Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ayanna
It’s close to midnight, and I stand at the window of my bedroom, fingers curled into the fabric of my robe, staring at the reflection of my own face layered over the dark glass. Eyes too red. Mouth pressed into a line that doesn’t soften no matter how long I hold it. I try to focus on the moon.
It doesn’t work.
All I see is Luca.
The way he was tied to that chair. Wrists bound behind his back like an offering left too long at an altar no god cared about.
The room smelled of blood and bleach, a combination that lingered in the back of my throat long after I left.
His face was swollen, bruises blooming across skin I couldn’t bring myself to study too closely.
He lifted his head when he heard me come in.
His eyes found mine through the swelling.
Through the blood. Through the ruin of a face I’d once kissed without a second thought.
And he looked at me in a way I’d dreaded from the moment I signed those papers.
Not with anger or pleading. Something worse, because he looked at me like he still saw the girl who loved him.
Like he still believed she was standing there.
And maybe she was. Maybe that’s why my throat closed before I could force out a single word.
His mouth opened, but I didn’t give him a chance to speak. I turned before he could find a word, and I left him there—and the girl who loved him stayed behind on her side of that door, where she belongs.
I ran away. Like a coward. I hate myself for that more than anything else tonight.
But the sight of him… what was I supposed to say?
I’m sorry for ruining your life?
I’m sorry for loving you?
I’m sorry that loving me has always been a death sentence?
The guilt settles deep in my chest. Luca didn’t end up here because he was reckless, though he was. He didn’t end up here because he was stupid, though he was that too. He ended up here because of me. Because of a feeling neither of us knew how to bury when we should’ve.
Love.
That stupid, catastrophic thing people romanticize until it leaves bodies behind.
I press my forehead to the glass, breath fogging the window as I try, and fail, to shut my running thoughts.
I straighten slowly, wiping my cheeks with the back of my hand like a child who doesn’t want to admit she’s been crying. My reflection still stares back at me.
Aric said I would come back as his wife, which means whatever I left behind in that warehouse is gone for good.
When the morning comes, I will be Mrs. Vold.
Not Ayanna Almaviri.
Not the girl who fell in love with Luca Bassi.
She is gone.
She has been gone since I signed those papers. I have only just understood it tonight.
I unwrap my fingers from the robe and finally turn from the window. I take the first step away from the girl who no longer lives in this room.
Tomorrow, I will be his.
Tonight, I will bury her.
The following morning comes far too quickly. I barely slept. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Luca. His swollen face. His blood. The way he looked at me...
I stand in front of the mirror, smoothing my hands over the black knitted turtleneck dress hugging my frame.
I tie my hair back at the base of my neck, low and neat, and slide my mother’s pearl studs into my ears.
My eyes are still faintly swollen despite the cold water I pressed to them for ten minutes. Concealer handles the rest.
I grab my phone from the nightstand and head downstairs.
Breakfast takes place at exactly eight o’clock every morning.
Not eight oh five.
Not eight ten.
Exactly eight.
Vidar’s rule, and Vidar’s rules are the kind that get tested only by people who don’t intend to live the week. I am downstairs at seven fifty-eight.
The dining room is the largest space in this house and the coldest. Long table of oak wood polished to a mirror, twelve high-backed chairs, four places set.
Vidar is already seated at the head of the table like a king holding court, cane resting against his chair, his presence cutting through the room before anyone speaks a word.
But he isn’t the first thing I notice.
He is.
Aric stands by the window in a black turtleneck.
We match. Like we planned it.
No. Don’t be ridiculous.
There is no we in that sense. There never was. Silly coincidence. Nothing more.
“God morgen, svigerinne.” Eero arrives a beat behind me, and his voice pulls me from my thoughts.
He drops into the seat left of Vidar and lifts his coffee in a lazy salute. His white-blond hair is a mess he hasn’t bothered to fix, and the scar through his eyebrow tilts when he grins.
“Good morning.”
“Only good?” He places a hand dramatically over his heart. “That’s all I get?”
“I haven’t had coffee yet.” A reluctant tug pulls at my mouth despite everything. Leave it to Eero to find a crack of warmth in a house built of ice.
“A fair point.” His grin widens. “I’ll forgive you.”
