept it. Used it as leverage—on me, on my father, on anyone who signed it. A contract like that is power, Aric. And you just set it on fire.”
He studies me for a long moment, silent in the way only Aric can be, saying more with that gaze than most people ever could with words.
“I don’t want leverage over my wife,” he growls.
I stare at him, unable to reconcile this version of him with the one I’d convinced myself I knew.
The man whose entire world revolves around leverage, the man who calculates everything, the man who always has contingencies, held a weapon in his hands and chose to burn it rather than ever point it at me.
Something in my chest cracks straight open.
He sees it. Of course he does—he reads me as easily as I’ve learned to read him. And he steps closer, until there’s no space left to hide in, until I can feel the warmth of him down the whole front of my body and the rasp of his breath stirring my hair.
“Ayanna.” He says my name like it’s a question, and the answer to one at the same time, and the way he says it makes my heart lose its rhythm for a fleeting second.
His hand lifts, and his knuckles graze the line of my jaw, tilting my face up to his.
His eyes drop to my mouth. Mine drop to his.
My breath goes shallow and uneven. The air between us pulls taut as a wire, and every reason I ever had to keep my distance from this man dissolves into the half inch of space left between our lips.
I swallow, my chest rising up and down heavily, and my lips part without my permission.
Then the door bangs open.
“Bror, Vidar’s been blowing up my—” Eero stops dead, taking in the scene: his brother’s hand on my face, the two of us frozen a breath apart, the ashtray still smoking on the desk. “Oh.”
Aric closes his eyes and exhales through his nose, slow and measured as though he’s counting to ten, and judging by the tension in his jaw, it isn’t nearly enough. He doesn’t step back from me, though.
“You should have knocked,” he rasps.
“Yeah.” Eero doesn’t look remotely sorry. A grin is already tugging at his mouth. “My bad. Didn’t realize negotiations had gotten this… intense.”
Heat climbs my throat. Aric’s thumb is still resting against my jaw, like he’s daring his brother to comment on that, too.
“What is it, Eero?” It doesn’t come off as a question, but a demand to get to the point before he ends up thrown through a wall.
The grin fades. Whatever settles over Eero’s face now is the closest to serious I’ve seen him come.
“It’s Vidar,” he says. “He wants to see you. Now.”