Chapter 42
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Aric
We step out of Olympus, and the chilly night air hits us, but it does nothing to cool the heat inside my body.
Ayanna walks ahead, in no particular direction, as though away from all of it.
I fall into step beside her without a word, because there was never another option.
Wherever she’s going, I go. That stopped being a decision somewhere I can’t pinpoint and became a fact about how I’m built now.
Neither of us says anything. The path curves away from the villa into the garden proper, and I watch her the way I’ve long since given up pretending I don’t.
The pearls at her throat—the ones I chose.
The dress that moves like water when she walks—the one I chose.
The dark eyes that have been quietly taking me apart since the day she came down that aisle toward me like a woman walking to her own execution and refused, the entire way, to look like anything but a queen.
I noticed her then. I’ve noticed her every day since.
I stopped lying to myself about that long before I was willing to do anything about it.
“Ayanna.”
She slows.
“Are you hurt?” My teeth clench at the memory of Thorne’s fingers on her arm. I can still feel the give of his jaw under my knuckles, and I’m not sorry. “Did he—”
“I’m fine.” She lifts the arm a fraction, then lets it fall. “He didn’t hurt me. You made very sure of that.”
But I see she’s different. And if it’s not the situation with this goddamn bastard that affected her, then it must be Chiara.
“Is it what she said, then?”
She’s quiet for a few steps. “No,” she whispers, brows creasing as though she’s contemplating whether to continue or keep whatever this is that bothers her to herself. “Not as much as—” She hesitates.
“Not as much as…?” I demand.
She stops walking and turns to meet me, stripped of the armor she wears so well.
“I saw you,” she breathes. “Last night. In the garden, with her. I went out onto the balcony for air, and you were down there—”
“It wasn’t arranged.” I don’t even let her finish as though I can’t stand the thought of her having the wrong idea of all of it. “I couldn’t sleep. She was already out there. I didn’t go to her, Ayanna. I’d never—”
“I know,” she states, and my brows twitch.
“I know you didn’t. You don’t sneak. If you wanted her, you’d tell the whole world to its face and dare it to object.
I knew that, watching you. That’s not—” She breaks off, her gaze drifting somewhere distant as if she can’t stand looking into my eyes.
“The problem wasn’t that I thought you’d arranged it.
The problem was that I stood up there watching you with her, and I felt…
jealous. I felt jealous, Aric.” She lets out a heavy sigh, running her hand through her hair.
“And then she said what she said tonight, and it just reminded me of something I already knew. Something I’d let myself forget. ”
She meets my gaze, and our eyes flick between each other for a moment.
“You didn’t choose me.” That comes out barely above a whisper and is threaded with pain. “None of this was your choice. So I don’t get to stand on a balcony being jealous like a wife. Because that isn’t what this is. This is an arrangement. It was always just an arrangement.”
And there it is again. The wall she’s built to keep herself safe, rising all over again between us. I don’t blame her, though. I’ve no right to. For a very long time… that’s exactly what I’ve been telling myself too.
“Do you really believe it’s just an arrangement?” I ask. “Do you still believe that, Ayanna?”
She doesn’t respond. Instead, she just looks me in the eyes as though searching for an answer there.
Even after the kiss last night, even after what I said to her, even after the hit that landed on Bobby’s face just a moment ago, Chiara’s words were still enough to plant something in my wife… something I won’t allow to rot for a second longer.
“Since the altar,” I say. “Since the moment you lifted your chin and looked at me like you’d rather burn the chapel down than stand in it.
” The words come out low. Controlled. “Something inside me that I’d kept shut my entire life cracked open, and I told myself it was nothing.
An inconvenience. A weakness I’d manage out of my system.
” Her breath goes shallow. I keep going, because if I stop now I’ll never start again. “I was wrong.”
“Aric—” Her voice stutters.
“You want to know what you’ve done to me?
” I take one step toward her. “I don’t lose control.
