Chapter 65
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Aric
Ihold Ayanna in my arms, her body trembling against me. “Are you okay?”
The question is inadequate. I know that. There is no version of okay that applies to a woman who just heard her father confess to killing her unborn child and call her pathetic in the same breath.
“I will be,” she says, it into the hollow of my throat, muffled, without lifting her head. Her breath fans my neck, fingers curling into the fabric of my shirt.
I press my lips to the top of her head. “I’m sorry.”
She pulls back slightly and looks up at me. Her eyes are red and swollen, stripped of every mask she’s ever worn. What stares back at me is the rawest version of Ayanna I’ve ever seen. “Who’s the joker?” Her brows furrow as her eyes flick between mine.
“I don’t know.” I brush a strand of hair from her face. My thumb traces the line of her cheekbone, catching the last of the dampness there. “But we’ll find out.”
“He mentioned Vivienne.”
“I know. The same name Farida gave me. The same woman Bobby said was Barry Thorne’s mistress.
” My brows twitch on their own. “If it’s the same woman, and I assume she is, your father had an affair with her too.
Barry was obsessed with her. And Luca died because he found out about her.
” My jaw tightens. “She’s the thread that connects all of it. ”
“The joker,” Ayanna whispers.
“Maybe. Or the key to finding them.” I cup the back of her head, pressing my forehead to hers. “I’ll find her, Ayanna. Wherever she is. Whatever she’s hiding. I’ll find her.”
A couple of hours later, we’re back in Norway. We were supposed to stay in Italy until the end of Leandro’s interrogation by The Gods, but Ingrid called, concerned about Vidar’s state.
The SUV pulls up to the estate, and the front door opens before the engine cuts.
Naomi comes through the door with no shoes, no coat, her hair flying behind her, and she collides with Ayanna on the path with enough force to stagger them both. Her arms lock around her sister’s waist, her face buries itself in Ayanna’s shoulder.
“I’m here,” Ayanna murmurs into her sister’s hair, her hands cradling the back of Naomi’s head. “We’ll go through this together.”
Eero walks toward the door but stops. He waits until Naomi lifts her head, until her wet eyes find his across the distance, until she runs in his direction.
Then I reach for my wife’s hand, and we step inside.
Ingrid stands in the hall with her hands clasped in front of her. Her face is composed, but her eyes—behind the glasses—are watery. She looks at me, then at Eero, who has appeared at my shoulder.
“What is it?” I ask, though the shape of the answer is already forming in the air between us.
Ingrid takes a breath. “Mr. Vold passed this morning.” She takes a trembling breath. “Peacefully. In his sleep. Kirill’s man was with him.”
I nod, expecting something to come and hit me. Anything. Grief, shock, the sharp intake of breath that marks the moment a son learns his father is gone.
Nothing comes.
I stand in the hall of the house he built, the house he raised me in, the house where he did all sort of terrible things to teach me lessons and make me strong, and I feel the absolute, cavernous nothing. As though I’ve buried my father years ago and I’m only now being told the body has caught up.
“Thank you, Ingrid,” I say.
She nods, wiping up the tears from under her glasses. She loved him, in her way. Or loved the version of him that existed in the cracks, the version that let her stay, that let her matter, that called her family. She’s earned her grief. I don’t begrudge her that.
Eero lets out a controlled exhale through his nose, burying his face at the top of Naomi’s head before they head to the living area.
I stand in the hall a moment longer, with Ayanna’s arms wrapped around me.
“Are you all right?” she asks softly.
“I’m fine.” I look her in the eyes that search mine with worry.
“I’m here, Aric. If you need… anything.”
“I know,” I whisper as I press a kiss to her forehead, pulling her closer. “That’s all I need.”
We bury Vidar a few days later. The service is brief. I insisted on that. No eulogies. No speeches. No parade of men who feared him pretending they loved him. A priest who says the necessary words, a coffin that goes into the ground, and the sound of earth hitting wood.
I stand at the graveside and still feel nothing.
Ayanna is beside me, her hand in mine, her thumb moving in slow circles against my knuckle. She’s been watching me since Ingrid delivered the news, searching my face for the crack, the break, the sign that losing him has affected me in any way, but it didn’t.
