Chapter 46
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Aric
“Are you hurt?” I ask her, anger biting inside my veins as much as the fear I felt for the first time in years.
“Aric—”
“I asked. Are you hurt?”
Her eyes search mine for a moment as though trying to read me.
“No.”
I nod. “Good.” Now we can have the talk. She’s safe and sound in my bedroom where nothing could ever reach her.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I growl.
Ayanna’s brows crease. “I’m sorry. I didn’t expect her to—”
That’s the match to the gasoline.
Not I’m sorry I went.
Not I’m sorry I put myself in danger.
Not I’m sorry I snuck out and turned off my phone and walked into a meeting with a woman I knew was unstable in a country where people have already aimed at me.
I didn’t expect her to.
As though Farida’s behavior is the problem and not the choice that put Ayanna in that room.
As though the near miss is the issue and not the going.
As though she genuinely believes a better outcome would have made the decision acceptable.
The thing I’ve been holding compressed in a locked fist since Maylin’s face in the corridor cracks open.
“You didn’t expect her to,” I echo her words. My voice is flat. Cold. But everything underneath it isn’t.
Ayanna’s chin lifts. “She called me. She said she had information about Luca’s death. She—”
“And that was enough for you to walk out of this house alone. Without Maylin. Without telling anyone where you were going.” I watch her, my first clenching. “Without telling me.”
“I thought I could handle it—”
“You thought you could handle it.”
I’m not shouting. I never do. But the coldness is gone now—replaced by something she hasn’t heard from me before. Something hot underneath the control. Something that makes the control itself feel dangerous rather than reassuring.
“I did handle it,” she says, and there it is—that spark of defiance. “I was talking her down before you arrived—”
“You were cornered against a wall with a knife at your throat.”
“I wasn’t—”
“I saw your face, Ayanna.”
Her gaze drops momentarily, and I exhale, trying to release this tension in me along with it.
“I saw your face when I walked in. You weren’t handling anything. You were waiting to die.”
Her jaw tightens as she swallows. “That’s not—”
“Don’t.” I take a step toward her. “Don’t lie to me. Not about this.”
She doesn’t back away. That’s the thing about her. That’s the thing that drives me fucking insane. Any other woman would retreat. Would fold. Would give me the space my anger demands.
Not her.
She holds her ground. Lifts her chin higher. Meets my eyes with that dark, burning gaze that has been living rent-free in my skull since the day I saw her walk down that aisle.
“I made a mistake,” she says. “I know that. But I don’t answer to you—”
“You do.”
“Excuse me?” Her tone goes higher.
“You’re my wife.” The word comes out rough. Raw. “In this world, that means something. It means you don’t walk into danger alone. It means you don’t turn off your phone and disappear. It means—”
“It means I’m your property?” She cuts me off. “Something to track and control? To lock away in a cage?”
Track. She knows.
“I saw on the screen in the car.” Her voice is cold now. Controlled. The way mine usually is. “You put a tracker on me. Without asking. Without telling me. Like I’m your prisoner.”
Every muscle in me tightens, because that’s exactly what I swore I’d never make her feel.
Trapped.
I promised myself I would never become the kind of man Vidar had been to Angelique. Never mistake possession for protection. Never feel my wife feel caged.
But ownership was never the point.
I never wanted a cage. I wanted a way back to her if the world ever took her from me.
And tonight, it did. Because of that tracker, I found her before I had to bury her.
If I had to choose again, I’d install it twice.
“You are not my prisoner.”
“Then what am I?” She steps toward me, closing the last of the distance. “A possession? Because that’s what it feels like, Aric. That’s what this whole marriage feels like.”
“The tracker”—I make myself sound calmer than I am—“was placed after Luca’s attempt on my life. After his men aimed at you. For your protection—”
“You didn’t even tell me about it. You decided for me. Just like you decide everything. What I’m allowed to know, what—”
“If you had told me about Farida—”
“You would have stopped me from going!”
