Chapter 37
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Aric
I’ve stood through worse ceremonies than this. Funerals. Executions disguised as negotiations. Men swearing loyalty they planned to betray the moment the room emptied.
Compared to those, a wedding should be easy.
It isn’t.
I’ve spent my whole life perfecting the art of appearing to watch one thing while every nerve I own tracks another. Tonight it’s the only skill keeping me in my chair.
Because the ceremony is unfolding at the head of the garden—the priest, the vows, the woman in white I once believed I’d spend my life beside—and I can’t make myself give it more than the edge of my attention. My focus has exactly one setting tonight, and it isn’t the altar.
It’s the woman beside me.
Ayanna sits with her spine straight and her hands folded in her lap, and she is, without competition, the most dangerous thing in this garden.
A black dress sits off her shoulders, baring the gold of her collarbones.
Two strands of pearls trace the line of her bare back like small moons against her skin.
Her hair is swept high, leaving the whole length of her neck exposed—which is its own quiet problem for me.
She looks like a woman who knows exactly what she’s doing to the room and has decided the room can suffer for it.
It’s working. It’s been working since she stepped out of that suite and I briefly forgot the mechanics of breathing.
I have looked at a great many beautiful things in my life and felt nothing. I look at my wife and feel like a man holding his hand over a flame to see how long he can stand it.
At the front, Hyun-seok takes Chiara’s hands, and I make myself look.
Part of me owes them that much. It feels like the last thread tethering me to the man I was before all of this, cut clean and drifting loose somewhere out over the sea.
Chiara’s safe. She’s in Hyun-seok’s hands now, and whatever I owed the past, watching this pays it in full.
Nothing back there belongs to me anymore.
The relief of it is so complete that for a moment I lose the garden entirely. I go somewhere behind my own eyes, and when I surface, I catch her watching me.
I noticed every time she looked at me. Every glance that lingered a fraction too long. Every time her gaze drifted my way, searching my face for something I couldn’t name.
The priest lifts his hands. Applause breaks over the garden.
It’s done.
The reception spills onto the terrace, music drifting through the evening air as servers weave among guests, carrying champagne and trays of Sicilian seafood.
From a distance, it looks like any other celebration.
But most of the people gathered here belong to the same world I do. Two hundred of the most powerful criminals alive pretending to be everyday people at an ordinary party.
Ayanna stands beside me, making small talk with Zahra and Marcelina while Bobby tries to talk to Alexei, who’s clearly annoyed by his presence, to say the least.
And I can’t bring myself to tear my gaze away from her. My wife. She fits into this world better than she realizes. Graceful yet sharp. Dangerous in ways she hasn’t discovered yet.
Eventually, a man in staff black slips up to my shoulder and lowers his voice to almost nothing. “Mr. Vold. Mr. Romano would like a word. In private.”
I glance at Ayanna—she’s caught it—and give the man a short nod.
“I’ll be a few minutes,” I tell her.
“Go.” Marcelina touches Ayanna’s arm, easy and kind. “I’ll keep her company. She’s perfectly safe with me. You can go be terrifying somewhere else for ten minutes.”
The corner of Ayanna’s mouth twitches. I leave her laughing at something Marcelina says as I make myself walk away from the sound of it.
Nikos waits on a balcony above the terrace, forearms braced on the stone balustrade, looking down at the party.
“Vold.” He doesn’t turn. “Drink?”
“I’m fine.”
“Of course you are.” A dry breath that does the work of a laugh.
He nods at the scene below. “Quite an evening for you. The woman you nearly married, marrying your closest friend. And you down there with a wife on your arm, holding it together like a professional.” He glances sideways.
“Most men would have invented a reason not to come.”
“I’m not most men.”
“No.” He takes a sip of his drink. “You’re not. Which is why I’ll say this plainly. There’s a great deal of expensive history in that garden tonight, and countless people who’d enjoy watching it catch fire. I’ve buried enough this year. I’d prefer no one dies at my wife’s cousin’s wedding.”
“No one’s going to die, Nikos.”
“Good.” He turns to me, glass still in hand. “I heard about Monsera. The funeral.”
“Word travels fast in our world.”
He turns his glass slowly in his hand as a deep hum rumbles in his throat. “A scene like that, around an alliance this young, is the kind of thing that gets noticed at the table. So tell me one thing, and I’ll trust your word on it. Is it handled?”