In twenty-eight years, not once. Not with a gun to my head.
Not with my father’s hand around my throat.
Not under pressure, not under fear, not in a single room where losing it would have cost me my life.
Control is the only thing that has ever kept me breathing.
” I take another step, the space between us shrinking.
“And then there’s you. Making a liar out of every certainty I’ve ever lived by.
Living in my head when I never invited you in.
You’ve settled into places I spent my whole life convincing myself didn’t exist.”
Her lips part slightly. Her gaze searches mine as though she’s trying to reconcile the man she’s always believed me to be with the one standing in front of her now.
“I calculated my first kill at seventeen. I have not made an impulsive decision since. Every move I make, I make twice. Once in my head, once in the world. That is who I am.” I look down at my own hand, the split knuckles, then back at her.
“But tonight, when Thorne put his hand on you, I did not think at all. There was no plan. No second move waiting in my head. I just moved, because his hand was on you and something in me didn’t give reason a chance to intervene. ”
The air between us is a different thing now. Dense. Charged. The kind that feels like standing at the edge of something that only falls one way.
“And since I kissed you—” I loom over her now, tilting her chin up with my knuckles. “I can’t stop thinking about doing it again.”
Her breath shallows, and her chest rises up and down uncontrollably.
“Every time.” My voice is barely above quiet now.
“Every room. Every meeting. I think about you constantly. In Council. In rooms full of people who’d kill me for the distraction.
In the quiet, when you’re not even looking at me, and I’m watching you anyway.
I can’t make myself stop. Somewhere along the way, I’ve stopped wanting to.
” My gaze drops to her parted lips, then back to her hypnotizing eyes.
“You are the only thing in my life I cannot predict. Cannot plan for. Cannot control.”
I brush her lips with my own.
“And I have tried.”
“Aric—” she breathes.
Something gives in her expression. The last careful thread of composure unravels, the final barrier she’s held between herself and everything she actually feels. And beneath it is something that mirrors every word I just said.
My jaw tightens, the last remnant of twenty-eight years of discipline telling me to calculate, to consider, to control.
“I’m done pretending this is just an arrangement, Ayanna. Done acting like you’re just a contract. You’re under my skin. And I’m done fighting it.”
Fuck it.
My hand closes around her jaw, and I draw her back to me until there’s no space left to pretend either of us can still walk away from this. This kiss is nothing like the one before. It’s deeper. Hungrier. Possessive.
She doesn’t hesitate. Not for a second. That does more damage to what’s left of my composure than anything that came before it. I kiss her harder, drawing her even closer, like I want to fuse our bodies together so she can’t tell where she ends and I begin.
She kisses me back just as hard, fisting the front of my shirt, meeting me with that same hunger and whatever fragment of control I had left goes with it. There’s a sound, low in her throat, half surrender and half challenge, and it undoes me past the point of any return I’d recognize.
When we break apart—barely, only enough to breathe—I keep my hand against her jaw.
Her pulse is racing under my fingertips, fast and uneven, and I notice it the way I’ve noticed a hundred small things about her since the day my eyes landed on her for the very first time.
The way she lifts her chin before she says something cutting.
The way she bites the inside of her cheek instead of admitting she’s nervous.
The way she breathes now, ragged, looking up at me as though the ground has shifted beneath us both.
Ayanna might be the woman I never chose. Never asked for. Never expected. Undeniably, I would’ve refused if anyone had given me the option the day our lives were bound. But somewhere along the way, she became the one thing I would burn kingdoms down to keep.
She rewired me, bypassed every defense I’d ever built, and became instinct.
Now she’s the only choice I’d ever make. The only future I can imagine. Somehow, without ever noticing the road that led there, she became home.
There’s no turning back, and no amount of it’s just an arrangement will ever make it true again.
“Say it’s still an arrangement,” I murmur against her mouth. “Lie to me one more time.”