“How generous,” I tease back, though my tone stays level.
Eero beams like I’ve just paid him a compliment.
I don’t understand how two brothers can be so completely different.
One is sunshine.
The other is a snowstorm.
Unfortunately for me, I married the snowstorm.
The snowstorm in question walks toward the table and pulls my chair out, looking at me with that stillness that gives nothing away. I step into place and lower myself into it, and his scent reaches me, and I inhale it despite myself.
Then I watch one of the household staff pour coffee, determined to focus on that rather than the man whose arm comes to rest an inch from mine as he takes his seat.
For a moment, the atmosphere feels almost normal. Until Vidar speaks, and every trace of warmth dies instantly.
“Now that we’ve settled old matters”—his voice is a low rasp roughened by the cancer slowly hollowing him out—“it’s time we move forward.
” His pale gaze, the same glacial blue as his son’s, slides between us.
“You’re married. The past has been dealt with.
What remains is to fulfill the terms of the contract.
An heir. That is the purpose of this union. ”
My fingers tighten around my fork I had just picked up.
Aric’s jaw shifts—the faintest tightening, there and gone. “It’s been days, Father.” His voice stays level, but I’ve learned to hear the blade underneath the calm. “Spare us the urgency. The ink’s barely dry.”
“Days I don’t have.” Vidar’s fingers drum against the wood. “You think I have the luxury of patience? Look at me.” He doesn’t raise his voice, just like Aric never does. “I want to see the next Vold before I’m in the ground, and you’re treating this marriage like an experiment.”
“An experiment,” Aric reiterates dryly.
“You gave her too much freedom,” Vidar barks, and I nearly choke.
Excuse me?
Too much freedom?
What century are we in?
My gaze drifts to Aric. His expression remains perfectly neutral. Dangerously neutral.
Across the table, Eero suddenly becomes fascinated by his breakfast.
“Separate bedrooms. Free rein for her to come and go as she pleases.” Vidar’s mouth curls, contempt thinning his lips. “You handle a wife the way you’d handle a guest. That’s not a marriage, Aric. That’s indulgence. And indulgence doesn’t produce heirs.”
Heat prickles up my spine—not from shame, but fury. I’m not a broodmare to be priced over breakfast. I open my mouth, the retort already sharp on my tongue when Aric stands. The chair scrapes against the floor, and before I understand what’s happening, his hand closes over mine.
I go still.
He’s touching me.
Aric—who never reaches for me, who measures every gesture like a man rationing bullets, who keeps a careful inch of cold air between us at all times—has wrapped his hand around mine.
And it doesn’t feel calculated. It doesn’t feel like a performance staged for his father’s benefit.
It feels like instinct. Like his body moved before his control could catch it.
Like he reached for me without deciding to.
My pulse stumbles.
“You are behaving like a man playing house instead of building a family,” his father continues.
“We’re done here.” Aric’s tone is bone-dry, laced with the kind of mockery only a man who fears nothing can afford.
Vidar’s eyes narrow to slits. “And where do you think you’re going?”
Aric doesn’t even look at him. “I’ve lost my appetite.”
“And I am rapidly losing my patience.”
The two men stare at each other, and for the first time, I understand exactly where Aric gets it from.
The stubbornness. The control. That frightening calm. The resemblance is impossible to ignore.
“You will do your job.” Vidar’s voice drops to a growl that vibrates through the floorboards, and he taps his cane. “You are both aware of the terms.”
The terms.
My throat constricts. He doesn’t have to spell them out—I read them, every clause, every line, until the ink blurred and the words rearranged themselves into the same verdict no matter how many times I looked. A living heir, or forfeiture of life. A child, or a coffin.
Twelve months.
The clock has been ticking since the day I married, and every morning I wake one day closer to a deadline that ends in a child or ends in me.
A cold shudder sweeps up my back, but I keep my face smooth, blank.
But the thing that sends my pulse into a frenzy now is the thought of my father-in-law literally ordering his son to fuck me over the breakfast table.
Aric lets out a humorless laugh, a sound entirely devoid of amusement. “Enjoy your breakfast, Father.”
He draws me up from my chair, and he leads me out, his hand never once letting go of mine.