Chapter 60
CHAPTER SIXTY
Aric
Iarrive at Asgard, and when I enter the meeting room, everyone is already seated.
Nikos at the head, Hyun-seok to his right, Alexei with those winter eyes that have watched me differently ever since a warehouse on the docks.
Camila in dark red across Bobby Thorne, a drink already in his hand. Hariri. The others.
The talk stops when I enter, and the gazes follow me until I sit across Nikos.
“Aric.” He looks at me down the length of the table, and the room goes quiet for him. “I’m sorry. For your wife, and for—” His gaze flicks between mine. “The whole of this table grieves with you.”
I merely nod because I don’t trust myself to speak without cracking, and I won’t crack at this table.
“Then let’s not waste his time,” Nikos says, folding his hands.
“This isn’t just Aric’s problem. Men walked into the Vold estate during a gathering attended by half the families at this table and put a bullet in a God’s wife.
” His gaze sweeps across the room. “That wasn’t an attack on the Volds.
It was an attack on every one of us.” A beat passes.
“Whoever ordered it didn’t just declare war on Aric.
They declared war on the table.” He looks at me. “So. What do we know?”
I tell them everything I’ve managed to establish so far.
The money, laundered through three shells before it reached the shooters.
The bought man on my own detail—already inside before the first shot was ever contracted, which means this was planned for longer than a single night.
The chain of cut-outs, each one dead-ending in the next, all of it designed by someone who’s done this many times and intends never to be found.
“Careful work,” Hyun-seok states.
“Very.” I nod. “There’s just one detail I haven’t been able to attach to anything. A woman, supposedly someone’s mistress. Luca told his mother that if anything happened to him, she should remember the name.” I lean forward, linking my fingers. “Vivienne Laurent.”
I study every face as I say it, the way I was trained to. And most of it is nothing. Blank looks. Nikos’s slight frown. Camila turning the name over with her mouth. Alexei, unreadable as ever.
But then there’s Bobby Thorne, who sits up a fraction. “Vivienne Laurent?”
Every head turns.
“You know the name?” Nikos asks.
“I know a Vivienne Laurent,” Bobby says as though pleased to matter for once. “Whether she’s your Vivienne, who knows.”
Every nerve ending in me goes very still and very cold, my eyes locked on Thorne. “You know her.”
“Knew her.” He shrugs, swirling his drink.
“Vivienne. She was one of my father’s women.
Toward the end.” Another careless shrug, like he’s reaching back into a box of things he never cared about.
“Real elegant, older, kept to herself. He loved her past all sense, and my father wasn’t the type.
” He takes a sip of his whiskey. “Then he died, and she was just… gone. Never saw her again. Wasn’t looking, honestly. ”
I keep my face straight, but a hundred different scenarios run through my mind.
Because Bobby’s father, Barry Thorne, was the man who proposed the alliance.
I saw a report from the Gods’ meeting my father attended instead of me.
We needed the route, and Thorne made the case.
Barry Thorne put Ayanna in my house. And now Barry Thorne’s mysterious woman, the one his own son says he loved past all sense, is a name that Luca told his mother to remember should anything happen to him.
That is not a coincidence I know how to make peace with, and it opens a door I don’t like the shape of. The Thornes. Bobby, who put his hand on my wife’s arm at Chiara’s initiation and had to be reminded, with my fist, that she isn’t his to touch. The Thornes, who suggested the marriage.
But the pieces fit too easily, and things that fit too easily are usually built to.
Because would Bobby Thorne—if the Thornes are neck-deep in this—be stupid enough to admit he personally knows the one name tying it all together?
He’s a fool, but even fools know when to lie.
Naming her could be the play. Get ahead of it.
Look cooperative. Point every eye in the room exactly where he wants it looking.
Confess the small thing loudly enough that no one goes digging for the large one.
Or he’s precisely the vain idiot he appears to be, and he genuinely doesn’t understand what he’s just admitted.
I don’t know which it is yet. That’s the problem with Bobby. He’s stupid enough to be innocent and stupid enough to be guilty, and the two look identical from across the table.
“Where is she now?” Nikos asks.
“No idea.” Bobby shakes his head. “Told you. She vanished when the old man died. Wasn’t my problem.”
“You never asked?” Camila shoots Bobby a spiteful glance. “A woman your father loved ‘past all sense,’ who disappeared the moment he was in the ground, and you never once wondered where she went?”
“I had an inheritance to enjoy, Camila. I didn’t have time to chase down Dad’s leftovers.” He grins at her, and she only stares back.
“You had a Council seat to grow into,” Alexei growls, and Bobby’s smile thins.
“A photograph, then.” Camila leans forward. “Anything. A woman like that leaves a trace somewhere, even a careful one. There’ll be an image, in your father’s things if nowhere else.”
Bobby lifts his glass in a lazy half toast. “I’ll dig around. See what’s in the old files. If there’s a picture of Vivienne Laurent anywhere, I’ll get it to you.” He looks in my direction, neck craning, and this goddamn grin he’s wearing on his face broadens. “Anything for the grieving.”
I look at him long enough that the grin fades.
“Do it quickly,” I say.
My phone buzzes under the table. I reach for it from my pocket and glance at the screen. Eero—he knows I’m in a meeting that shouldn’t be disturbed, so it means only one thing.
Ayanna.
“Forgive me.” I stand before Nikos nods. “Continue. Whatever comes back on the name, I want it.”
