Chapter 32
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Aric
Ileave Ayanna in the office doorway and walk down the corridor toward the old man’s study. The door stands half open, the usual scent of smoke drifting through it. I close it behind me, and Vidar doesn’t look up when I enter.
He sits in the black leather chair, a single lamp carving half his face out of the dark, the oxygen line he refuses to wear coiled beside an ashtray he refuses to empty.
My father is dying the way granite dies.
Slowly. And certain, to the last, that it’ll outlast anything stupid enough to stand against it.
“You burned it.”
I knew he’d hear about it before the ashes cooled. This house stopped belonging to one man years ago. He has people loyal to him. I have people loyal to me. We’ve both long stopped pretending otherwise.
“I burned a copy.”
“Mm.” He turns a page of something I can’t see, in no hurry at all. “And sent Tassilo for the rest. The lawyers. The archive.” His voice drops another notch. “My safe.”
“I did.”
“You sent men into my study to empty my safe, Aric.” He lifts his eyes at last. The same pale blue I find in the mirror on the nights I stop hiding what I am. “I raised something colder than I meant to.”
“You raised exactly what you meant to.” I crane my neck slightly, studying the man who spent a lifetime sharpening me into a weapon. “You just didn’t account for where I’d point it.”
Something stirs at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The ghost of one. The place one used to live before he decided softness was a price too high to pay.
“Sit.”
“I’ll stand.”
“You’ll waste the one hour I’m willing to give this, then.” He sets the page down, squares it to the edge of the desk, and I see my own economy of motion reflected back at me. I hate that I recognize it. That I see myself in him.
“You think the contract was the thing that could kill her.” His voice is devoid of any emotion. “It wasn’t. The contract was only the record of it. The debt was agreed long before any lawyer wrote it down, and it doesn’t stop existing because you’ve decided you don’t like the terms.”
“Then the debt dies too.”
“The debt is a pact between two houses,” he says, low and languid.
“You can burn every page in Norway, and it still stands. That heir is the price of ending the war between Almaviris and us, the key to Leandro’s seat on the Council.
Ink did not create the bargain. It merely recorded it.
” He regards me with detached scrutiny. “You didn’t free her.
You removed one prison wall and convicted yourself she’d escaped. ”
“Leandro signed his daughter’s death into a contract to buy a chair.” I feel every muscle in my body tighten.
“Leandro would sign her into the ground twice if it bought him the room.” Vidar glances at the cigar, then leaves it where it is.
“You’ve seen how he operates. You know exactly what kind of man he is.
He handed his own daughter to the people who wanted him dead because it served him.
You burned a contract because your conscience got in the way, Aric.
Your enemies are counting on exactly that. Sentiment gets men killed.”
There it is. The lesson beneath the lesson. The one he’s been teaching me since before I could hold a gun without dropping it.
“Your princess isn’t the point. She never was. She’s the vessel. The means. The alliance is the point.”
“She’s my wife.”
“She’s an asset.” He says it the way he’s said everything to me my whole life—correcting a child who keeps reaching for the wrong tool. “Don’t make the mistake of confusing the two. I raised you better than that.”
You raised me to be you.
Cold to the core. A man who could write off an innocent life as the cost of doing business.
“Say what you need to say,” I drawl. We’ve never shared the same definition of strength. We aren’t about to start now.
He looks at me a long moment, adjusting the signet ring on his finger. “I had a woman I couldn’t keep, once, too.”
My jaw tightens.
He doesn’t get to do this. He doesn’t get to reach for her.
“Your mother.”
Something in me splinters, though none of it reaches my face. Of course he’d reach for the deepest wound and mistake it for wisdom.
“I controlled every corner of her life. Every door. Every hour. I thought that was enough.” His gaze drifts away for a fraction. “It wasn’t. She ran the first chance she got. She left you behind—her firstborn—and never looked back.”
