Chapter 41 #2
“Remember,” she says, her voice sweet as arsenic, “every time he kisses you, those lips kissed me first.”
I hold her eyes and give her nothing. Behind her, Aric’s brows draw down, trying to assemble what is going on.
“Every time he touches you, I felt that touch before you did.” Her eyes glitter with a sharp, broken light as if she knows she’s setting fire to something she can’t rebuild. “Everything he does to you, he’s done to me first.”
“That’s enough.” Aric’s voice fills the room. “What are you doing, Chiara?”
She turns to him without shrinking. I’ll give her that too. She lifts her hand toward his face, her fingertips reaching for his jaw, but Aric’s hand catches her wrist midair, and her fingers stop an inch from his jaw.
“The truth,” she says, like it pleases her.
Something locks in his face, that near-invisible tightening I’ve learned to read like a second language.
A shadow falls across the doorway, and I see Hyun-seok appear just behind Aric, his expression carefully blank, but the set of his jaw tells me he heard every word. His dark eyes move from his wife to Aric to me, reading the room in a single sweep.
As soon as Chiara sees him, she snaps her wrist out of Aric’s grip and walks out without another word. Hyun-seok follows.
Aric stands in the frame, his gaze fixed on me. His chest rises and falls with a breath he’s working to control.
“Ayanna—”
“Don’t.” The word comes out harder than I intend.
I can feel the cracks spreading through my composure—thin fractures racing outward from the place where Chiara’s words lodged themselves—and if I stay in this room, if I let him look at me with those pale-blue eyes that see too much, I will shatter in front of him.
And I refuse.
I walk past him. Through the doorway, past the space his body occupies, close enough that his scent hits me, and I keep walking.
“Ayanna.”
I don’t stop. My heels strike marble, each step counting down to my own demise. Even so, I walk like a princess instead of a woman coming apart, because my composure is the last fortress I have left… and I refuse to let it crumble.
Every time he kisses you, those lips kissed me first.
My eyes sting, but I blink it away.
Every time he touches you, I felt that touch before you did.
My throat closes. I swallow through it.
Everything he does to you, he’s done to me first.
I turn a corner, putting a wall between us, and press my back against the cold stone. My hands are shaking. I fold them together, fingers lacing tight, and breathe through my nose—the kind of breathing you do when you want to scream but can’t.
She’s right.
Everything I have from him—every reluctant touch, every almost tender gesture, every fraction of a second where the ice thaws just enough for me to glimpse the man underneath—she had first. She had it willingly, freely, in a version of his life where he chose to give it.
She had the original. I’m left wondering whether everything between us is only what survived after she was gone.
The version of him that’s left once someone else has already had the first claim.
“Well, well. Mrs. Vold.”
I jump a little, startled at Bobby Thorne leaning against the corridor wall, a drink in his hand.
I push off the wall, wiping the dampness from beneath my lashes with the pad of my thumb. Straighten the necklace. Smooth the dress. Reset the mask.
You’re a princess. Act like one.
“All alone? That’s unlike your husband. He usually keeps his assets under closer watch.” He falls into step beside me, pleased with himself. “Married life not quite the fairy tale?”
“I’m not in the mood, Mr. Thorne. Excuse me.” I intend to walk past him, but his hand closes around my arm, and he leans in with a smile he badly mistakes for charm.
“Shame. Though perhaps I could fix—fuck!” Bobby shrieks as his head snaps sideways from the punch square in his face, the crack of it splitting the corridor. His glass slips and shatters on the floor.
Before I can even process what’s happened, Aric steps between us, shielding me, and looking at Bobby with an expression I haven’t seen before.
It’s not just rage. Rage is hot, explosive, temporary. This is something else. Something colder. Like rage but under absolute control, and I see the discipline it takes to contain it.
“Touch her again,” Aric growls so low it barely qualifies as sound, “and I’ll make sure you never use that hand for anything. Ever. Again.”
Bobby drags his tongue across his teeth and spits red onto the marble, and then—because the man apparently has a death wish stitched into his tailoring—he laughs. He straightens, rolling his jaw. “You always this territorial, Viking?”
“Bobby.” Alexei’s hard voice reaches Bobby from behind. A hand clamps his shoulder. “Enough.”
Bobby shrugs it off. “Get off me, Morozov. I’m a member, same as he is. He doesn’t get to put hands on me and walk. There are rules. There are consequences.” His eyes swing back to Aric. “You want to discuss what happens when a God strikes another God? Because I’d love to.”
“I said enough.” Alexei’s grip returns, harder.
“The rules are the only reason you’re still standing.
” Aric steps closer, crowding Bobby until the latter has to tip his head back just to meet him.
“Put your hand on her again, and I will take it all. Your seat. Your name. Your inheritance. I’ll dismantle it piece by piece.
” His voice drops to something lethal. “And when there’s nothing left of any of it, I’ll start on you.
There isn’t a God at that table, or anywhere else, who’ll be able to stop me. ”
Bobby says nothing, only his Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows.
Aric turns from Bobby as though the man has already ceased to matter.
His gaze finds mine, and for one heartbeat, something that was never meant to be seen slips through.
Something that looks suspiciously like a man standing at the edge of a cliff he swore he’d never approach, staring down into the fall.