Chapter 35
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Ayanna
The jet levels off somewhere over the North Sea. Across the cabin, Aric buries himself in a stack of documents with the kind of focus that makes conversation seem like an intrusion.
My gaze catches on his hands again. The knuckles look worse. Overnight, the swelling has darkened, and the split skin has pulled tight as it tries to knit itself back together. He turns a page without so much as flinching.
“You should have wrapped them.” I break the silence.
He doesn’t look up. “They’ll heal.”
“You keep saying that.” Like the bruises are mine to see, but whatever broke them belongs to him alone.
He turns another page.
I look out the window for a while. Cloud, then ocean, then cloud. But no matter how hard I’m trying not to touch on the topic, I fail. Because if that’s the reason that broke his hands, I need to know.
“So. The wedding.”
“What about it?”
“It’s a big day. For Hyun-seok.”
“It’s a wedding.” He squares the pages against his knee. “We go, we’re seen, we show respect. We leave.” His eyes finally lift to mine, perfectly level. “That’s all it is, Ayanna.”
That’s all it is. I file the words next to it’s handled, and they’ll heal in the growing collection of sentences Aric Vold uses to end conversations he doesn’t want to have.
“Right.” I nod slightly. “Of course.”
We land in a different world. Palermo is all light. It pours off the sea and ricochets off pale stone and lands warm on my skin the second I step onto the tarmac. It feels like Monsera.
The venue is a villa above the coast, old and golden and draped in white flowers. It’s beautiful. It’s also crawling with the most dangerous people on earth, dressed like a magazine spread.
We’re barely through the gates when I see her.
Chiara.
The whole moment seems to lean toward her the way a room leans toward the person it’s all for. Serena walks on her side, and beside her, with one hand at the small of Serena’s back like a brand, is Nikos.
Serena’s gaze finds us first, and it moves over Aric, and then it settles on me, cool and exact. I remember, all at once, that the first time this woman looked at me, she was deciding whether I deserved the air I breathed.
Then Chiara looks up, and her gaze locks with Aric’s across the courtyard.
I don’t know what passes between them. That’s the worst part. I can’t read it—this thing that exists in the space between two people who were once meant to build a life together and never got the chance.
A second. Two. Long enough for something to turn over low in my chest. Long enough for that’s all it is, Ayanna to echo through my mind, and, for the first time, sound like a lie.
Then her gaze slides from him to me. Her replacement. It’s only a flicker, barely half a second, but it feels as though she’s looking straight through skin and bone, searching for the place I’d break. Then someone steps between us, breaking the line of sight.
“You came.” Hyun-seok smiles, and his whole face beams in a way I’ve never once seen on my husband. He clasps Aric’s hand and pulls him into a half embrace, two thumps to the back. “I wasn’t sure you would.”
“I said I would.”
Hyun-seok nods, then turns to me and smiles once again. “Ayanna. Thank you. Truly. It means more than he’ll ever let me say.” His eyes cut to Aric, fond and exasperated. “He’s not built for sentiment, this one. I’ve made my peace with it.”
Despite everything, I almost chuckle. “I’m learning.”
“You have my sympathy,” he says lightly, but there’s real kindness under it, and I understand why Aric keeps this man. “Come. I’ve had a room made up for you both. Change, settle, and breathe before the chaos starts. Second floor. Someone will show you.”
We step into the room. The shutters are half drawn against the afternoon, a balcony beyond them framing a long blue ribbon of the Mediterranean. Our bags are already waiting.
Aric makes his way to the window and stops there, his back to me. The silence stretches between us until I can’t hold the question in any longer.
“Does it bother you?”
He doesn’t turn. “Does what?”
“Your best friend. Marrying her.” I make myself say it. “Chiara.”
He turns and looks at me across the room. “Why would it?”
“Because she’s the woman you planned a future with once.” The words come out before I can dress them up. “A real one. Not—”
“That was before.” He cuts in, his tone calm as ever.
“And now?”
“Now I’m married to you.”
My pulse trips. I cover it the only way I know how—chin up, voice flat. “That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one there is.” He takes a step closer. “You keep doing this. Deciding my attention is somewhere it isn’t. On the wedding. On her. On a life that stopped being mine the day I signed the same contract you.” Another step. “You want to know where my attention is, Ayanna?”
“Where?” That comes out as a whisper.
“Right now,” he murmurs, “it’s on my wife.”
My heart skips a beat. The world narrows until there’s nothing left but him. His words find somewhere deep inside me and take root, and I hate how badly I want to believe them. I hate even more how frightened I am to.
“That changes nothing.”
That’s a lie.
But it’s the only way I know how to keep myself guarded from the heartbreak that’s sure to follow once the illusion breaks. Because if I let myself believe him now, I’ll have nothing left when reality catches up.
“No?” Aric challenges.
I shake my head. “Whatever this marriage is… it’s just an arrangement.”
I echo his words from the altar, from the very first—and only—time his lips touched mine.
He grows impossibly still. But not the practiced stillness he slips into without thinking, but something more raw. Like he doesn’t have control over it. His weight settles. His jaw locks hard enough that I watch him swallow the first thing that wants to come out.
“Is that what you believe?” His voice is deep and low, and he keeps looking at me with those penetrating, pale eyes in a way that makes my heart race behind my ribs, the way it makes it harder to breathe.
And I do not want to feel this way. I cannot allow myself to.
Because this is the same man who made it abundantly clear exactly where I rank on his list of priorities the day he decided to send my engagement ring through a lawyer, clipped to a contract he couldn’t be bothered to read.
The day he couldn’t spare an afternoon to meet me before the wedding.
At the altar, when he whispered it’s just an arrangement against my mouth—twice.
I let myself forget all of it somewhere between the bullet he took for me and the contract he burned.
But we’re standing at his ex’s wedding, the one he arranged to keep her alive, and that speaks for itself.
Aric didn’t do those things for me. He did them because this is simply who he is.
Which is the part that hurts, because I think I’d like him to have done them for me.
But being born a princess never once meant I’d get the fairy tale.
“That’s what it is,” I say. “You made sure I know that.”
“That’s what it was.” He’s close now, close enough that I have to tip my head to hold his gaze, close enough that the air thins between us. “You were wrong about one thing yesterday morning.”
My breath stalls. “Wrong about what?”
“Yesterday.” His voice drops. “It wasn’t Chiara who made me lose control.”
The floor seems to shift under me. Because if it wasn’t her, if it wasn’t the wedding—
“Aric.” A knock, a voice through the door, accented and low. “Nikos is asking for you. They’re starting.”
The moment snaps like a thread pulled too tight, and I almost feel the ache in my chest at the irony of it.
Aric’s eyes flick between mine one second longer, then the wall slides back into place.
“We should go,” he mutters. “We’ll finish this later.”
Right. Later.
I press a hand flat to my sternum, where something has come loose and won’t settle, and I follow my husband down into a wedding that has just become the least important thing happening in this villa.