Chapter 59
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Aric
Anabella.
I learned her name from a dream. Ayanna woke up crying it, and I have not been able to put it down since.
Anabella. That’s a beautiful name.
We’ll remember you as Anabella. My daughter.
I’m sorry I never got to meet you. I’m sorry I didn’t know you were there to protect, and that when it mattered I was a half second too slow to keep the bullet out of your mother, and out of you.
That’s mine to carry, but I’ll carry your name with me too, every day, until the last one.
You were wanted. Even before I knew to want you—you were.
You were loved. You are loved. And whoever took you from us is going to pay for it. I promise.
I squeeze the bridge of my nose, eyes closed while I stand in front of the window in my office in the dead of the night. One of those nights when Ayanna cried herself to sleep, and I felt helpless.
So. Fucking. Helpless.
And guilty. The guilt is always there. It never leaves.
I didn’t protect my wife. I didn’t protect my daughter. How do I recover from that?
I take a deep breath and get back to my desk. I can’t let myself break because if I do, who will carry Ayanna through this darkness? She is already slipping somewhere I can’t follow, and every attempt I make to reach her, she turns aside with a practiced I’m fine.
I’ve watched grief in other people my whole life.
I know its shapes. This isn’t the loud kind.
Ayanna doesn’t weep where I can see, or rage, or throw things.
She does something worse—she empties. She moves through the house like a woman performing the memory of herself.
She eats when watched. She answers when spoken to.
She smiles when people expect her to, and the smile never once reaches the place behind her eyes where she actually lives.
And sometimes I don’t know how to do this.
That’s the truth I don’t say to anyone. I can take a building full of armed men with a knife and a plan.
I cannot find the doorway back to my own wife.
Everything I was ever taught about holding a thing together is useless against this, because the thing coming apart is her, and I was never taught how to mend. I was only taught how to break.
So instead, I hunt. Hunt for the man responsible for this.
I’ve had Farida Bassi in a room more times than I can count over these weeks.
I kept my word to Ayanna—the woman is alive, and she’ll go to Monsera’s courts when this is finished.
She gave me everything she had. The trouble is that everything she had amounts to almost nothing.
She never met the hand that moved her. It reached her through cut-outs, the way it always does.
Letters. A voice on a phone that was never the same number twice.
Money that appeared and instructions that followed.
Though this night, when I sit in front of her, is different from any of the other times. Because tonight is the first time I sit across from her since I became what she is. Since I learned what it costs to lose your child.
“I didn’t kill your son, Farida,” I say flatly, never breaking eye contact.
Her jaw tightens, and she doesn’t argue, which is new.
“For a long time, I didn’t care whether you believed it.
It changed nothing. But I understand something now I didn’t before.
” The quietest and the heaviest breath escapes my lungs.
“I understand the grief you’ve been carrying.
The shape of it. Losing a child.” My voice stays level only because I make it do so. “I didn’t, until recently. I do now.”
Her head comes up at that. Whatever she sees in my face—and I don’t know what is on it, I’ve stopped guarding it as carefully as I should—something in her cracks.
Her eyes fill. For the first time in weeks she looks at me not as the monster she’d built to blame, but as a man standing on the same ground she’d been standing on alone.
“They told me you’d lost—” She presses her lips together. “I’m sorry. Whatever you are, no one should—”
I nod, and for a moment there’s just silence.
“There’s something,” she says quieter, her hands twisting in her lap. “I don’t know if it matters. I’ve thought it over and over, and I can’t decide if it’s anything at all. But you asked me to tell you everything I remembered, even the small things, and this…it came back to me a few nights ago.”
“Tell me.”
“Before my Luca…” Her voice frays on his name. “He was frightened, near the end. More than he’d say. He drank too much one night and told me a name. A woman’s name. He said if anything happened to him, I should remember the name. That it was his mistress.”
“His mistress?” My brows twitch. “Whose?”
“He didn’t say.” She looks me in the eye. “And I assumed he was talking about you.”
