Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Aric
Imean to go back to Ayanna. I make it halfway down the corridor before I turn for the gym instead—the only room in this house that’s ever been entirely mine.
The lights are low when I step in, and the heavy bag still sways a fraction from the last time I worked it loose, as though the room never quite stopped waiting for me.
I brace my hands on the cold steel of the weight rack and drop my head between my shoulders. Breathe out, slow, through my nose.
Vidar shouldn’t have brought her up.
He almost never does. That’s the unspoken treaty of this house—we do not speak of Angelique. He broke it tonight on purpose, the way he does everything on purpose, because he wanted to watch the one wound he gave me that never scarred over.
My jaw sets.
I never knew her. That’s the part no one understands.
There’s no face to miss, no voice, no scent, no warmth I’m grieving.
Just stories. Stories told by servants who thought I was too small to follow them.
Stories that died mid-sentence the moment I came into a room.
How quickly Vidar married her. How quickly she vanished after I was born.
She left the night I arrived in the world.
For years, he told it the same way—she ran, she couldn’t take the life, couldn’t carry the weight of it.
I believed that until I was old enough to learn the uglier truth, and I didn’t learn it from him.
I learned it from whispers. From the way the older staff looked at me with something that wasn’t pity but lived next door to it.
She didn’t run from the life.
She ran from him.
Because what he did to her was never meant to become a marriage. It was meant to be buried, forgotten, denied. Except it couldn’t be any of those things. Because nine months later, I existed.
I curl my hands into fists, knuckle by knuckle.
There’s a difference between knowing a thing and carrying it.
I know what was done to her. I know the kind of man my father was capable of being on a night he decided a woman’s no didn’t apply to him.
I know exactly what made me. None of it answers the question that’s lived under my ribs my whole life, quiet and rotting, patient as a needle working toward the bone.
Why didn’t she take me with her?
I walk to the bag and hit it. The chain jumps.
What kind of woman tears her way out of a cage and leaves her own child inside it?
I hit it again, harder.
Unless she never wanted me to begin with.
Maybe she looked down at me and saw him. Maybe every time she held me she felt his hands again, his weight, the night that broke her. I wasn’t a son. I was evidence. Living proof of the worst thing that ever happened to her, swaddled and screaming and impossible to set down.
I land three more, fast, the impact climbing up through my wrists.
How do you nurse a child who wears your rapist’s face? How do you look into a newborn and find the man who ruined you staring back?
You don’t.
You leave him in his cradle, in his father’s house, and you don’t look back, because looking back means seeing that face one more time.
I understand her. That’s the part I never say out loud. Some buried, traitor piece of me has always understood her—and hated that it does.
But understanding isn’t the same as forgiving. And it doesn’t quiet the little boy inside me.
Because that’s the truth I keep welded shit.
Somewhere under twenty-eight years of discipline is still a child standing in this house who wonders why she couldn’t take him too.
Whether the sight of him was so unbearable she’d rather hand him to the monster than carry him one mile toward something safe.
Knowing exactly what that monster would do to him,.
Knowing he’d be carved hollow the same way she was.
She knew what Vidar would make of me, and she left me to it anyway.
My first lesson came from a cradle. The people meant to keep you are the ones most capable of leaving.
And then there’s her.
Ayanna is nothing like the ghost I was raised on. The ghost made herself small enough to slip through a door and never come back.
Ayanna does the opposite. She storms in. She looks at me like she’s daring the cold to win—and fully intends to outlast it. And for the first time in years, something dangerously close to feeling takes root inside me. Something I thought I’d buried beyond recovery.
I care.
Not about the alliance. Not about the Syndicate or the Council seat or the powers that come with it.
About her.
I hit the bag again, and the sting shooting up my forearm is almost a relief because the realization is intolerable.
Caring is where the rot starts—that’s gospel in this house.
Vidar carved it into me young, and standing here, I can’t prove him wrong.
Maybe this is exactly how it begins. You care.
You protect. You let yourself trust it. And then one ordinary morning she looks at you and understands she doesn’t want to stay, and you learn the lesson your mother taught you the day you were born all over again, except this time you’re old enough to feel the whole of it.
Another punch. Harder. Because there’s one thing in this I will not repeat.
I will never trap a woman the way my father trapped my mother.
I will never be the prison someone has to bleed to escape.
I’ll burn this entire dynasty to its foundation before I become that man.
And if it ever comes to it—if she ever looks at me the way Angelique must have looked at him, with fear where love should be—I won’t make her run.
I’ll leave first.
Even if I have to take the whole house down with me.
I hit the bag until my knuckles split and the sting drags me back into my own skin, back behind the walls where it’s quiet, and nothing reaches. Then I stop.
I rest my forehead against the worn leather. Breathe until the chain goes still.
I straighten, wipe the blood from my hands with a towel, and roll my sleeves down over it.
Control restored. No one will ever see that crack. Not Vidar. Not her.
Especially not her.