Chapter 45
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Aric
The meeting runs long. Supplier dispute. Territorial negotiation. Two hours of watching men talk themselves into corners.
Tassilo stands behind me, hands clasped over his abdomen. Eero lounges with one leg slung over the other, looking bored out of his mind.
I let the men barter. By the time I leave, the outcome is exactly what I’d decided before I walked in. It always is.
The car cuts through the city. My thoughts should be on the deal. On the numbers. On the next move.
They’re not.
They’re on her.
Again.
I catch myself doing it—picturing her in some room of my house, moving through rooms that have belonged only to me for years. I don’t know what she’s doing right now. Reading. Playing the piano. Reducing some unfortunate soul to ash with that razor tongue of hers.
We arrive back at the estate around midnight. The door opens, and I see Maylin. Her troubled face—a face usually carved from stone. A stillness that does not belong on a woman who is supposed to be standing next to my wife.
Everything in me goes quiet. The dangerous kind of quiet.
Something’s wrong. Something about Ayanna.
I know it the way I know a gun is loaded without checking the chamber.
“Where is she?”
“She told me she was going to sleep, but Elske wouldn’t stop growling at the door, and I knocked and got nothing, so I went in.
” She shakes her head. “She wasn’t there.
I pulled the cameras.” Her breathing changes; it gets shallow and heavy.
“She went out through the east service entrance. A car was already waiting on the service road, had pulled up before she reached it. She got in, and it left.”
The words hit like bullets.
Someone reached my wife inside my own house, arranged a car on my own land, and took her off this estate without a shot fired or an alarm raised.
That’s the detail that turns the cold in me to something worse.
Nothing happens in this country without my leave.
Nothing crosses this property without my men knowing.
Whoever drew her out had reach. Connections.
Enough authority that my own men never questioned it.
That isn’t opportunity. It’s access. Someone with power did this, and I will find out who.
My jaw tightens. “How long?”
“Half an hour. Maybe more.”
Half an hour.
In half an hour, a woman can disappear. A woman can be taken. A woman can bleed out in an alley while the city steps over her body and keeps walking.
In half an hour, everything can end.
Eero’s hand closes on my arm, and I turn to face him. “What do you need?”
“Car. Now.”
Tassilo already has his phone out, fingers moving across the screen.
He knows the protocol. After the last attempt on my life, I had a tracker placed on her.
She doesn’t know about it. I didn’t tell her.
Didn’t want to explain why a man who married her out of obligation would need to know where she is at all times.
The location appears on Tassilo’s screen. An address on the edge of a village. A café.
The car tears out of the gates. I drive because I wouldn’t stand sitting idly in the back seat. Eero sits beside me, silent for once in his goddamn life. Tassilo and Maylin are behind us, a second vehicle of my men in the mirror.
My hands are steady on the wheel, my knuckles turning white.
She’s fine.
She went somewhere without telling anyone, and she’s fine, and when I find her, she’ll look at me with those black eyes and say something sharp, and I’ll say something cold, and we’ll drive back to the house and—
The image fractures.
My mind runs scenarios, and I can’t stop it. The thought of finding her hurt feels like a knife sliding between my ribs.
The tracker shows her stationary.
Stationary means she’s still there.
Stationary could also mean she can’t move.
Stationary could mean…
“She’s going to be fine,” Eero says. He’s watching me, reading me the way he’s always been able to, even when I give him nothing to read.
I don’t answer. My foot presses harder on the accelerator. The engine screams.
Something in my chest is screaming too—something I’ve spent my whole life learning to silence.
It isn’t silent now. It’s loud and raw, and it tastes like fear, which is impossible, because I don’t feel fear.
I’ve had guns to my head. I’ve watched men die.
I’ve killed with my own hands and slept soundly after.
But this.
Her.
The possibility of finding her… I can’t finish the thought.
I drive faster. Eero glances at me but doesn’t tell me to slow down. He knows better.
Fear. Actual fucking fear pounds through my blood like a second heartbeat, and no amount of control will make it stop.
We pull up short of the café, headlights killed, and I know before the wheels stop turning that I’m looking at a kill-box.
The street is wrong. Too quiet. Too dark.
Someone has cut the power to this entire block, every window swallowed in black.
