Chapter 62
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
Aric
Idon’t let go of her until she’s steady on her feet, and even then, I hold her against my chest and feel the shaking in her body slow by degrees, steadying the way a heartbeat steadies after the worst of the fear has passed.
Her forehead presses into the hollow of my throat, and I can feel her breath, warm and ragged, fanning against my skin.
She’s here. She’s staying.
The relief is so violent it nearly takes me down a second time.
And I keep holding her because I’ve spent the last hour believing I might not get to hold her again, and I’m not ready to test whether the belief was wrong.
Behind me, my men wait. Behind her, hers. And in the car beyond us both, Leandro watches through the glass with the kind of expression saying that he has never once in his life accepted that a thing hasn’t gone his way.
He gets out again the moment he understands what he’s seeing—his daughter’s hand in mine, her body turned toward me and away from the plane, away from Monsera, away from him.
“Ayanna.” He comes around the door, and his voice has changed. It’s harder. “Habibti. Think. Remember what I told you. Because if you don’t go home now, you will not get another chance—”
“That’s enough.” I step in front of her, placing myself between Ayanna and her father.
Negotiation is over. “You’re going to get back in your car.
You’re going to leave my wife and her sister here with me, and you’re going to drive back the way you came, and you’re going to do all of it without another word. ”
His fists clench on his sides. “You have no right to—”
“Let her go.” I cut in. “Walk back to your car. Get on your plane. Go back to Monsera.” I hold his gaze for another second before I speak. “Or I tell her right here, in front of every man on this road, exactly what I’ve found.”
Leandro’s jaw tightens, the muscles beneath the skin working. His eyes flick from me to Ayanna to the armed men surrounding us, measuring the cost of every possible response.
He knows what I have. He doesn’t know how much of it, or how certain I am, but he knows I have something, because I don’t bluff. I don’t deal in empty threats. Every word I speak is backed by something I’m willing to act on, and Leandro Almaviri has known me long enough to understand that.
His chin lifts. The mask settles back into place; thinner now, but intact.
“You’ll regret this, Vold,” he hisses, low enough that only I can hear it, pressed through teeth that barely part.
I don’t flinch. I’ve been threatened by men who make Leandro Almaviri look like a parish priest, and I’m still standing.
He stares at me a moment longer, then turns toward his car.
But Naomi is still in the second vehicle.
I turn my head toward the car where my brother’s girl is pressed against the window with tears standing in her eyes.
“Naomi.” I raise my voice. Not a shout but enough to carry across the road, past the armed men and through the glass. “You don’t have to go anywhere you don’t want to.”
Leandro stops mid-stride, and his shoulders go rigid.
For a long moment, nothing moves. The road. The convoy. The armed men on both sides holding their positions like statues carved from the same rock that lines the fjord.
The car door opens, and Naomi comes out fast and runs toward her sister and past her father without even a glance in his direction.
She throws herself in Ayanna’s arms, and over their heads, I can see Leandro standing by his car.
He watches his daughters cling to each other on a road he no longer controls, and whatever calculation runs behind his eyes, he keeps it locked behind a face that gives nothing away.
Then he gets in the car; the sound of the door closing echoes through the air.
The convoy reverses, and three sets of taillights disappear around the bend in the coast road.
I turn to Tassilo. “Follow them. Eyes on the convoy until it reaches the airfield. Confirm departure. I want to know the second his wheels leave Norwegian soil.”
Tassilo nods and disappears. The man is a ghost with a gun. I’ve never had to tell him anything twice.
I put my hand on Ayanna’s back. She lifts her head from Naomi’s hair and looks at me.
“Let’s go home.”
Vidar is stable when we reach the house. Kirill’s man has him settled—oxygen and monitors. Eero is pale-faced beside the bed, refusing to leave it. I stand in the doorway for a moment and feel nothing.
