Chapter 41
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Ayanna
Iclose my eyes, trying to fall asleep and fail miserably. Aric lies on his back beside me, perfectly still. His breathing is controlled—too controlled—like he’s pretending to sleep.
Which means I’m not the only liar in this bed.
I keep my eyes closed, because what exactly am I supposed to do? Roll over and ask whether the taste of me still lingers on his mouth the way the taste of him lingers on mine? Ask whether his body aches for my touch the way mine does for his?
No. Absolutely not.
Princesses have dignity.
Even if said dignity currently consists of lying rigid beneath the hotel sheets while replaying the moment my husband kissed me like he’d finally run out of reasons not to. The fraction of a second where his control slipped, and I felt the raw, unfiltered want beneath the ice.
One kiss.
One bloody kiss, and my entire nervous system has staged a mutiny.
Minutes pass. Then more. The silence stretches long enough that the sea outside begins to sound louder than my thoughts.
Eventually, Aric pushes himself upright. I still don’t open my eyes, but I feel his gaze linger on me before I hear the quiet rustle of fabric. His weight leaves the bed slowly, as though he’s trying not to wake me. Then I hear the footsteps, and a soft click of the suite door.
The moment he’s gone, my whole body lets go, like I’d been holding a note too long. Air. Finally. Space that isn’t full of him.
I wait a moment longer, making sure he’s left before I slip out of bed, walk to the balcony doors, and step into the cool Sicilian night. The sea air does more for me than the last hour of fake sleep.
And then I look down into the garden, and I see them.
Aric. And Chiara.
My heart plummets.
Did they arrange this?
No. I dismiss it almost as fast as it arrives, because whatever else I don’t understand about Aric Vold, he isn’t a liar.
He doesn’t sneak. He doesn’t engineer quiet little meetings in gardens.
If he wanted to speak to Chiara, he’d do it in daylight, in the open, and dare the world to comment. This isn’t his doing.
Chance, then. Or hers. It doesn’t matter which.
Because jealousy doesn’t care about any of it. It sits in my chest anyway while I watch my husband say something to the woman he was supposed to marry.
Then Chiara turns and walks away from him toward the villa, and he stays there, alone.
I don’t wait to see more. I duck back inside, slide under the covers, and arrange myself exactly as I was—because whatever just happened down there, I will not be the woman he finds at the window, spying like she has something to be afraid of.
He comes back a while later and settles onto his side.
I can’t fall asleep for what feels like an eternity. My thoughts are spiraling, and the jealousy coils tighter, braiding itself with something worse—longing. Not for Luca. Not for my old life. But for something I’ve never had and have no right to want.
To be chosen.
Not arranged. Not contracted. Not bartered between fathers and societies.
Chosen.
By someone who looked at me and decided, of every soul on this earth, her.
I don’t know what we are now. I don’t know what that kiss made us. I don’t know whether the man beside me wants me or simply wants, and I don’t know which answer frightens me more.
After eternity, exhaustion finally wins.
I wake to light. Too much of it. I fumble for my phone, and the time stops me cold.
Past noon. I never sleep past seven.
“You’re awake.”
I startle upright, the sheet clutched to my chest, and find Aric in the armchair at the foot of the bed. He’s already showered, already dressed, dark hair still faintly damp. One ankle is crossed over his knee, and he’s watching me with those pale Nordic eyes I’ve become dangerously fond of.
“Were you watching me sleep?” I ask, flustered.
“You’ve been doing an alarming impression of the dead since dawn.” His head angles. “I don’t appreciate being forced to speculate.”
“About whether I was dead?”
“Among other things.” It’s so dry, so perfectly flat, that for a full second I can’t tell if it’s a joke.
It is. I think.
But before I can think of a fitting retort (because I’m not fully awake yet), he tips his head toward a large box next to my nightstand that wasn’t there last night. “That came for you.”
“What is it?”
“A dress. For tonight. A few other pieces.” His eyes flick to mine. “I’ll let you get ready.”
He stands from the chair—all six and a half feet of him—and heads for the door with that unhurried, deliberate stride, and I wait for the click before I reach for the bag.
The dress comes first. Black, strapless, a sweetheart neckline cut clean across the chest, a slit up one leg that will reveal exactly enough.
Then a pearl necklace, so beautiful, so unmistakably my style it’s almost devastating.