A sedan sits across the road with the wrong plates, angled for a fast exit. Two silhouettes occupy the front seats.
Tassilo’s car glides in behind ours. I hear doors open. Boots on asphalt. His men fan out without a word.
“Boss.” Tassilo is at my window, voice flat. “This is a setup. Whoever built it wants you through that door fast. We hold. We ring it. We take the building on our terms—ten minutes—”
“No.”
“Aric,” Eero urges. “He’s right. They drew this to bring you in stupid and alone. That’s the entire point of it.”
I know it’s the point. I know every line of this was sketched to march me through that door before I can think. I know the smart move—the move I would order any man under me to make without a second’s hesitation—is to wait, ring the building, starve them into the open.
I know all of it.
But I also know Ayanna is there and god knows what she’s been put through, and I’m already out of the car.
“Ten minutes is ten minutes she doesn’t have,” I growl, and my men follow.
The first man is waiting just inside the door.
He’s good. Fast. Trained. His gun is already coming up, but he’s also expecting a man who intends to survive the night.
I don’t give him that man. I drive straight into the muzzle.
No cover. No angle. Nothing between the barrel and my chest but speed.
My hand closes around his wrist before he can fire.
I wrench the pistol aside, and the shot meant for my heart tears into the ceiling.
The joint breaks beneath my grip. I drive his own weapon beneath his jaw and pull the trigger.
The body drops. There are more behind him.
Three. Four. They spill out of the darkness of the main room, and the café comes apart.
Glass. Muzzle flash. Tassilo’s men pour in at my back, the flat cough of suppressed fire chasing them. I don’t take cover; I cut a straight line toward her. The men on my flanks become my crew’s problem. A shot passes close enough to score a line of fire across my arm, but I don’t even feel it.
Behind me, one of my men goes down hard—Sten, I think, by the sound he makes.
Tassilo breaks off to drag him clear of the line of fire, and for three seconds, my flank is mine alone.
A man steps into my path at the back, but I don’t slow.
I drive straight through him, taking him off his feet and slamming him into the doorframe hard enough that something gives. He stops being in my way.
And then I’m through, and I see her.
Ayanna.
Cornered against the back wall of a storage room. And Farida Bassi standing pressed to her back, one arm locked across my wife’s chest, a knife laid flat to the line of her throat.
I stop so abruptly my boots skid on broken glass.
“That’s far enough.” Farida’s voice shakes violently, but the blade never leaves Ayanna’s throat.
“Come any closer, and I cut her. I mean it, Vold. One more step, and I open her throat before any of your men reach me.” Her eyes are wild.
Bloodshot. Wrecked. This isn’t a soldier’s plan.
This is a drowning woman clinging to the only leverage she has left, and that makes her more dangerous, not less.
I can predict the actions of a professional, but I cannot predict what a grieving mother with nothing to lose will do.
But it’s not the knife that brands itself into me. It’s Ayanna’s face.
I’ve seen her sharp. Composed. I’ve seen fear flicker across her features before she buried it quickly enough that most people never noticed.
I have never seen her like this.
Not cracked. Gone. The armor she wears like a second skin—the sarcasm, the defiance—is stripped clean away, leaving only her. She looks like she’s stopped waiting to be saved and started deciding how to die with dignity.
The image sears itself into my skull. Burns there. I know it will never leave. I know I’ll see it every time I close my eyes for the rest of my fucking life. My wife, standing at the edge of death, and I wasn’t there to stand between her and it.
“Farida.” I keep my voice flat and even. The kind of voice that has talked men off worse ledges than this. “Look at me. You don’t want her blood. You came for me.”
“I came for justice.” The knife trembles against the pulse in Ayanna’s throat. “You took my son. Someone told me. Someone showed me how to reach her, how to bring you here. They said this was the only way a man like you ever answers for anything.”
Of course. Farida was never the architect. Only the weapon.
“Now,” she shouts.
Men step out of the dark I’d already written off as empty. The kitchen. The stairwell. A doorway I walked straight past. Four of them. Five. Guns up, and not on my men.
On me.
For one cold, suspended second, the whole room holds its breath, and I see exactly how this was always meant to end. Lure me in. Ring me with guns. Kill me on a filthy café floor. Whoever paid for these men built it clean.