“Yes!”
The word echoes through the room. Loud. Uncontrolled. I don’t raise my voice. Ever. And I just did.
Ayanna stares at me with her lips parted, and the silence that follows is thick enough to choke on.
“Why are you this angry?” she asks quietly. Genuinely asking, genuinely trying to understand why the fury in this room is so disproportionate, why it feels like more than the situation warrants.
She’s acting like I didn’t kiss her in Italy like a man possessed. Like Bobby’s hand on her arm at Chiara’s initiation didn’t put something in my veins that felt like murder. Like the image of her cornered against that wall isn’t going to haunt me until I die.
Is she serious, for fuck’s sake?
“You’re acting like last night, and the one before didn’t happen.
” My voice is rough, and there’s something in it I don’t recognize.
“Like I didn’t stand between you and a knife tonight.
Like I didn’t spend the entire drive to that café calculating every possible way I might find you dead and feeling like—”
I stop. The word is right there. On the tip of my tongue.
“Like what?” she whispers.
My jaw tightens, every muscle in my body coiling. “Like it would end me.”
The confession comes out raw. Hoarse. Nothing like my voice is supposed to sound.
“If she’d hurt you. If I’d been five minutes later.” Every syllable fights its way past my throat, each costing me more than the last. “If I’d lost you—”
“Aric—”
“I would have burned this city to the ground.” I look into her eyes, and stop trying to conceal what she was always going to find anyway. “I would have killed everyone responsible and everyone who ever spoke to them. I would have torn apart anyone who stood in my way. And then I would have—”
And then I would have followed you into the ground.
Her breath shudders out of her, and her hand lifts, fingers hovering just shy of my skin. Tentative. Like she’s afraid I’ll break. Or maybe afraid I’ll burn. Then she sets her fingers against my jaw, fingertips tracing the edge of it, and my control goes up in flames.
I wrap my arms around her, one hand at the back of her head, the other at the small of her back, and I pull her and kiss her.
Hard. My mouth claims hers like I’ve been drowning and she’s my first breath of air.
She gasps against my lips, and I swallow the sound, deepen the kiss, pour the fear and fury into it.
Her fingers slide into my hair. Grip tight. She’s kissing me back with the same desperation, the same hunger, like she’s making up for every second she thought she’d never get to touch me again.
I walk her backward until her back hits the wall. My body presses against hers, trapping her there, and the sound she makes—a small, breathless moan that goes straight through me—almost undoes me completely.
“Aric—”
I kiss her jaw. Her throat. The spot below her ear that makes her gasp.
“Tell me to stop,” I murmur against her skin. “If you don’t want this, tell me to stop, and I will.”
Her fingers tighten in my hair. “Don’t stop.”
Fuck… her permission is my ruin. My downfall. My damnation.
Control is the only thing I’ve ever trusted. The only thing that’s kept me alive in a world that devours weakness. And right now—with her back against this wall and her fingers in my hair and her breath hot against my mouth—I have none.
None.
I lift her, and her legs wrap around my waist like they belong there. Like her body already knows mine. My hands grip her thighs, holding her against me, and the sound she makes—fuck, that sound—grinds whatever’s left of my restraint into dust.
I carry her to the vanity beside us and clear it with one sweep of my arm—her perfume, her jewelry, everything—all of it shatters across the floor before I set her down on top.
“Aric.” My name rolls off her lips. Soft. Urgent. “Please.”
I’ve never heard her say please. It almost kills me.
I kiss her, hard and demanding, one of my hands kneading her thigh and the other at the back of her neck.
I’ve killed men with these hands. Pulled triggers.
Broken bones. Signed death warrants without blinking.
I don’t even know what a man like me, an irredeemable criminal and a killer, does with a woman like her.
A real-life princess untainted by the darkness of my world.
I pull back just enough to look at her face. “You should hate me.”
“I know.”
