Chapter 48
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Ayanna
I sit up slowly, the sheets pooling at my waist, and that’s when I see him.
Aric stands at the window, his bare back to me.
He’s wearing only his trousers, slung low on his hips in a way that would be distracting under different circumstances, and he’s utterly still.
Statue-still. Staring out at nothing. Or maybe at everything.
At the snow falling soft over his frozen kingdom.
At the ghosts that seem to live in every corner of this house.
At the wreckage of whatever walls I tore down tonight, when I let him inside my body, and he let me inside something far more dangerous.
My chest tightens.
The smart thing would be to pretend I’m still asleep. Give him space. Let him brood in peace. Wait for morning, when we can both pretend this night was just desire, and nothing more.
Except I’ve never been particularly smart when it comes to Aric Vold.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed. The floor is cold beneath my feet. I wrap a robe around myself and cross the room and stop a few feet behind him. Close enough to touch, far enough to give him the illusion of space, because God knows this man hoards space like a dragon hoards gold.
“Aric.” His name comes out softer than I intend. Almost tender.
He doesn’t turn, but I see his shoulders shift. A minute adjustment, barely there.
“Go back to sleep.” His voice is flat and distant as if he’s already halfway behind his walls.
No.
No.
Two hours ago this man was inside me. Whispering my name like a prayer. Saying things I’d never thought I’d hear from him, and looking at me like he couldn’t decide whether to worship me or consume me whole.
Now he sounds like he’s addressing a stranger.
Typical. Absolutely typical.
I should turn around. Climb back into that ridiculously huge bed that still remembers what happened two hours ago, and pretend I don’t care.
Preserve what’s left of my dignity—and God knows there’s little enough of it left after tonight, after I let him see me want him, let him hear me moan his name, let him watch me come apart in his arms like I was made for it.
But I don’t. I can’t, nor do I want to. Not anymore.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Business,” he says, dry and automatic, and I know it’s a lie.
I almost laugh. Almost. But nothing is funny about the way he’s holding himself. Nothing funny about the distance he’s already rebuilding. Nothing funny about watching a man construct walls in real time while I stand here hoping he’ll still let me past them.
“Don’t.” The word comes out harder than I mean it to.
He turns his head, and I catch the edge of his jaw, the sharp line of his profile, the pale slash of moonlight across his cheekbone. Those ice-blue eyes, always watching, always calculating, always ten steps ahead of everyone else in the room.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t do this again.” My voice is barely above a whisper. “Don’t push me away.”
I step closer. My hand lifts, hovers near his shoulder blade—near the ink and the scars and all the stories on his skin that he’s never told me—then drops.
“Please. Not again. Not after tonight. Not after everything you said. Not after—”
Not after you made me believe this could be real.
Through the window, I see the snow keeps falling, burying the world in white like it’s trying to hide all the ugly things under something clean. I wonder if that’s what Aric does too—lets the ice build, layer over layer, until whatever’s underneath is too frozen to feel.
I’m about to retreat, about to decide I’ve pushed too hard, exposed too much, when his voice stops me.
“I’m not prepared for this.” His tone is low and rough, like it’s being dragged out of him against his will.
“For what?”
He turns fully toward me. His eyes find mine, and what’s in them makes my breath catch in my throat and refuse to move.
Not coldness. Not distance. Not the calculated control I’ve come to expect from Aric Vold.
Fear.
Aric Vold is afraid.
This man—this mafia heir who kills without flinching, who took a bullet for me without hesitating, who walked into that café tonight ready to burn the world down—stands in front of me looking terrified.
Of what?
Of me?
“For what’s happening between us.” His voice drops, scraping over something raw. “You’re rewriting every rule I’ve ever had. Every wall I’ve built. Every truth I treated as sacred.”
My heart pounds so hard I can feel the pulse in my fingertips.
“Is that…?” I hesitate.
This isn’t the conversation I expected. I expected deflection. Coldness. The Aric I know—the one who holds everyone at arm’s length and calls it strategy.
“Are you trying to tell me you have feelings for me?”
His eyes bore into mine, restless, searching, shifting like the sky before a lightning strike.
“I’m not sure I’m capable of feelings.”
My heart stumbles.
I’m not sure I’m capable of feelings.
Not I don’t have feelings for you. Not this was a mistake.
Not any of the things I braced to hear.
I’m not sure I’m capable of feelings.
Like it’s a deficiency. A flaw in the wiring. Something broken so long ago he’s not sure it can be fixed.
“I know you are,” I say softly. “You’ve proven it.”
“Have I?”
I inch closer, tilting my head back. “Why won’t you just open up to me? What are you so afraid of?”
I watch the tension move through him—the shoulders tightening, the hands flexing at his sides, the way he looks at me like I’ve asked him to hand over a loaded weapon.
“Is it about your mother?”
He goes rigid. Every muscle locks, the stillness shifting from controlled to frozen, from guarded to trapped, like I’ve pressed a blade to a wound he thought was hidden under years of scar tissue.
“Ingrid told me,” I continue, quiet and careful. “Not everything. But enough.”
His gaze moves between my eyes, as though he’s only just realized he’s standing in a minefield, and every step might be his last.
“What did she tell you?”
“That her name was Angelique,” I whisper. “That she was beautiful. That when she walked into a room, people noticed.”
I breathe out, slow.
“And that Vidar forced her to be with him. That she escaped after she gave birth to you. And that you don’t speak of her. Ever.”
