Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Aric
Isit in my office in the dark. The fire’s burned low in the hearth, ash pulsing dull orange under the last of the wood.
The wall of windows behind my desk shows nothing but the polar night and long, pale stripes of snow stretching across the lawn.
Amber laps against the crystal as I rotate the whiskey glass between my fingers, giving my hands something to do while my mind refuses to be still.
Thinking… A habit I despise.
Ayanna is with him now.
The thought breaks through me like a foot through thin ice.
I should’ve refused.
I should’ve looked at her in that bedroom and said no.
I should’ve reminded her that the man she’s about to see tried to put a bullet in me, walked into my home to take her, and the only reason he still has a pulse is because I am, by my own goddamn admission, trying to be the man she thinks she’s married to.
I should’ve refused.
Instead, I let her have it. Because she watched Chiara fall apart against my chest, and even though she kept her face still as a tomb while she did, I still saw what it cost her. Because this—this goodbye—it’s the least I can give her. Because I owed her this.
Doesn’t mean I have to like it.
I lift the glass and take a sip. The peaty burn goes down clean. Then another. I don’t usually let myself do this. Most nights, I keep a glass in my hand for the ritual of it—the cold weight of crystal, something to occupy my fingers. The whiskey itself barely touches my lips.
But usually, I need to stay sharp, yet tonight, I don’t want to stay sharp because my mind won’t shut off.
My wife is in another man’s company right now.
I know she is supervised. Two of my men are inside the room with them.
Two more are at the door. Tassilo at the perimeter.
No contact, no touch—those were my conditions, and Luca took them on his knees because the alternative was a bullet.
I gave him half an hour. Thirty minutes to look at her and understand he is not her future.
To grieve her if he needs to. To say whatever a man who once thought he was going to marry her has left to say.
I drag a hand down my face before I pour myself another drink.
From somewhere near the hearth, Elske lifts her head, watches me for a long second with those silver eyes that don’t pretend not to read me, then settles her muzzle back onto her paws.
Even she has learned that this kind of silence isn’t meant to be broken.
And I can’t stop fucking thinking.
I can’t stand the idea of my wife looking at her past lover again. Of hearing his voice. Of standing close enough to touch. Of him looking at her like she’s something he’s lost and still thinks belongs to him.
She doesn’t. She belongs to me now.
Mine.
She’s mine.
I shake my head, trying to dispel those haunting thoughts. Focus on anything else but her.
I fail.
Is this how she felt?
Back at Nikos’s mansion when Chiara broke apart in my arms. When her fists hit my chest, when her forehead pressed there like it had a right to be. When I held her wrists like they were mine to hold because I’d done it a hundred times before.
I didn’t think about it then. I was focused on control. On damage containment.
But Ayanna was there. Watching.
The image turns sour in my mind, and the glass creaks softly in my grip.
Because the thought of her in another man’s arms—Luca’s arms—wakes something I’ve kept leashed for years. It bares its teeth, and it wants blood.
Did she feel this too?
“For fuck’s sake,” I hiss, running my hand through my hair. I killed men without batting an eye, and half an hour with my wife in another room is doing what no enemy ever has. Undoing me from the inside out.
This is what she does to me.
But it isn’t just any man. That, I could rationalize. That, I could leash.
It’s her first.
The one who knew her before me. The one who held her in a softer life than the one I dragged her into. The one whose name was in her mouth before mine was.
Her first love. The only ghost a man can’t kill.
He isn’t dangerous because of what he can do to me. He’s dangerous because of what he might remind her of. And I have killed men for less than the way she might be looking at him right now.
It makes no sense.
She’s not a woman I chose. I didn’t court her. Didn’t chase her. Didn’t build anything with her before being forced to stand at an altar and call it fate. She was… just an arrangement.
So why does the thought feel like bone snapping?
I exhale through my nose, irritation curling tight in my chest. This is not how it works. This is not how I work. I don’t do feelings. I don’t care like this. I don’t—
I drain the whiskey in one swallow, and it burns all the way down.
Whatever this thing is, it doesn’t change the rules. It only sharpens them. Ayanna is my wife. Bound by vows neither of us asked for, but vows nonetheless. And my world doesn’t care about feelings. It cares about lines that cannot be crossed.
I rise and stride toward the wall of glass, looking out into the darkness.
She thinks I let her have the goodbye because I am a good man. I let her have the goodbye because if I had not, she would’ve given it to him in her head for the rest of her life. I would rather she give it to him at gunpoint than carry him with her into my bed.
She can have her goodbye, but it ends there.