Not relief. Not concern. Not the complicated tangle of resentment and obligation that usually accompanies any thought of my father. Just nothing. A blank space where a feeling should be, as though he’d spent my entire childhood burning through every emotion I was ever capable of feeling for him.
Eero lifts his head. His eyes are red. He looks at me the way he’s been looking at me since the ballroom, like I’m a version of his brother he hasn’t met before and isn’t sure how to approach.
“Is Ayanna back?”
“She’s back.”
Something loosens in his face. Then tightens again. “And Naomi?”
I nod.
Eero is out of the chair before the nod is complete. He runs past me, through the door, down the corridor, the same way I drove down that road.
Then I walk to the bedroom.
Ayanna is sitting on the edge of the bed. She’s changed into something soft—a sweater that falls past her wrists, her hair loose—and she looks up when I enter with eyes that are exhausted and alert in equal measure.
“What you said to my father on the road…”
I walk closer and set the files I grabbed from my office on the bed beside her.
“This will explain it,” I almost whisper. “I’m done keeping things from you, Ayanna. I thought I was protecting you. All I was doing was building the wall higher. Whatever this costs, I would rather bleed with you than keep you comfortable behind a lie. So. Here is everything.”
I open the file, and I lay it out for her the way I laid it out for the table at Olympus, but slower, and gentler.
The money that paid the shooters, laundered through three shell companies before it ever touched them.
The man on my own detail who’d been bought and set inside our walls before the first shot was ever contracted—weeks before, which means someone was planning to put a bullet in me long before that gala was ever announced.
The chain of intermediaries that dead-ends, every single time, back into the same nest of holdings I flagged and told no one about.
Holdings that trace, through enough cut-outs to give a man a headache and just short of enough to convict, to Monsera. To her father.
“I haven’t shown you any of this before because I didn’t want to destroy you more than you already were. Not before I was absolutely certain. Everything in those files points in one direction. Your father.”
I see the way her breathing changes, the minute contraction of her pupils, the way her hands go very still in her lap, but her face stays composed.
“Points at him,” she repeats slowly. “But doesn’t confirm.”
“No.” I owe her the precision. “Points. Strongly. The money trails lead back to Monserian accounts with ties to his network. The cut-outs are structured the way his operations have always been structured. I’ve studied them long enough to recognize the signature.
The timing of every move against us aligns with moments where he had access, information, opportunity.
” I exhale. “But there’s no single piece of evidence that would convict him.
Nothing that closes the door completely. ”
“Then it could be someone else.” Her voice is thin as though she’s clinging to the last impossible hope that her father isn’t beyond saving.
“It could,” I admit. “And I’ve been holding that door open for weeks, Ayanna. Longer than I should have. Because I wanted it to be someone else.” My jaw tightens. “For your sake. More than you know.”
She stares at the files for a long moment, then her expression changes as though something just came to her mind. Her brows twitch and eyes wander somewhere distant.
“What is it?” I ask.
Her gaze lifts to mine, flickering with something that looks like the moment a puzzle piece clicks into place and you wish it hadn’t.
“Naomi told me something.” Her voice is quiet now. “A couple of weeks ago. She overheard our father.” Ayanna swallows, absently tucking a strand of her behind her ear. “The night before Luca’s funeral. He said the problem had been handled. That he wouldn’t be making any more threats.”
The door I’ve been holding open for weeks just narrowed to a crack.
I look at Ayanna. She looks back at me with the kind of expression that says the last illusion she might’ve had just burned. And I see that she knows—has known, maybe, longer than she’s been willing to admit—what her father is capable of. What he’s always been capable of.
“I have an idea,” I tell her slowly, “how to know for certain.”
Her eyes sharpen. “How?”
“It’s dangerous. And we only have one shot. If it fails, we’re burned.”
Ayanna’s posture straightens. And in her eyes, beneath the grief and the exhaustion and the residual ache of everything this year has taken from her, I see the thing that made me want her from the first day—that core of iron that refuses, under any circumstance, to bend.
“Tell me,” she says.