Chapter 44
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Ayanna
Iwake to weight and warmth and the unfamiliar fact of being held.
For a moment, I don’t move because I don’t want to break it.
Aric is a furnace at my back, one heavy arm banded across my middle, his breath slow and even against the nape of my neck—and somewhere in the night, the careful inches he’s always kept between us in this bed disappeared entirely.
There’s a tenderness low in my body, a bone-deep softness, and a mark on the side of my throat I can feel without touching it.
Evidence, all of it. Proof that last night wasn’t a dream I invented to torture myself.
“You’re thinking too loudly,” Aric murmurs against my skin, voice rough with sleep. He doesn’t open his eyes. His arm tightens, drawing me back into the heat of him. “Stop.”
“I’m allowed to think.”
“Not before coffee. It’s against the rules of this house.”
I can’t help but chuckle softly. “Well, we should be getting ready for the said coffee, or Vidar will scowl at us.”
“Stay. Five minutes. The world can wait five minutes.”
Now that’s astonishing. Aric Vold, who spends every second of his day like it’s ammunition, is asking me to waste five of them lying still in a warm bed. So I do. I stay.
Eventually, he rises—pressing his mouth to my bare shoulder first like he’s done it every morning of his life—and goes to the bathroom.
A moment later the shower runs, water drumming against stone, and I lie in the wreckage of the bed listening to it, grinning at the ceiling like a fool. Until my phone rings.
I reach for it on the nightstand. Unknown number. Monserian prefix.
I slide to answer and press the phone to my ear. “Hello?”
“Princess Ayanna.” The voice is rougher than I remember like something has been scraped out of it. “This is Farida Bassi.” Luca’s mother.
I’ve known this woman for years—long before Luca and I were ever anything.
The Bassis are an old aristocratic family, and once, Farida and my mother were as close as sisters.
I sat at her table on summer evenings, ate food she cooked from recipes her own mother had pressed into her hands, and listened to her melodic laugh.
She used to take my face in both her hands and call me ya omri.
My life. The way Monserian women do with the girls they’ve decided are their own.
And then the warm memory curdles into the other one. Farida at the funeral. The accusation etched into her face. The raw, jagged grief of a mother who’d buried her only child—and who looked across that grave and laid the blame at my husband’s feet.
“Farida.” I keep my voice careful. “How did you get this number?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Her breathing is uneven. “I need to speak with you. In person. I know who killed my son, Ayanna. And I can prove it.”
The world seems to hold its breath.
She knows. She has proof.
“Farida, what do you—”
“Not over the phone. Meet me.” She sounds concerned. “And Ayanna, you can’t tell your husband. Please, I’m begging you. I’m terrified of what he’ll do if he finds out I reached out to you.”
I let out a heavy breath.
Come alone. Tell no one. Be afraid of the one man on earth who would burn down a continent to keep you safe.
Every word of it is shaped like a snare—and I have spent my whole life in a world where snares wear the faces of people you trust. I should hang up right now, walk into that bathroom, and repeat every syllable of this to Aric.
But it’s Farida. My mother’s friend, the woman who used to call me ya omri, Luca’s mother…
And the not knowing about Luca has been a stone in my shoe for weeks—through the funeral, through every sleepless night spent wondering what truly happened to a man I once thought I’d build a life beside.
If Farida has the answer, I have to hear it.
I owe it to him. I owe it to her. I owe it to the girl I used to be.
I close my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose, the shower still running a wall away.
I’ll go. I’ll hear her out. And then I’ll tell Aric everything—after. Once I know what it is I’m even telling him.
After. Right?
“Where?” I breathe.
She gives me a place. A time. A village an hour up the coast that I’ve never heard of. I memorize it and write nothing down.
The water shuts off. I slide the phone face down onto the nightstand and gather my expression back under control.
Aric comes out, toweling his hair, and he looks at me the way he’s only just started looking at me—like I’m the single good thing in a life made of damage and darkness. I smile at him, and I say nothing.
I feel absolutely terrible because the first lie of my marriage isn’t a word. It’s a silence.