Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
Aric
Idrag my collar open as I walk through the hallway, working the top button loose, the cold of the house a relief against my throat after hours of holding a room together by sheer will.
All I want is silence. A few hours where no one needs anything from me.
I open the door to our bedroom and stop in my tracks.
Ayanna isn’t asleep as I expected. Instead, she sits on the edge of the bed in a sheer white robe, with nothing beneath it. Her dark hair falls loose down her back, the lamplight gilding the long line of her thigh.
For half a second, I genuinely wonder if it’s déjà vu, or if I’m imagining her.
“Waiting for someone?” My tone comes out dry, as if my blood isn’t running hotter than it has any right to.
“For my husband.” She holds my gaze, lifts her chin.
“That’s unfortunate.” A corner of my mouth lifts. “I’m told he’s around here somewhere.”
She doesn’t smile. Doesn’t roll her eyes. Doesn’t fire back with one of the sharp remarks I’ve become entirely too accustomed to.
“We should end this. The waiting. The pretending it isn’t hanging over us.” She lets out a soft breath. “Let’s just get it over with.”
Get it over with.
The words kill the heat stone dead.
I want her.
God knows how badly.
I want her sarcasm. Her temper. The way she looks at me when she’s trying very hard not to smile. The way she challenges every order I give her. The way she somehow made my house feel less empty simply by existing inside it.
And I want her the way a man desires a woman—with a hunger that’s becoming impossible to ignore. More than I’ve allowed myself to admit. Far more than I should.
I want to feel her bare skin under my fingertips, see her body shudder when I touch her, hear her moans when I pleasure her.
I’ve wanted her since she walked down an aisle toward me with hatred in her eyes, and the wanting has only sharpened every day since, until it sits behind my ribs like a blade I’ve trained myself to ignore. I’m leashing it now by something thinner than willpower. One step. That’s all it would take.
And that’s the problem.
Because she wouldn’t stop me.
I can see it. Her eyes have gone dark, pupils blown wide.
Her breath’s turned shallow. Her lips are parted just enough that one more inch would burn every rational thought out of my skull and hers both.
If I crossed this room and put my mouth on her, she’d let me.
She’d give herself over completely, but she’d be giving herself to me like she’s signing another contract.
And that’s exactly what stops me.
The thought of her under me, wearing the same look she wore at the altar—doing her duty, fulfilling a clause, ticking a box on the long list of things this marriage demands of her body. Looking at me like I’m one more obligation she has to survive.
I don’t want her like that.
I want all of her, or none of it. I want the day she comes to me because she can’t help herself—because the wanting has consumed her the way it’s consuming me—and not one minute before.
Not because she wants to get it over with.
I exhale slowly and walk toward her. She never breaks eye contact.
Her breathing turns uneven as I stop in front of her, close enough to feel the warmth radiating from her skin.
I reach down, and tip her face up with two fingers beneath her jaw, the way I did at the altar.
Only this time, nothing about this is for show.
“No,” I murmur.
Her brows draw together. “No?”
“Not like this.” I hold her chin a beat longer than I should, because letting go is harder than it has any right to be.
“When you come to me, Ayanna, it won’t be to get it over with.
It’ll be because you can’t stand another second of not.
And when that happens”—my voice drops, rougher than I intend—“you won’t be able to stop me. ”
For a moment she only stares at me, something flickering behind her eyes. Surprise, maybe. Then her jaw sets, and the defiance comes roaring back.
“You’re either horrible at maths,” she hisses, “or I’m going to start believing you actually enjoy my humiliation and want me to fail.”
Humiliation? My brows twitch. “Fail at what?”
She looks at me like I’ve said something absurd. Like the answer should be obvious.
“The contract,” she states.
“What about it?”
Her eyes search mine with a confusion that tells me there’s something here I haven’t reckoned with.
“Tell me exactly what’s in that contract,” I insist. Or plead. Or both for that matter.
