Chapter 43
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Ayanna
“Ayanna. Aric.”
We break apart—not far, his hand still warm at my jaw—and turn. Marcelina stands a few paces away on the stone path, hands clasped in front of her, the serene mask she wears in every room slightly askew.
“Forgive me. I didn’t mean to… interrupt.” She hesitates, wincing at her own timing. “I’ll be quick. I came to apologize. For Bobby. For what he did to you in that hallway.” Her voice steadies. “There aren’t words for how sorry I am.”
“You’re not the one who should be sorry,” Aric states, and somehow those are the same words I’d say too. “Nothing your husband does belongs to you.”
“Still.” Her chin lifts, and I can see exactly what it costs her. “I’m his wife. And I’m… God, I’m so embarrassed. That you should be treated like that, at—” She stops, presses her lips together.
“Don’t be.” I step toward her, and I mean it more than I’ve meant most things tonight. “You didn’t put his hand on me. You don’t answer for him. And Marcelina—” My gaze bounces between hers for a second. “If you ever need anything. Anything at all. You come to us.”
She glances between us—Aric, then me, then back—and something careful and disbelieving moves across her face. “You mean that.”
Aric nods. “Yes.”
“You have a friend in me,” I tell her. “Whatever that’s worth in a world like this one. You have one.”
For a moment, Marcelina looks like a woman handed water she didn’t dare ask for. Then the mask resettles—gentler this time—and she nods.
Aric’s hand finds the small of my back as he tips his head toward Olympus. “Tell Nikos we’ve gone. We leave tonight.”
“I will.” She gives us a polite, small smile. “Thank you. Both of you.” She turns and goes back toward the club’s entrance.
The following morning, I wake in our bed.
We came back to Norway at night. Back to our reality.
Our routine. I shower and dress, and by eight o’clock, we’re at breakfast. But something is different.
Something has changed. I can feel it in the breakfast room before a single word is said.
In the way Aric’s eyes keep finding me over the rim of a coffee.
In the way I keep finding his. We trade the usual barbs, but the edges are gone off all of it, and there’s something underneath now that wasn’t there a week ago.
After breakfast, he walks me as far as his office door, and instead of going in, he stops, and turns, and steps close enough that I have to tip my head back to keep his gaze.
“You’ll be all right today.” It isn’t quite a question—he doesn’t deal in questions—but there’s one buried in it.
“I’ll survive a few hours without you, Vold. I managed twenty-two years.”
The corner of his mouth lifts. “That wasn’t the question.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“Oh, come on.”
We both turn. Eero is leaning in the doorway down the hall, a coffee in one hand, grinning, far too pleased with himself, looking between us like he’s just won a bet against himself.
“What,” Aric says.
“This.” Eero waves the mug vaguely at the pair of us. “Something’s different. Don’t bother denying it because I have eyes. I clocked it at breakfast.”
“Eero.” It’s a warning that has never once worked on his brother.
“What?” He takes a slow sip, delighted with himself. “Watching the two of you trade insults over eggs is my favorite part of the day, and today, the insults had feelings in them. Tragic. You’ve ruined it.”
Eero pushes off the frame and claps his brother on the shoulder. “I’m thrilled for you both. I’ll be insufferable about it, and Tassilo’s been waiting in the car for ten minutes.”
Aric turns back to me. For a moment, he doesn’t say anything.
Then he leans in and presses his mouth to my forehead, and it undoes me more thoroughly than the kiss in the garden did.
Because a kiss in the dark is one thing, but this is daylight, in his own house, in front of his brother, without a single thing forcing his hand.
“I’ll be late,” he says against my hairline. “Don’t wait up.”
Then he’s gone down the corridor with Eero, who is saying something I can’t hear and very obviously shouldn’t, and I stand there with my hand drifting up toward my forehead like I can hold the warmth there if I try.
I don’t wait up. Officially.
Unofficially, I’m awake when the convoy comes back—headlights sweeping the bedroom ceiling, the low growl of engines, doors, voices, the house stirring and resettling. I lie in our bed and wait for the sound of him on the stairs.