He’s quiet so long I think he’ll turn away. Shut down. Become the ice sculpture I married instead of the man who burned inside me hours ago.
But he doesn’t turn away.
He exhales like he’s setting down something he’s carried for decades, and when he speaks, his voice is stripped of everything. Empty.
“Ingrid told you he forced her. Did she tell you what that means?”
His expression hardens, and I frown faintly, searching for what I’m missing.
“She said he was obsessed with her. That she didn’t want—”
“He raped her.”
The words ring through the silence long after he’s finished speaking.
I stop breathing. Everything stops. The snow. My heartbeat. The whole spinning world.
“She didn’t want him.” His voice stays flat, as though dulling every edge is the only way he can force the words past his throat. “She loved another man. She refused Vidar. Told him no.” His jaw flexes, clenched so tightly I swear I can hear his teeth grind. “He took what he wanted anyway.”
He looks back through the window.
“She got pregnant. With me.” His tone hardens. “The child she never wanted. From the worst night of her life.”
My heart aches so much I don’t even know what to say. Or whether I should say anything at all.
“She stayed long enough to give birth. Then she ran.” The tendons in his neck tighten as he swallows. “Saved herself.”
His eyes come back to mine.
“And left me behind.”
“Aric—”
“Do you understand what that means?”
It isn’t really a question. He takes a step toward me—just one, but it feels like a collision.
“Every time she’d have looked at me,” he says, “she’d have seen his face.
The monster’s face. The night he—” He exhales as though to pause, unable to keep going.
“How do you hold a child that’s the product of the worst thing that ever happened to you?
” His voice frays at the edges. “The product of rape. That’s what I am. ”
I’m crying. I don’t know when it started. The tears are just there, trailing down my cheeks.
“My father had one lesson he cared about teaching me.” His voice darkens, his gaze sinking somewhere far beyond me. “Love makes you weak. Attachment gets you killed. A man is made by carving the softness out of the boy he used to be.” The memory hollows his expression.
He drags a hand through his hair, and when he looks at me again, whatever’s left of him is barely holding.
“So you want to know what I’m afraid of?
” He takes a heavy breath before continuing.
“I don’t know if I can love you the way you deserve, Ayanna.
I was raised by a man who beat every instinct I have into me.
And the only person who might’ve shown me something different left me on the floor the day I was born. ”
His lips press into a thin line. A faint shake of his head follows.
“I’m afraid whatever he made of me can’t be undone. That one day you’ll look at me and realize there’s too much of him left in me.”
I close the distance between us. My hands lift, cup his face, and force him to look at me. His skin is warm under my palms. His eyes are wary, braced, waiting for me to flinch now that I know the full shape of what he is.
Product of rape. Unwanted child. A monster’s face.
This is not what he is.
“You are not your father,” I tell him. “You are not what he did. You are not how you were made. You are not the violence that created you, or the abandonment that came after.”
His eyes close for a fraction, then settle back on mine.
“You were a child, Aric. An innocent child. You didn’t ask to be born. You didn’t choose any of it. And your mother leaving—”
I swallow hard, my heart breaking quietly beneath the weight of every word.
“That wasn’t about you. That was survival.
She was broken, and she was trying to get out alive.
Maybe it was the wrong choice, or maybe it was the only one she had left—but either way.
” My thumbs brush his cheekbones, wiping away something I pretend not to notice.
“It wasn’t because you were unlovable. It was because she was destroyed.
And destroyed people make impossible choices. That was never your fault. Never.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“How?”
“Because I’m here. In your bed. In your house. In your life. In this frozen country so cold it makes my bones ache, married to a man who speaks in silences and fights with control and has more walls than a medieval fortress.”
A soft, unguarded sound escapes him—almost a laugh.
“And I’ve seen you, Aric. Not the ice. Not the walls.
Not the mafia heir everyone else gets.” My fingers slide into his hair.
“I’ve seen the man who put himself between me and a knife without thinking.
Who took a bullet and didn’t flinch. Who burned a contract because he couldn’t stand to have me trapped by terms I never agreed to. ”
I inhale slowly, holding his gaze, and suddenly every piece of him falls into place.
“Who trusted me enough to tell me all of this, because I asked him not to push me away.”
His hands lift and cover mine where they rest against his face.
“That man is capable of love.” I lean in and press my forehead to his. “I know he is. Because I’ve felt it. Even when you didn’t say it. Even when you tried to hide it. I felt it, Aric. I feel it.”
“I don’t know how to do this,” he whispers, his breath mingling with mine. “What if I get it wrong? What if I hurt you?”
I pull back just enough to look at him.
“You’re not him. You never will be. And I am not your mother.”
My thumb caresses his jaw on its own.
“I’m not going to leave you. Not because of where you came from. Not because of what you’ve done. Not because loving you is hard.”
His hands tighten over mine.
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying. I’m choosing to stay—not for a contract, or an obligation, or an alliance. For you.”
He kisses me. But not like before. Not the desperate, consuming collision of hours ago.
This is different.
Softer. Slower. A vow instead of a claim.
I kiss him back with everything I have. My hands in his hair. My body pressed to his. My heart beating against his chest like it’s trying to find a way inside.
When we break apart, he doesn’t pull away. He stays close, forehead against mine, breathing me in like I’m oxygen. Like I’m the first clean breath he’s taken in years.