“I’m not a good man, Ayanna.”
“I know that too.”
Her hands finish with my buttons. Push the shirt off my shoulders. Her palms flatten against my chest, and her eyes move over the ink, the scars, the whole story written across my skin. She traces the runes at my neck. The skull over my heart. The raised line of an old knife wound across my ribs.
“You’re mine now,” she says quietly. “That makes you good enough.”
Everything in me snaps and turns feral.
I take her mouth again, and there is nothing careful in it, nothing left that remembers how to be.
I shove the dress up her thighs, gripping flesh hard enough to mark, needing skin, needing proof.
Because that’s what this is, underneath all of it.
Beneath the want, beneath weeks of denial finally tearing loose, something in me is howling one word on an endless loop—alive—and the only thing on earth that will quiet it is the heat of her under my hands and her heart slamming against my chest, still beating, still here.
“I almost lost you tonight.” It comes out against her throat, half a growl.
“Do you understand that? I walked into that room ready to die getting to you. I would have.” I drag her to the edge of the vanity and fit myself between her thighs, and the heat of her against me tears a groan out of my chest. “So be very clear with me right now, Ayanna. Because if you don’t stop me, I am not going to stop at all. ”
Her answer is to reach between us and go for my belt.
Of course it is. She answers a threat with a dare. It has undone me from the first day.
I strip her out of what’s left of the dress, and for one second, I just look—my wife, flushed and wanting and alive, here, mine—and then I can’t look any longer.
I have to touch, have to taste. My mouth drops to her breast, and she arches off the vanity with a cry that goes straight through me.
My hand slides between her thighs, and she’s soaked, slick and ready for me, and the sound I make at the feel of it isn’t a human one.
“Aric—” she moans, breaking apart. “Now. I need—”
“I know what you need.” I free myself and drag the length of my cock through the wet of her until she’s shaking, until her nails carve half-moons into my shoulders.
“I’ve known for weeks. I’ve thought of nothing else.
” I catch her jaw and force her eyes up to mine.
“You’re a princess, Ayanna. But I’m going to fuck you like you’re not. ”
And I thrust inside her.
She cries out, and I swallow it, buried to the hilt in a single stroke. The feel of her clenching tight around me nearly finishes me on the spot. I hold there a beat—forehead to hers, both of us shaking—and then the leash is gone for good.
I fuck her hard, deep, relentless. The vanity slams against the wall with every thrust, and I don’t care.
Let the whole house hear it; let the whole world know.
One hand fists in her hair, the other clamps on her hip and hauls her into me, and I pour every cold mile of that drive into it—every scenario, every if, every second I spent imagining her dead—I drive all of it into her until there’s nothing left in either of us but this.
“You feel that?” The words scrape out against her ear. “That’s mine. You’re mine. Every part of you. I don’t share, I don’t lose, and I will never—” My next thrust punches a cry out of her. “Let anyone take you from me again.”
Her legs lock around me and drag me deeper, her nails rake down my back hard enough to draw blood, and I don’t care.
I want her marks on me. Her hips rise to match every stroke, and through the wreck of her breathing, she gasps my name like a curse and a prayer in the same breath, like she’s been starving for this every bit as long as I have.
“Say it.” It comes out a command, and only I know it isn’t one. “Tell me.”
“I’m yours.” It tears out of her, helpless and honest and stripped of every defense she’s ever raised against me. “God—Aric—I’m yours—”
I feel her shatter. Her whole body bows off the vanity, her thighs tremble against my hips, and my name breaks out of her as she clenches around my cock and comes apart.
I hold her through every wave of it, watching her face come undone, because this, her, undone and alive in my arms, is the only thing I have ever wanted and been too much of a fool and a liar to reach for.
She’s destroyed me. Utterly. Completely.
If an undoing had a name, it would be hers.
Ayanna Lilith Almaviri is my undoing… and I stopped wanting to be saved from it.