The mourners are few. Members of the organization, mostly. Tassilo stands at the edge of the group, hands clasped, face carved from the same stone as the headstones surrounding us.
Nikos sent word, a single line: The Gods mourn with you.
Eero stood on my other side throughout the service, and when the coffin went down, I felt his shoulder press against mine.
The same way he’s always been there. The younger brother who never left, who chose this house and this family and this frozen, fractured life over the mother who would’ve taken him somewhere warmer.
He chose me. He’s the only person who ever did, until Ayanna.
Now the mourners filter away. The cemetery empties in degrees until it’s just the two of us standing over a hole in the ground that holds the man who made me.
I look down at the coffin, and in my mind, I say my goodbye.
You wanted an heir. You got one. You wanted a legacy. You got one of those too, though not the kind you imagined. You wanted me hard and cold and unbreakable, and you succeeded, and the cost of that success is that your son is standing at your grave feeling nothing at all.
Not sadness. Not grief. Not forgiveness.
Goodbye, Father.
You did your worst. I survived it.
Ayanna squeezes my hand, pulling me back to presence. We turn together, walking away from the grave. We’re halfway to the car when someone calls out my name.
“Aric.” A female voice reaches us from behind.
I stop, and Ayanna instinctively does too.
For a moment I don’t turn. The voice doesn’t belong to anyone I know.
Not Ingrid, not any of the women who attended the service.
It’s unfamiliar, yet something about it hooks into a place so deep inside me that I feel it in my spine before my brain has finished processing the sound.
I turn and see a woman standing on the path behind us.
She’s alone. No escort, no entourage, no one accompanying her.
She’s tall—taller than average, though not as tall as Ayanna—and slender in a black coat that falls to her knees.
Her hair is dark, threaded with silver, and pulled back from her face.
She’s in her late forties, maybe early fifties.
But her eyes are what stop me. Pale blue.
Ice-cold. Identical to the ones I see every morning in the mirror.
The same ones I thought I’ve had from my father.
No, it can’t be.
“Yes?” I ask low and cool.
“My name is Angelique.”
My blood runs cold, something thudding in my ears.
She looks at me for a moment longer before she speaks again. “I’m your mother.”
Ayanna’s hand tightens around mine as if she feels the way the ground tilts beneath my feet.
I look at the woman who gave birth to me and abandoned me the same night. The woman Ingrid described in whispered fragments. The woman whose name was forbidden in this house. The woman who ran from the man we just put in the ground and didn’t take her son with her.
“We have nothing to talk about,” I say coolly, as though I’m closing the door—the same door she closed twenty-eight years ago when she walked out of this house and left me in it.
“I know you don’t want to know me.” There’s something in her posture—straight, composed, carrying its own weight without apology—that reminds me of someone, and it takes a full second before I realize who.
Ayanna. She reminds me of Ayanna.
“I know you probably hate me,” Angelique continues, and her voice is steady but her hands—clutching the bag in front of her, pressed tight against her stomach—are trembling.
“And you have every right to. I’ve spent twenty-eight years knowing you would, and I’ve never once tried to tell myself you shouldn’t. ”
“Then there’s nothing left to discuss.”
“All I’m asking for is ten minutes.” She takes a single step forward, though carefully as if she understands she’s standing on ground that could collapse beneath her at any moment. “Ten minutes to hear my side. Not to excuse it. Just to tell you what happened, from my perspective.”
My jaw locks. Every instinct I have—every wall, every defense, every scar my father carved into me—screams to turn and walk away.
To get in the car and drive back to the estate and never think about this woman again.
But something else stops me. Something small and stubborn and irrational that lives in the same place where Ayanna’s name is written and Anabella’s is carved.
The part of me that was a child once. The part that never stopped waiting for his mother to come back.
“I’ve been waiting twenty-eight years for your father to die,” Angelique says with a quiet, shaking voice, “so I could safely come back.”
The words hit me like the final piece of a puzzle I didn’t know I’d been building. Safely. Not until I was ready. Not until I’d moved on. Safely.
I stand on a cemetery path between the grave of the man who kept me and the ghost of the woman who left me, and I don’t know what to do with either.
“Ten minutes,” I say.
And the door I swore I’d never open cracks.