It doesn’t come.
I give it twenty minutes. Then I give up the pretense, pull on a robe, and go looking for my husband in his own house in the middle of the night.
I find him in the piano room.
The door stands open a hand’s width, and I stop before I reach it because of the sound. Low. Quiet. A voice I know, shaped around words I don’t. Aric is saying something in Norwegian.
I edge closer and look through the gap. He’s sitting on the floor, his back against the leg of the grand piano, with sleeves of his black shirt shoved to the elbow.
Elske’s enormous white head rests in his lap.
He’s stroking her in long, slow passes, murmuring to her in the language I’ve only ever caught from him in fragments—soft, unhurried, none of the clipped flatness he wears in English.
Whatever he’s saying, it’s gentle. It is the gentlest I have ever heard him.
I stand in the corridor and watch Aric Vold—the man who sits at tables with the most dangerous people on earth, who has not once in my presence allowed his face to do anything he didn’t first sanction—talk quietly to his wolf like nothing else in the world requires his attention.
I must make a sound, because his head turns.
For a moment we only look at each other across the room.
“You should be asleep,” he says.
“So should you.” I push the door open the rest of the way and step in. Elske’s tail thumps once against the wood. She decided long ago that I’m allowed. “You didn’t come up.”
“I didn’t want to wake you.” His hand moves over the wolf’s fur. “And it was a rough night. I needed a moment to think.”
I make my way across the room and lower myself to the floor beside him. Elske huffs and resettles, her head bridging both our laps now, and I sink a hand into the thick fur of her scruff.
“How did you end up with her?” I glance at her, then him. “A wolf. In a house.”
He’s quiet a moment as though traveling back in time in his mind.
“We found her in the woods. Years ago. A cub, half starved, one leg torn open, left behind.” His thumb moves slowly over her fur.
“She’d have died out there in a night. So I took her,” he says simply, as though there’d never been another choice. “Couldn’t leave her.”
Something turns over in my chest, slow and aching. The man beside me, who swears he feels nothing, looked at a wounded thing left alone in the cold, that everyone expected to die, and he carried her inside and kept her anyway. He did the opposite of what his mother did.
“What does her name mean?” I ask, trying to steer away from the topic because I’m afraid he might close like a door if I mention what’s running through my mind. “Elske.”
He looks down at her and strokes the white fur between her ears.
“Love,” he mutters, and goes on petting her like he hasn’t just dismantled me.
The man who doesn’t speak. Who doesn’t smile. Who insists he doesn’t feel. Named his wolf Love.
I look at him, and he’s already looking at me, and I think he knows exactly what I’ve just understood, because there’s an unmistakable tenderness in his eyes, and he doesn’t bother to hide it this time.
I lean across the space between us, and I kiss him.
He goes still for half a heartbeat—caught off guard—and then he turns into it, a hand rising to my jaw, and kisses me back.
Slow, at first. Then not.
Elske has the good grace to leave the room—and the last coherent thing I manage to think, before thinking stops being possible at all, is that I came to this frozen country certain it would be the end of me.
I was right. Just not in any of the ways I feared.
Because his mouth is crushing mine, his tongue pushing past my lips, his hands gripping my waist hard enough to bruise. He kisses me like he’s been starving for it—messy and desperate and nothing like the controlled man I married.
An involuntary moan escapes me, and I feel the corner of his mouth lift against mine.
In one swift motion, and never breaking our heated entanglement, he rises to his feet, pulling me up with him, and places me on the piano lid.
Then his mouth is on my throat, and he sucks hard enough to leave a mark I’ll be hiding for a week, and a sound rolls up out of his chest that isn’t a word in any language. Low. Rough. Half a growl.
“Aric—”
“Don’t.” His fist closes in my hair and tips my head back, and he works his way down it—biting, kissing, biting again, trailing goose bumps on my skin.
“Do you have any idea,” he says against my neck, his voice vibrating against my skin, “how many nights I’ve lain in that bed next to you with my hands to myself? Behaving. Like a saint.” His mouth drags lower, teeth scraping my collarbone. “I’m finished behaving.”