“It’s being handled.”
He nods, slow, watching my face the way I watch everyone else’s.
“Then it’s handled. But if you need men, or reach, or a door opened that won’t open for you—you come to me.
” He looks back out over the party. “An alliance the Council blessed doesn’t get threatened in private.
Noise around Monsera isn’t only your problem, Vold.
It’s The Gods’ concern as much as yours. Don’t carry it alone out of pride.”
It’s the closest thing to an offer of protection Nikos Romano has ever extended me, and I don’t take it lightly. “Understood.”
“Good.” He tips his glass in my direction. “Then we’ve done the business.”
And that’s when I glance down at the terrace and stop hearing him entirely.
Because a man is standing too close to my wife.
He’s young and handsome, the sort of man who’s spent his life assuming every smile was an invitation. He’s leaned into Ayanna’s space with a glass in his hand, and he’s saying something that makes her laugh. His hand is on her bare arm.
On. Her. Arm.
Something goes very still and very cold in the center of me. The old, ugly, animal thing I keep on a short chain.
“Ah.” Nikos has followed my stare, and there’s open amusement in his voice now, dark and delighted. “And there it is.”
“There what is.”
“The cold Viking...” He turns fully toward me, entertained. “Jealous. I genuinely didn’t think the wiring was installed.”
“I’m not jealous.” My eyes haven’t left the man’s hand. “I’m assessing a problem.”
“Mm. Is that what we’re calling it?” He settles back against the balustrade like a man with a good seat at a fight. “Tell me, should we put money on it? I give that boy thirty seconds before he learns firsthand why they call you the Viking.”
I’m already heading their way. The crowd parts as though on instinct, the body clearing a path before the mind understands why.
By the time I reach them, the man is mid-sentence, his hand still on my wife, and Ayanna is wearing the cool, blade-bright diplomatic smile she was raised to put on in situations like this.
“You’re touching my wife.” I don’t raise my tone despite the caged animal in me trying to break free now—which is infuriating, because five minutes ago I was perfectly calm. And now, watching another man flirt with my wife feels suspiciously close to a declaration of war.
The man startles, turns, takes me in, and his grin falters. His hand drops from her arm like the skin scalded him.
“Vold.” He swallows.
“Correct.”
I step between Ayanna and him until he has to tip his head back to hold my eyes. It takes him all of two seconds to realize his mistake.
“I’m giving you something very few men receive.”
His brows furrow. He’s fortunate I just promised Nikos no one would die tonight, and I’m not the man who breaks his word.
Because outwardly, I’m perfectly composed.
Inwardly? I’ve already killed him three different ways.
“A warning,” I say, forcing the thought aside. I look at the hand he’d laid on my wife before my gaze returns to his. “Walk away. Don’t let me see your hand near her again, or you’ll learn exactly how I earned my reputation for making examples.”
The man stumbles over his own feet as he flees.
I turn to Ayanna. She’s watching me with her arms loosely folded, one brow arched.
“I had it handled,” she says with dry amusement.
“I know.” I did know. That isn’t why I came, and we both understand it. “I didn’t.”
Something kindles behind her eyes, and she buries it fast.
“Vold.” Alexei has appeared at my elbow with a glass of something amber, looking thoroughly delighted. He tips his head toward the man fleeing the terrace.
“Well,” he mutters into his glass. “You scared him.”
“I introduced myself.”
“You stared at him like you were deciding where to bury the body.”
I tilt my head. “Was I?”
“Yes.” He huffs a laugh. “So. You planning to dance with your wife at some point tonight? Or just intimidate every man inside a ten-meter radius until the song ends on its own?”
I look at Ayanna, at her mouth still fighting not to smile.
“I’d rather give them something else to watch.” I hold out my hand. “Dance with me.”
Ayanna’s eyes widen as they flick between mine for a moment before she lays her hand on mine, and we walk toward the dance floor.
The man who flirted with Ayanna made one very unfortunate mistake tonight. He reminded me how much I dislike seeing another man near my wife.
The band has shifted to something slower by the time we reach the floor. Strings. A low piano. The kind of music built to make people forget killers surround them.
Lantern light pools across the marble, over the couples already turning in slow circles. Ayanna stops in front of me, one eyebrow raised.
“You’re actually going to dance?”
“Shocking, I know.” I offer my hand.