It’s a good plan, but it has one flaw.
I step into every line of fire in the room, placing myself between every barrel and my wife. If they fire now, they fire through me before a single round reaches her.
“You should have brought more,” I tell them.
Then I give the order—one word, in Norwegian, quiet enough that Farida won’t know what it means until it’s already done.
Tassilo’s men were never at my back by accident.
The room turns to slaughter. One of mine takes a round to the shoulder going through the kitchen doorway, and the man at the stairwell nearly opens Eero up before Eero puts him down at arm’s length.
I don’t spare the dead a glance. My eyes stay on her. If she has to see anything in this room, I want it to be me. Not the blood soaking into the floor. Not the men collapsing around us. Me.
When the shooting stops, the only people left standing are mine, and her, and Farida.
Farida still has the knife on Ayanna’s throat. Her hand shakes so badly now it’s a wonder it hasn’t fallen on its own.
“It’s finished, Farida.” I slowly walk closer, hands open, and stop close enough that I could take the blade or take her throat, and she knows I could do either.
“Your men are dead. The ones who used you are not in this room. They sent you in here to do the part they didn’t want their hands on.
” I look into her wrecked eyes. “Take the knife off my wife.”
Silence. The kind of quiet that comes before everything burns.
She breaks as though she looked into my face and saw her own death looking back at her. The arm across Ayanna’s chest loosens, and the blade drops away from her throat.
The knife clatters to the floor, and Ayanna runs to me. I catch her against me, one arm wrapping around her, and the feel of her—alive, whole—hits me with a violence I don’t have words for.
“Don’t—” Her voice is shaking as she speaks into my shirt. “Don’t hurt her. Please.”
I could. Every cell in my body demands it. She’s the reason my wife looked at death and accepted it, and she’s just an arm’s length away, still breathing. Everything in me screams to finish it.
But Ayanna asked.
And I need Farida alive if I want the person who orchestrated this.
“Take her,” I order Tassilo. “Alive. I’m not finished with her.”
He seizes Farida himself, her wrists pinned, hauled back, and she’s weeping now—something about her son, about justice, about blood for blood. I don’t listen. Nothing matters except Ayanna in my arms.
Eero appears in the doorway, blood on his sleeve that isn’t his. His eyes flick from me to Ayanna and back. He nods and follows Tassilo out. The door closes behind them, and we’re alone.
Ayanna continues to tremble against me, already trying to rebuild what Farida tore down—the spine, the chin, the mask.
“Aric—”
“Don’t.”
Harder than I mean it. I don’t trust my voice for anything else, not with her face still burning behind my eyes and the blood now starting to make itself known down my arm.
I take her hand. Her pulse hammers against my fingers, rabbit-fast.
She almost died tonight. Because I wasn’t here. Because she didn’t tell me. Because she walked into a trap alone, and I was an hour away.
The rage rises like floodwater against the walls I built to contain it.
I pull her gently forward and walk out.
Eero drives. I sit beside Ayanna in the back and stare straight ahead, because if I look at her I’ll see it again—her face, stripped bare, deciding how to die—and I don’t know what to do with that right now.
Burn the country, maybe. Start with whoever moved Farida and work my way outward until no one left alive would ever mistake my wife for a door to me.
Eero doesn’t speak. Twice in one day. A record. But I catch him in the mirror, reading the set of my jaw, the stillness that isn’t calm.
And my mind won’t stop replaying the scene from the goddamn café. The knife at her throat. Her face. If I hadn’t put a tracker on her. If Farida’s hand had been steadier. If we’d waited the ten minutes Tassilo wanted…
Something cracks behind my ribs. Fear. I’d almost forgotten the shape of it.
We pull up to the house. Eero stops the car and gets out to deal with Farida. The door shuts.
We sit in the silence a moment longer. Then I get out, walk around, and open her door. She looks up at me. Those dark eyes. That face I can’t get out of my head. The face that almost became a memory tonight.
“Inside,” I say.
She doesn’t argue. She gets out, and we walk toward the house. The thing I’ve been holding down since I saw that blade against her throat is still there. Still pressing. Still looking for somewhere to go.
I already know where it’s going.
But first, I get her behind a locked door and make sure she’s safe.