Chapter 39
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Aric
Iwatch Ayanna go. She crosses the terrace after Marcelina with that straight-spined, deceptively unhurried walk she has, Zahra falling in beside her, Camila a few steps behind.
Ayanna doesn’t look back. She doesn’t need to. She knew the answer before she asked me the question. She’s learning to read me faster than I’d expected.
I don’t stop watching until the villa doors close behind her.
“You’ll wear a groove in the floor,” Alexei says, appearing at my shoulder with two fresh glasses of whiskey. He follows my line of sight to the doors, then back at me. “She’s in good company.”
I take the drink he hands me and turn across the terrace, where Thorne is still leaning into the woman who isn’t his wife, performing his appetite for anyone who cares to look.
And plenty are looking. That’s the point.
He doesn’t stray because he wants her—he strays because he wants everyone else to know he can.
I married a stranger under a contract, just like half the men in this garden.
I understand Bobby’s standing in the arrangement better than he ever will.
And I know that even if I’d never felt a single thing for the woman I married—if she’d stayed nothing but an arrangement—I would still never humiliate her in front of two hundred people.
A man does not have to love his wife to protect her dignity.
That’s the floor. The absolute minimum. Bobby can’t even find it.
“He’s a clown.” The words leave me on their own.
“He’s a clown with a Council seat.” Alexei swirls his glass, watching Bobby in a way as though he’s already burying him in his head.
“Which is the part I’ve never understood how that”—a tip of the glass toward Bobby—“ended up holding the Thorne chair.” Something cools in Alexei’s voice.
“The wrong heir got the throne, and everyone at the table knows it.” He takes a sip.
“No one says so out loud. But everyone knows it.”
I nod, because he’s right, and because it changes nothing. Fair was never how seats got filled in our world. Fair has nothing to do with anything here, and it never has.
“I’m glad for you,” Alexei says after a moment, lifting his glass to his lips.
I glance at him. “For what?”
His gaze flicks briefly toward the doors the women disappeared through, then back to me.
Right.
“So you all saw it,” I say, not bothering to pretend otherwise.
His mouth tilts. “Hard to miss.”
I exhale, let my gaze drift over the terrace, and come back to him. “That wasn’t the intention.”
“No?” One brow lifts, just enough to tell me he doesn’t believe a word of it.
No. It wasn’t.
That’s the problem. It wasn’t calculated. It wasn’t a move on a board, a message for the room, a thing done because it served the alliance. It simply happened. The chain slipped through my fingers, and I never reached for it again.
In a way, it terrifies me because I’ve spent my whole life making sure nothing I do happens by accident.
Tonight, I kissed my wife on impulse, driven by nothing but desire that consumes me, devours me.
I never even realized when Ayanna became the one addiction I no longer have the strength to resist. She became instinct.
She carved herself into my bones, into my blood, into the parts of me that answer before reason can speak.
I turn the glass in my hand without drinking, trying to distract myself from the thoughts of her. “What about you?” I glance at Morozov. “You and Zahra. You’re married for nine years now?”
“Nine.” His voice is quieter this time.
“Did you come to feel anything for her?”
Alexei studies his glass for a long moment before answering.
“I respect her. She’s sharp, she’s loyal, she’s never once embarrassed me.
I wouldn’t do anything to embarrass her either, and she knows it.
” He pauses for a fraction. “That is not nothing. Plenty of marriages would kill to have that much.”
“But?”
“But.” He doesn’t pretend there isn’t one.
“You still think about her.”
Alexei’s gaze drifts somewhere beyond the terrace, then fixes on a point in the darkness.
“Nina,” I say. A name I’ve only ever heard him say once, years ago, when he was bleeding badly enough to be honest.
He looks at me, weighing whether honesty is worth the risk again this time.
“Every day.”
He raises his glass and drinks.
Another thing in our world where fair doesn’t have the right to exist. Some men get the arrangement and make their peace.
Some men get the arrangement and spend the rest of their lives looking at a point in the dark where someone else used to be.
Some get lucky enough for the arrangement to turn out something they never knew they wanted.
And then the villa doors open, and she’s there.
Ayanna, walking in my direction. Her dark eyes find me across the floor the way they do now—the way they didn’t a month ago, when she couldn’t stand the sight of me.
Alexei says something, but I don’t hear it. Because the only coherent thought in my head, watching my wife cross the terrace to come back to where I’m standing, is how badly I would like to kiss her again.