His hand roams up my inner thigh, and when his fingers reach my soaked thong, he exhales against my throat like the feel of it tests the last of his restraint.
“Fuck.” It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him say the word, and from his mouth it sounds like a man losing a war.
He drags two fingers slowly across the wet fabric, watching my face come undone, and his mouth pulls into something dark and wolfish I have never once seen on him. His thumb finds the spot that makes my hips buck, and I can only whimper as his fingers trace the shape of me through the ruined lace.
Then he shoves the lace aside—no patience left, no finesse—and drags two fingers through my bare flesh.
“Christ.” The word comes out strangled.
He pushes one finger inside me, and I gasp, my hips jolting forward. He watches my face the entire time—watches me take him in, watches my mouth fall open, watches my eyes lose focus.
He adds a second finger, stretches me open, and starts to move. “Let me feel you. Let me see what I do to you.” His fingers curl inside me, finding that spot, and my back arches off the piano with a cry I couldn’t suppress if my life depended on it.
I whimper at the loss when he withdraws his fingers. Then he brings them to his lips and sucks them clean while I watch, his eyes locked on mine, dark and hungry and completely unhinged.
And he sinks to his knees.
Aric Vold, on his knees between my thighs.
He looks up at me, and his eyes aren’t cold anymore. They’re burning.
The sight of the most controlled man alive kneeling for me with his mouth a breath from where I’m aching nearly undoes me on its own.
“What are you—”
“I spent my whole life refusing to kneel, and now I’m here because it’s you.”
Something inside me stumbles, and then he unravels me completely.
He fists my underwear and drags it down my legs, slow, deliberate, his eyes never leaving mine. “A king kneels only for his queen.” He plants a kiss on the inside of my knee. Then higher. Then higher still, his breath scorching against my inner thigh. “You’re mine.”
Then he buries his head between my thighs and his mouth is on me, and something in me detonates and surrenders all at once. A moan escapes me, and I plant my palms on the cool lacquer and let my head drop back.
He doesn’t ease into it. He devours me—his tongue pushing inside me, like he needs to taste every part, and then dragging up to my clit with a pressure that makes my spine arch off the piano.
The whole sky is laid out over me, green and violet and gold rippling across the black, the northern lights moving like something alive through the glass ceiling.
Long, deep drags of his tongue, then the soft, relentless pull of his mouth that makes my hips buckle, legs tremble on the sides of his head—and he bands his arm low across my belly, holding me in place.
“Stay still,” he groans against me like he’s the one being pleasured, the sound of it vibrating up through me and tearing a cry out of my throat.
His tongue circles my clit, then flattens against it, then flicks—learning me, reading every twitch and gasp, cataloging exactly what makes me fall apart.
“You taste,” he says between strokes of his tongue, “like everything I’ve ever wanted.” Another lick, slow and devastating. “Like something I’d kill for.” His lips close around my clit and suck gently, then release.
“Aric—” My voice is in pieces. “I can’t—I can’t—”
He lifts his head just far enough, jaw slick, eyes blown black and fixed on my face.
“Come on my tongue, Princess.”
He seals his mouth over my clit and sucks, and I shatter.
I come apart with his name ripping out of me—loud, helpless, fingers clawing the lacquer—my hips bucking up into his mouth, and he growls, holds me down, and works me through every wave of it, relentless, dragging it out of me until nothing is left, drinking down every sound like he’s been dying for them.
He doesn’t stop after I’ve come. He gentles me—slow, soothing passes of his tongue—easing me through the aftershocks until I’m trembling and oversensitive and boneless on the lid of his piano.
Only then does he lift his head again, his mouth slick and eyes still black. He licks his lips clean of me, holding my eyes the entire time.
I’m wrecked, shaking, the aurora still burning overhead, and I look down at my husband on his knees with my taste on his mouth and the leash nowhere in sight.
The cold, silent, untouchable man the whole world fears does not exist in this room.
There’s only this one. The starved one. The one he’s kept chained since the day we married.