Chapter 40
CHAPTER FORTY
Aric
The door shuts behind us, and for the first time in hours, the air is ours to breathe.
I reach for my tie, slip a finger beneath the knot, and work it loose. My eyes are already on her. My wife. She’s bent to pull off her heels, one hand braced on the back of the couch, and I have to look away before the hunger she’s awoken in me decides it’s done waiting.
Because all I can think of right now is how badly I want to cross this room, put her back against that wall, and finish what I started on the terrace.
I want to drag my mouth down the line of that bare throat I’ve been losing my mind over all night and hear her breath going ragged against my ear.
I want every careful inch of distance I’ve kept since the altar burned to ash.
I want her with a violence that feels almost foreign.
Every instinct I usually keep on a leash is straining against it now, deaf to command.
All because of her.
Ayanna had become my intoxication.
But I’ve spent weeks refusing to touch her until she asked. I’m not going to stop being that man the first night it gets difficult. So I drape the tie over the back of a chair and let the want sit where it is.
“You left early,” she comments, snapping me back from the tug-of-war inside my mind.
“I thought you’d want to.”
She turns to look at me. “Why would I want to?”
Because half the room was watching you. Because the other half was watching me watch you. Because you stood across a terrace from a past I buried with my own hands, and I didn’t want you in that room one second longer than the optics required.
I say none of it.
“You’d had enough,” I tell her instead. “We were seen. We paid our respects. That’s all the night required.”
She studies me as though not convinced. She’s learning the difference between the things I say and the things I mean, and she’s getting dangerously good at it.
“Why can’t we just go home? To Norway.”
I move to the side table and reach for the decanter.
“I spoke to Nikos.” The whiskey pours in a smooth, controlled stream. “Chiara’s initiation is tomorrow. Here. In Olympus.”
“So soon? And here, not Seoul?”
“Domenico’s betrayal complicated things.
There are men at the table who don’t trust her yet.
” I set the decanter down. “Not as Hyun-seok’s wife.
Not as one of us. They want to see her bind herself to The Gods in blood before the doubt has time to spread.
Tonight, she’s married. Tomorrow, she’s bound.
And everyone who matters is already here. Efficient.”
I turn toward her. She’s standing beside the bed now, gathering things from her suitcase.
“Efficient,” she echoes, with a dry curl to it, like she’s learning that word is one of my favorites for things that are anything but.
“That’s all it is,” I say.
I arranged the timing so this would be over quickly, Chiara would be safe, and I could take my wife home.
Ayanna nods slowly. “I’m going to shower.”
She gives me a fleeting glance as she heads toward the en suite bathroom. The door clicks shut, and the water starts a moment later.
I’m left standing in the middle of the room holding a drink I’m not going to touch, and I fail, comprehensively, to think about anything except the woman on the other side of that wall.
I drag a hand down my face and exhale slowly through my nose, as though that has ever once helped a single thing. It does nothing. It was never going to.
When the water cuts off, I make myself look at the window. The sea. The black water, the lights strung along the coast. Anything that isn’t the door.
She comes out wrapped in a robe, hair damp and pushed back off her face, bare-legged, scrubbed of the night, and somehow more dangerous like this than she was in the dress, and every effort I just made evaporates.
My gaze drifts toward her on its own, and she catches me looking.
A slow, knowing curve pulls at her mouth.
“You keep pouring those,” she says, nodding at the untouched glass in my hand, “and you never drink them.”
I glance down at it like I’d forgotten it was there. “Old habit.”
“Mm,” she hums as if amused.
And then, entirely oblivious to the war she’s leaving behind her, she makes her way to the bed and slides under the covers. “Good night, Aric.”
I take the shower cold. It’s a tactic that has never once worked, and I use it anyway.
By the time I come out, she’s asleep. Her breathing has gone slow and even, all that royal composure finally gone her face.
I stand there longer than I should, looking at the woman whose name I once resented and now worship as though it were sacred.
I watch her sleep a moment longer because I can’t bring myself to tear my gaze away.
Eventually, I lie beside her on my back, stare at the ceiling, and do not touch her.
It should be easy. I’ve shared a bed with her before and survived it.
But tonight, my mind refuses to obey. The taste of her lingers, clinging to me like a sin I’m unwilling to confess.
I lie there, staring into the darkness, burning with a hunger I have no intention of feeding.
Finally, I accept the inevitable. I won’t fall asleep with her three feet away and her kiss still haunting my mouth.
I give up.
I pull on a shirt and go out into the night, because staying would mean gambling with the one promise I have no intention of breaking.
The garden is cool and dark and almost empty, the wedding long since collapsed into its embers—a few staff clearing glasses. The cold helps. A little.
Then I see her, and it doesn’t help at all.
Chiara. Alone at the far edge of the terrace, a wrap pulled around her shoulders, looking out at the black water.
For half a second, I consider turning around. Slipping back inside before she knows I’m here. It would be easier. Then I discard it, because leaving would be a coward’s move. I have many faults, but that has never been one of them.
She sees me before I decide anything else.
“What are you doing out here?” Her voice carries across the quiet.
“I could ask you the same.”
“I couldn’t sleep.” She turns back to the water. “It’s difficult. Sleeping next to a man you don’t know.” She breathes quietly. “Especially after the performance you put on earlier.”
I don’t pretend not to understand her. “I didn’t plan it.”
She scoffs. “Of course you didn’t.”
“I didn’t, Chiara.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She wraps her arms tighter around herself. “It’s fine, Aric. My heart was already broken. There’s not much left in there to damage.” She glances at me, and her voice softens. “But now I’ll have to watch it. The two of you. For the rest of however long this life lasts.”
There’s nothing I can say that isn’t either a lie or a cruelty, so I give her the only true thing I have.
“I’m sorry.” I mean it more than she’ll ever believe me. “I never wanted it to come to this. I wanted you somewhere far from all of it. Safe, free, with a man you’d actually chosen. Someone you could fall in love with.”
Once, I thought I wanted to be that man.
Standing here now, with my wife’s taste still on my tongue, I understand that I’d never wanted Chiara the way I want Ayanna. I never even came close.
“I did choose, Aric.” Chiara’s voice is fragile. “I chose you. A long time ago, and I never took it back.”
She looks at me for a moment as if expecting me to say something she’d like to hear. But there’s nothing.
“And you didn’t choose me,” she finishes.
It’s true, and we both know it’s true. The only kindness left in me is not insulting her by pretending otherwise.
I chose a contract over her. I chose the alliance, the seat, the war I was born into.
And then somewhere along the way, I chose a sharp-tongued princess who hated me, without ever meaning to.
Now I know something else. For Ayanna, I’d walk away from all of it. I’d thrown it all away if she asked. I’d burn every last piece of it to the ground if choosing her demanded it.
But I don’t say any of it aloud, because no version of that doesn’t cut.
So I say nothing.
Chiara looks at me a moment longer, reading the silence for everything it admits. Then she nods, slowly, as if I’ve confirmed something she came out here already knowing, and walks past me toward the villa.
I lean against the stone balustrade and stare out at the sea, its wind cutting through my shirt. And I can’t stop thinking of Ayanna asleep upstairs. Of the way she kissed me back. Of her hand in mine. Of her saying good night like there would be a tomorrow after this.
My father spent my entire life teaching me that love was weakness. A liability. A knife handed to your enemies. And the cruelest part isn’t that he might have been right. It’s that if loving her destroys me, I don’t think I’d choose differently.
I push away from the balustrade and head back inside, because my wife is upstairs. And I’m done pretending that isn’t exactly where I belong.