Open-toe heels at precisely the height I’d have chosen.
I check the size of the dress, the heels, both mine.
He noticed. He knew exactly what I’d need, down to the height of the heel.
It would be so much easier if he’d just stay cold.
I shower, dress, take my time with my eyes until they look darker and deeper, and leave my hair in loose waves gathered to one side.
I jolt when I hear the knock on the door.
“Come in.”
Aric walks in. His gaze sweeps over me, and then stops, arrested somewhere it never intended to linger. Something raw flickers behind those glacial eyes, and I catch the exact moment his composure fails. His lips part. The hard line of his jaw loosens.
For one unguarded heartbeat, the most controlled man I have ever known forgets to be controlled—and he forgets it while looking at me.
It’s like his brain malfunctions before his control rushes in to repair the damage, but I catch every millisecond of it, and the satisfaction is so sharp it borders on dangerous.
“We should go.” He clears his throat.
I close the distance between us and take the arm he offers, and we head out.
That malfunction of his might be my new favorite thing to collect. Not that I’ll ever tell him so.
Chiara’s initiation is no different from mine. Same oath. Same ritual. Same knife cutting her palm the way it did mine. Nikos presides with that bored, bottomless authority, as if he’s done this so many times he could perform the ritual in his sleep.
I watch Chiara’s face as she drinks the mix of blood and vodka without flinching and recites the oath in a voice that doesn’t shake once. I’ll give her that. Whatever else she is, she isn’t weak.
When it’s done, when the masks come off and the room loosens back into something like a party, I slip out to find the powder room.
I push the door open and stop in my tracks.
Chiara is at the sink, one hand under the running water, a pale thread of blood unspooling pink against white porcelain. Her head is bowed, her hair done in a half updo with some strands curtaining her face, and for a moment, she doesn’t see me.
My first instinct is to slip out and find another bathroom. Any reasonable woman would do that.
But I don’t.
Because I am so thoroughly, bone-deep tired of arranging my life around this woman.
Around the idea of her. Around every room she might be in and every ghost of her left in the corners of my own marriage.
We swore the same oath tonight. We are going to share this world for a very long time, and I refuse, categorically, to spend a decade of it backing out of bathrooms.
I walk to the adjacent sink and turn on the tap.
“We’re going to be in the same rooms for years.
” I keep it level, pleasant even—the precise brand of pleasant my mother drilled into me for people I’d rather not speak to at all.
“It would be far less exhausting for both of us if we learned to tolerate each other.” I find her eyes in the mirror. “I have nothing against you, Chiara.”
She shuts off the water before reaching for a towel and pressing it slowly to her palm. Then she turns to me, face-to-face.
“I do,” she says.
“I didn’t choose this either.”
“No.” She sets the towel down. “But you married the man I’m in love with.
” She says it simply, like stating a fact of nature.
The sky is blue. Water is wet. You took him.
“At first, I thought he could’ve refused.
That he chose this. Chose you.” Her eyes bounce between mine for a fraction before she tilts her head further.
“Then I learned how this world actually works. The Gods. It wasn’t only his father and your family.
It was a whole society with its hand on the scale.
And that changed how I see all of it. He had no choice at all. ”
Her bluntness catches me off guard. I clear my throat, but she doesn’t give me a chance to speak.
“But tell me something, Ayanna.” Her voice lowers until every word feels honed. “Do you truly believe that if Aric had been free to choose, he would have chosen you over me?”
The question embeds itself beneath my ribs like a shard of glass.
I don’t answer. Not because I don’t have words, because I have too many, each sharper than the last. But I recognize the shape of what she’s doing. She’s standing over a loss, trying to take a piece of me with her as she falls.
“That’s what I thought,” she says, reading my silence the way she wants to.
Her gaze drops, half a second, to my left hand. To the ring. And something dangerously close to pain flickers on her face.
“I don’t blame you,” she says, quieter now. “I know you didn’t ask for any of this. I know you didn’t go looking for him.” She locks her eyes with mine. “But that ring was supposed to be mine.”
She doesn’t give me room to answer. She turns for the door and pulls it open onto Aric, his hand half raised as if he’d been about to knock.
His gaze flicks from Chiara to me in a single sweep, and I watch his expression harden.
His jaw tightens, something in his eyes going darker as if he’s calculating what he’s walked into.
Chiara glances back at me over her shoulder, and she smiles.