“You did read it?” She hesitates. “Tell me you read it, Aric.”
I signed what was put in front of me. That’s the truth.
The marriage was the alliance. The alliance was already decided; the paperwork was a formality drawn up by my father and Olympus’s lawyers—terms I assumed were the usual architecture of a dynastic union.
Fidelity. Succession. The standard cage.
I had a syndicate to run, a war to manage, and a wedding I never wanted.
I skimmed the pages, signed where I was told, and dismissed the rest as details beneath my notice.
“No,” I admit. “I didn’t.”
The disbelief on her face would almost be funny if I weren’t the reason for it.
“Oh my God. You actually didn’t.” Her hands have started to tremble. She folds them together to hide it. “The arrogance. You signed the document that decided the rest of my life, and you couldn’t even be bothered to read the whole thing.”
“Ayanna”—my tone is half warning, half plea—“what is in the contract?”
She exhales and looks at me like she’s debating whether homicide would void the agreement.
“There’s a clause.” Her voice is quiet, equal parts disappointment and resentment.
“What clause?”
Her eyes close briefly, like she’s praying for patience.
“Twelve months.” She lets out a breath. “From the day we signed. To conceive and deliver a living heir.”
My blood runs cold. I stare at her as though hoping it’s a bad joke.
“And if you don’t?”
Her hand goes to her hair, pushing it back. “Then it’s a material breach.”
“Ayanna.”
“Forfeiture of life,” she says it flat, the way the goddamn document must have. “Mine.”
I don’t move. I’m not sure I’m breathing.
“Both families agreed to the penalty in advance. My father signed it. Yours drew it up.” Her voice doesn’t break, which is somehow worse than if it had. “Twelve months, or the Volds kill me. That’s the deal you couldn’t be bothered to read.”
The room goes very quiet. Very far away.
I’ve sat across from men while they learned how they were going to die. I’ve delivered that news myself more than once, and watched it without so much as blinking. I know the exact weight of a death sentence spoken out loud.
I’ve never once felt it strike in my own chest. Until now.
Twelve months. A countdown she’s carried alone since the day she signed—in a foreign country, in a stranger’s house, without a single person on her side.
While I came and went, ran my meetings, kept my careful distance, and congratulated myself on being a decent man for not touching her.
While my father pushed for an heir, I kept telling him to give us time, never once realizing that time was the one thing she was running out of.
And suddenly dozens of moments from the last few weeks rearrange themselves.
The let’s just get it over with. The lingerie weeks ago. The first time she appeared in my room dressed for something she clearly didn’t want.
Fucking Christ.
Humiliation settles heavily in my stomach. Not hers. Mine.
Twice.
She came to me twice. Not because she wanted to. Because she thought she had to. The impossible fucking deadline hanging over her head while I walked around blissfully unaware because I never thought to read the goddamn contract I signed.
Something twists in my chest. I know the feeling. It usually comes a heartbeat before violence. Only this time it isn’t aimed at her. Or my father.
It’s aimed squarely at myself.
For not knowing. For not seeing. For letting her carry it alone.
“Ayanna.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “Look at me.”
She does. Jaw set, braced for whatever cruelty she’s been trained to expect from men like me.
“I didn’t know.” It isn’t enough. Nothing would be. But she needs to hear it, and I need her to believe it more than I’ve needed her to believe anything. “Every time you came to me, I thought you were—” An exhale escapes my lungs. “You should’ve told me.”
“I assumed you knew what you signed.” A hundred different emotions flicker across her face.
My expression remains the same. I’ve been trained to keep a poker face even when something inside me detonates, peeling me apart from the inside out and exposing things I’d buried long ago.
“Besides…” she whispers. “Would it have changed anything?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. None.
Because no one touches her. Not my father. Not that contract. Not whatever clause some goddamn lawyer buried in the fine print while I was too arrogant to read it.
I signed her into a grave.
Now I’ll burn the world to the studs before I let it claim her.