“No,” I state plainly. “He wasn’t.”
Farida nods. “Vivienne Laurent. Does the name tell you anything?”
I exhale, my mind already running. It means nothing. It connects to nothing I can think of—no family, no allegiance, no face. It can be a made-up name. It could be the key to all of it or it could be a ghost, someone invented to leave a false trail. But the question is, whose mistress was she?
After I’m back at my office, I type the name in the search bar, but nothing comes up. Like the person doesn’t exist.
I stare at the name when the door opens, and I don’t have to look up to know it’s her. She carries a different kind of silence now. One worn thin by grief.
“Vivienne Laurent,” I say it aloud to Tassilo, who’s standing across the desk. “Everything. Every database, every family ledger, every passenger manifest in and out of Monsera and Norway for a year. I want to know if she’s a person or a story.”
Tassilo nods and reaches for his phone.
“Who’s Vivienne Laurent?” Ayanna asks from the doorway.
“I don’t know yet.” I set the tablet down. “It’s a name Farida gave me. It may be nothing.”
Tassilo reads the room and lets himself out, the door clicking shut behind him.
Ayanna stays close to the door. She’s dressed, which is something. Her hair is down. She looks at the tablet, then at me, and I watch the small spark of interest gutter out and something harder move in behind it.
“That’s what you do.” She nods slowly, lips pressing thin. “Every night. You come down here, and you work.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve been working for weeks.”
“Someone shot you in our home, Ayanna. Someone is still breathing who paid for it.” My eyes flicker between hers. “I’m not going to stop until I find them.”
“Of course you’re not.” Something is rising in her now, and I let it, because anything is better than the numbness. “Because that’s a problem you can solve. A name to chase. A man to hunt at the end of it. That’s something you know how to do.”
“Ayanna—” I whisper, but she cuts me off.
“Do you even grieve her, Aric? Do you grieve our daughter at all? Or did you file her under problems-to-be-handled and move on to the part you’re good at?”
The words stop me where I stand, and they hurt in equal measure.
“You stand there every day so calm. So controlled. So perfectly fine.” She’s shaking now, her voice fracturing. “I keep waiting for you to break. For one crack. One sign that losing her affected you. And there’s nothing. There’s just… work. And that flat voice. And you, standing there like a wall.”
She takes a breath that shudders going in.
“How much would it take?” she whispers, voice cracking and her eyes that flicker between mine are full of pain and hatred and something I can’t name.
“What would it actually take to break Aric Vold? Because I’m starting to think nothing could.
I’m starting to think there’s nothing in there to break. ”
I want to close the distance between us and tell her the truth—that I learned our daughter’s name from her crying it out of a dream, and I have said it every single night since in the dark like a prayer to a God I don’t believe in.
That I burned three men alive weeks ago and felt nothing but the cold, because the warm thing in me died on the ballroom floor with our child and I have not been able to find it since.
That I am not calm. That I am holding myself together by a thread because the alternative is something I cannot let her see.
But then what?
If I break, who catches her? She’s already drowning. If I go under with her, we both drown. There’s no one left to drag us back to the surface. If I let myself feel all of it now, it will bury me. And I can’t afford to be buried until I’ve buried the man who did this.
One of us has to stay standing. It was always going to be me. I have almost thirty years of practice at carrying things that should’ve killed me. This is just one more, heavier than all of them put together.
So I don’t break. I cannot allow myself to. I owe her at least that much.
“You’re wrong.” I keep my voice level, and I hate myself a little for how well I do it. “But I won’t argue with you about it tonight.”
It’s the worst possible thing I could’ve said.
“Right,” she says, hollow. “Of course.”
She turns and goes, and I let her, because the only thing that would stop her is the truth, and I can’t afford to give it to her yet.
I sit back down. I pick up the tablet. Vivienne Laurent. A ghost of a name, attached to the hand that took my daughter and nearly took my wife and is, slowly, taking my marriage too.
I’ll find you.
The world is no longer big enough for you to hide from me.
I will find you.