Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Aric
Hyun-seok walks into Nikos’s office at six in the morning, where Nikos and I are already waiting.
He walks in with his signature controlled expression and his dark brown eyes that miss nothing.
His raven-black hair is combed back with a kind of military neatness.
He’s an inch or two shorter than me, built leaner, but there’s nothing slight about him.
“You flew through the night.” I clasp his shoulder.
“You asked.” He returns the gesture, voice flat as though it’s as obvious as the sun shining outside. “I came.”
That’s the whole shape of our friendship in two sentences.
The chair across from me scrapes back as he sits.
Nikos watches us from behind his desk, cigar burning slow between his fingers.
“Let’s not waste time.” The cuff of Nikos’s shirt skims the polished wood as he leans forward, propping an elbow on the desk. “This isn’t an official meeting. The Council doesn’t know you’re here.”
Hyun-seok inclines his head before casting me a sidelong glance.
“I wouldn’t ask if there were another way. And I wouldn’t ask you if it didn’t matter.”
He looks at me as though he’s reading between the words. “Someone’s life.” It’s a statement rather than a question.
Nikos exhales smoke. “Chiara. Serena’s cousin.”
“And my ex,” I finish, because the room can’t function on half-truths.
“The girl you—” He stops himself before he finishes. He knows what I had with her. He’s one of the few who does. I kept the people who knew about Chiara to a very short list, but he’s on it.
Briefly, I tell him what happened. The betrayal.
Domenico. The execution I performed last night with my own hand because I didn’t want Nikos to carry it.
The rule that blood answers blood, which I helped write, which is currently aimed at a woman who has never raised a gun in her life, and which Hyun-seok is well aware of.
“A marriage to pull her under the protection of The Gods and keep her breathing,” I lay out.
Hyun-seok’s gaze shifts to Nikos. “Marriage is sacred in this society.”
“I know.” Nikos nods. “There is no clean exit.”
“There’s only one,” Hyun-seok states.
“Death,” I finish.
A long silence sits between us, weighted with the cost of what I’m asking. Hyun-seok looks down. He’s already running it: logistics, optics, the consequences for his own house in Seoul. The man can calculate war while looking like he’s enjoying a glass of wine.
“I’ll do it for you, brother. You saved my life,” he recalls, looking me in the eye.
Seoul. The alley behind the Hongdae safehouse.
Hyun-seok took the first bullet square in the side, the kind meant to keep a man on the ground until the second one finished the job.
I dragged him out by the collar of his suit while my men returned fire, blood slicking my hands, lungs burning, the smell of cordite thick enough to taste.
Two of my men told me to leave him. Said I should save myself because he might not survive the extraction.
I told them he didn’t get to die on concrete like an animal.
He woke up two days later in a hospital bed and looked at me like I’d put the world back together for him. I told him not to make it sentimental.
He never has. He’s also never forgotten.
There’s a softness in Hyun-seok’s eyes for a fraction of a second, then it’s gone, replaced by the steady black calm I’ve always known.
“I don’t keep score,” I tell him.
“I do,” he says, and there’s no room for argument. “I’ll do it. For you. And for her, too,” he adds. “She’s done nothing. Her brother’s sins aren’t hers. A life is a life. I wasn’t raised to let the wrong people die when I can keep them breathing.”
That’s the part of him most people miss. They see the warmth and assume softness. They’re wrong. Hyun-seok is steel wrapped in a smile, and the smile is what makes him deadly. He’ll be good to her. As good as a man in our world can be to a woman who didn’t choose him.
“Thank you.” It scrapes coming out. I don’t say it often, and he knows it.
“So it will be arranged.” Nikos sets the cigar in the dish. “Quietly. Council will be informed shortly.”
Hyun-seok straightens his cuffs as if to pretend it didn’t rearrange his whole life, head tilting. “When do I meet my wife?”
Nikos leans back in his chair, his head canting to one side. “Now.”
Hyun-seok and I turn to him at the same moment. His brow knits, the first visible crack in his composure since he walked in.
“There’s no time to waste.” Nikos folds his hands. “Domenico’s execution won’t stay quiet for long. The longer Chiara remains unclaimed, the closer she gets to becoming a liability.”
He fixes me with a look I’ve seen across Council tables for years. The one that means “don’t make me explain my reasoning to you, of all people.”
“We brought her here last night. Quietly. She’s been secured.”
Secured. The word sits wrong in my chest, as though she’s contraband.
Nikos lifts his hand a fraction. Remo, who’s been standing near the door like a shadow with bones, nods and steps out.
The minutes that follow are the longest of the morning. Nikos casually bounces in his chair. Hyun-seok stares out the window in silence. I don’t move. I simply wait. When the door finally opens, I rise instinctively, my gaze snapping to the doorway. Chiara stands there.