I bite back a scoff. Because that’s what he took from it. Not that he’d caged her. That she’d escaped.
“You can hold every piece of a woman’s life in your hands and still fail to keep her,” he adds, and I want to shoot him just to interrupt the sermon. The man has believed his own bullshit for longer than I’ve been alive.
But I know the older, uglier truths—how Vidar wanted a woman who didn’t want him and decided wanting was reason enough. What he stole from Angelique to make me and called the violence of it duty. How she spent years surviving inside the life he’d forced around her before she finally broke free.
She escaped. Her only crime was leaving me behind with him.
Only Vidar could look at the devastation he’d carved into a woman and salvage a lesson about the dangers of loving too much.
“Love is a luxury, Aric,” he continues. “I told you that the day I arranged this. Men like us cannot afford it.”
“She’s not my mother.” My voice comes out level, though it costs more than it should. “And I’m not you.”
“No.” He leans back, and the light slides off his face entirely. “You’re worse. I never once believed I could save anyone. You’ve started to.”
“Is that all?” I toss, as though he’s already exhausted whatever interest I had left to give him.
“No.” He lets out a thin, rattling breath. “You made quite the impression in Monsera. A dead boy’s voice at his own funeral, accusing my heir of murder in front of half the Almaviri court.”
“The boy’s death wasn’t my work.”
“I know that. If you’d killed him, there’d be no recording.
There’d be nothing at all.” Something that might have passed for approval, if he were a man who approved of things.
“Which means someone wanted my son’s name attached to it.
Find out who. Quietly. Before it costs us the alliance we bled to build. ”
So he sees it too. The frame. For the length of a breath we want the same thing, which is rare enough to be its own kind of warning.
“I’m already on it.”
I’m at the door before the temptation to shoot him wins.
“The heir still has to come,” he says, and I stop at the door. “Burn whatever you like. The families haven’t forgotten what this marriage is for—and her father least of all. Leandro needs that child more than I do now. Think on that, when you decide who you’re protecting her from.”
I turn back. Our gazes lock across the room.
“Your wife’s deadliest enemy walked her down the aisle, son. And he gave her away with both hands.”
“You’ll have your heir,” I say at last. “When she wants to give one, and not a day before. On our terms.” My voice turns colder. “There’s no contract above her anymore. No Council. No father. Whatever comes for her will have to come through me first.”
I can’t erase the world, but I can make myself impossible to get past.
For a moment, Vidar only looks at me, as though I’ve spoken a language he doesn’t understand.
“You’d set yourself against your own house. Against The Gods. Against me.” His eyelid twitches faintly. “For a woman who walked to that altar hating the sight of you. You’d burn almost thirty years of standing for a clause that hasn’t even come due.”
“I’d burn more than that.” I speak in that impassive tone he taught me. “You want to know how far I’ll go? Leave the clause in. Find out.”
Silence, save for the rasp of his breathing through his ruined lungs.
He studies me the way he’s studied every man across that desk—hunting for the bluff, the fracture he can force open, searching for the boy who used to fold beneath that pale stare.
That boy isn’t in the room.
He finds nothing but a face that gives nothing back.
His own gift.
“I’ll call the lawyers in the morning.” His pragmatic response is the closest my father comes to surrender.
“A dead heir-bearer serves no one, and a son who’ll burn down the alliance over a woman serves me even less.
” His eyes narrow. “But understand what I’m conceding and what I’m not.
I can take the knife off the table. I cannot take it out of Leandro’s hand.
Strike every line and the families still want the child, and her father still wants his seat.
You haven’t ended this tonight, Aric. You’ve only made it personal. ”
It’s enough. It’s more than I walked in expecting to win—the deadline dead on a page by morning, the penalty gone with it. The rest I’ll handle myself.
Because Ayanna became the line I refuse to let anyone cross. And if anyone mistakes what I permit for all I’m capable of, they’ll learn exactly what my self-control has been keeping on a leash.