Nikos nods again. “Go.”
I walk the length leaving the meeting room behind until only silence remains. Then I answer.
“What is it, Eero?”
“Bror,” he says, voice solemn. “Almaviri’s back.”
The cold that started at Bobby’s words finishes its journey through me.
“And?” My voice hardens, the grip tightening on the phone. Because I know there’s a but. Eero wouldn’t have called if there weren’t.
“And Ayanna’s cases are packed. They’re standing in the hall.”
“Say that again.”
“She’s leaving, Aric.” He breathes heavily. “Almaviri spent the afternoon in her room. When he left, she had Ingrid help her pack. Everything’s by the door. There’s a car booked to the airfield.”
For one full second, I don’t move. I’m rooted to where I stand, while the world seems to tilt under my feet.
She’s leaving.
The sentence keeps ringing in my head, muffling everything else around until there’s only the sound of my heartbeat.
“Hold the airfield,” I say, already walking out of Asgard. “Whatever it takes. Ground the charter, invent a mechanical, buy the pilot. I don’t care. She does not take off.”
“I will do everything I can.”
“And Eero?”
“Yes?”
“You do not frighten her. You delay her. Ingrid. The luggage. A flat tire on the car. Be creative and be gentle and buy me every minute you can.”
“Understood.”
I end the call.
I’m in the car before the cold’s finished registering on my skin, and then I’m driving like a man who has stopped believing in his own mortality, because right now I have.
The estate is an hour out.
I make it in less.
The fjord road is full of blind curves, and I take them at speeds that would kill a sane man.
But I can’t stop, can’t slow down because I cannot—I cannot—let her leave believing that I never grieved our daughter.
That there’s nothing in me. That I filed Anabella under things-to-be-handled and moved on to the part I’m good at.
If she walks away carrying that, she won’t come back. She’ll be right to. I’ll have given her every reason to leave.
I thought it was strength. I thought I needed to stay strong for her, to carry her through the darkness. Now I know it wasn’t strength. I understand that now, an hour too late, doing ninety on a road built for thirty.
The phone goes off in the console. Eero again. I answer it without slowing.
“Aric.” His voice is cracked, none of its usual ease. “I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry, I couldn’t do anything—”
“Where is she?”
“They’re gone. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.
” The words come tumbling, and Eero doesn’t tumble.
“Leandro was going for the cars, and Father came down—came down to argue with him, got in his face about the marriage, the contract, all of it, shouting like I haven’t heard him shout in years—and then he just—” He lets out a breath that shakes.
“He went down, Aric. Father collapsed. Right there in the hall. He couldn’t get air.
I ran to him—everyone ran to him—and that’s when they fled.
By the time I had Father breathing again, the cars were already through the gate. ”
My jaw tightens. “Is he alive?”
“Barely. Kirill’s man has him. He’s bad, Brother. But he’s breathing.” Eero swallows. “They took Naomi too. They made her go.” Something raw moves under his voice. “She didn’t want to, but Leandro made her, Aric.”
Everything in me tightens. Every muscle, every nerve ending, every fiber.
I cannot let Leandro take both of them back to Monsera.
Because the man isn’t just their father.
He might be the one responsible for Luca’s death, the one trying to set me up for it, the one lying straight to his daughters’ faces without batting an eye.
“Which road?” My grip on the steering wheel tightens too.
“South. The airfield. His plane’s—”
“Stay with Vidar.” I cut the wheel into a hard turn, the back end breaking loose across the road before it bites. “Call Tassilo. South road, the airfield. Tell him I’m ahead of him and not to lose me.”
I end the call.
The airfield is forty minutes. Leandro has fifteen on me. His convoy is heavy and careful. Mine is one car and I no longer mind whether I survive the night. I’ll close it.
The light blurs. The road unspools. And the thing in my chest that I’ve kept chained since the ballroom—since Kirill’s face, since the gray came down over my wife and never lifted—it’s off the chain now, running loose, and it doesn’t feel like rage. It feels like fear. The plain, animal fear.
I grip the steering wheel even harder, to the point my knuckles turn white.
I did not say the words to her. I never once said I am destroyed, Ayanna. I say her name every night. I would trade every year I have left to have heard her heartbeat once. I saved it. I hoarded it because that’s all I’ve ever known. Contain it. Compartmentalize it. Lock it away.
And now she’s in a car with her cases packed, believing I felt nothing, and I might… lose her.
And the thought of losing her feels worse than any war. Any betrayal. Any blood I’ve survived. Worse than all of it.
Taillights snap me out of my reverie. Far ahead, strung along the black ribbon of the road—the convoy, four sets of red eyes in the dark.
I close the distance past the rear car. Past the second, my engine screaming, gravel spitting. The third. Their drivers see me now. The lead car speeds up, tries to make a race of it. It isn’t one. They’re protecting cargo, and I’ve stopped protecting anything at all, including myself.
I pull beside the lead car. I hold it. And then I cut the wheel and put my car across the road in front of theirs and brake.
The shriek of tires—mine and theirs. The car skids sideways across the road before lurching to a stop ten feet ahead, the driver’s face drained of color behind the glass. Dust hangs in the air. The smell of hot rubber lingers. The immense silence of the fjord settles over everything.
For a moment the world seems to still. Again, just the sound of my heartbeat thudding in my ears.
Then I open my door, and I get out onto the road.