She doesn’t look like the woman I last saw trying to hold herself together while I dismantled her world with a sentence.
This Chiara looks smaller, pale, with eyes swollen and red-rimmed, as if she’s been crying since the earth cracked open beneath her feet.
Her hair is loose, unstyled, falling around her shoulders in caramel waves that frame a face stripped bare of its armor.
Her gaze finds mine instantly, and she freezes. Her breath hitches like her body needs a moment to catch up to what her eyes already understand. Then she runs straight at me.
“You fucking bastard!” Her voice tears through the room, raw and breaking. Her fists land against my chest again and again, small and weak and furious, the impact more sound than damage.
I don’t move. I don’t catch her wrists. She’s earned every strike and a thousand more.
“First you broke my heart—” A strike. “Then you killed my brother—” Another. “And now you’re arranging—” Her voice cracks. “You’re arranging a marriage for me?”
Hyun-seok stands by the window, hands loose at his sides, and watches his future wife pour herself into another man’s chest.
I lift my gaze over her shoulder for the first time.
Serena stands just outside the doorway, framed in the space Remo left open, watching me with an expression that says it all.
She told her. Maybe last night, maybe an hour ago.
She told Chiara what we’d agreed to so that I wouldn’t have to break the news cold.
So that Chiara would walk in here already past the shock, already at the rage, already at the bottom of her grief instead of the surface.
It was mercy. From Serena. Toward me. Toward Chiara, in her own way.
“What did I do, Aric?” Chiara’s voice fractures completely, and my gaze returns to her. She looks up at me, eyes wild with grief. “What is my fault in all of this? Please. I know you didn’t stop loving me. You couldn’t. You don’t stop loving someone overnight.”
I draw a slow breath. “I chose to stop loving you, Chiara.” I refuse to soften the truth for either of us. “The day I married Ayanna, I chose to stop loving you.”
“Of course.” A hollow laugh escapes her.
“Because it’s as simple as that. You just turn off your feelings with a snap of your fingers.
But what about me, Aric? Did it ever occur to you that it wasn’t that easy for me?
” She presses her lips together, but the last words escape anyway.
“All I ever did was love the wrong man.”
It hits me sideways. Somewhere deeper than her fists. Somewhere I haven’t built a wall thick enough to stop it. But I keep my face composed. I have to.
I catch her wrists gently but firmly, stopping her from hurting herself more than me. My grip is steady, controlled.
“Chiara.”
She breaks anyway. She literally collapses against my chest. All of her at once.
Her forehead drops against my chest. Sobs tear out of her in uneven breaths, her shoulders shaking as if her body finally surrenders to the pain her mind has been holding back.
I don’t push her away. I don’t pull her closer either.
I stand there, letting her cry it out against me, taking the weight because there’s no one else left to take it.
Her brother is dead by my hand, her mother will follow him by the end of the week if we don’t move fast enough, and her old life is gone the moment she lifts her head off my shirt.
Because I was the last man she trusted with her body, and now I’m the man who’ll give her to another one before the sun finishes rising.
So I just let her fall apart against my chest because I owe her that much and worse, her tears soaking through the cotton of my shirt.
That’s when I feel her.
Not Chiara.
Her.
I look up slowly, already aware of her before I see her. My wife stands in the doorway beside Serena.
Her posture is perfect, chin level, hands clasped just below her waist. The royal mask is in place. She could be at a state funeral. She could be presiding over a coronation. To anyone watching, she gives nothing away.
But I’m not anyone, and I see it.
I see the way her eyes have gone too still.
I see the breath she’s holding without showing it.
I see the way her gaze drops to Chiara’s fists balled in my shirt, the wet patches her tears have left on the fabric, on the part of my life that existed before her, colliding violently with the life she’s been forced to build alongside me. And then her eyes lift back to mine.
Guilt clenches low in my rib cage. Not for holding Chiara.
Holding her is the only decent thing I can do right now.
For Ayanna having to watch it. For the fact that the first time my wife has seen me show anything close to tenderness, it was for another woman.
For the fact that this is what she has to carry into whatever the rest of our marriage becomes.
For the fact that I asked her to stand at an altar a few weeks ago and call me husband, and I haven’t yet earned the right to be one.
Chiara’s crying slowly subsides. Her breaths even out into shudders. I loosen my grip on her wrists.
“This isn’t a punishment,” I tell Chiara, my voice even. “It’s a way out.”
She laughs weakly through tears. “You always were good at calling hell something else.”
Maybe. But hell with an exit is still better than the alternative.
I lift my gaze across the room one more time.
Ayanna is still watching, and I see exactly what this is costing her.