Page 112 of Vow to Claim You

I know it’s the point. I know every line of this was sketched to march me through that door before I can think. I know the smart move—the move I would order any man under me to make without a second’s hesitation—is to wait, ring the building, starve them into the open.

I know all of it.

But I also know Ayanna is there and god knows what she’s been put through, and I’m already out of the car.

“Ten minutes is ten minutes she doesn’t have,” I growl, and my men follow.

The first man is waiting just inside the door. He’s good. Fast. Trained. His gun is already coming up, but he’s also expecting a man who intends to survive the night. I don’t give him that man. I drive straight into the muzzle. No cover. No angle. Nothing between the barrel and my chest but speed. My hand closes around his wrist before he can fire. I wrench the pistol aside, and the shot meant for my heart tears into the ceiling. The joint breaks beneath my grip. I drive his own weapon beneath his jaw and pull the trigger. The body drops. There are more behind him. Three. Four. They spill out of the darkness of the main room, and the café comes apart.

Glass. Muzzle flash. Tassilo’s men pour in at my back, the flat cough of suppressed fire chasing them. I don’t take cover; I cut a straight line toward her. The men on my flanks become my crew’s problem. A shot passes close enough to score a line of fire across my arm, but I don’t even feel it.

Behind me, one of my men goes down hard—Sten, I think, by the sound he makes. Tassilo breaks off to drag him clear of the line of fire, and for three seconds, my flank is mine alone. A man steps into my path at the back, but I don’t slow. I drive straight through him, taking him off his feet and slamming him into the doorframe hard enough that something gives. He stops being in my way.

And then I’m through, and I see her.

Ayanna.

Cornered against the back wall of a storage room. And Farida Bassi standing pressed to her back, one arm locked across my wife’s chest, a knife laid flat to the line of her throat.

I stop so abruptly my boots skid on broken glass.

“That’s far enough.” Farida’s voice shakes violently, but the blade never leaves Ayanna’s throat. “Come any closer, and I cut her. I mean it, Vold. One more step, and I open her throat before any of your men reach me.” Her eyes are wild. Bloodshot. Wrecked. This isn’t a soldier’s plan. This is a drowning woman clinging to the only leverage she has left, and that makes her more dangerous, not less. I can predict the actions of a professional, but I cannot predict what a grieving mother with nothing to lose will do.

But it’s not the knife that brands itself into me. It’s Ayanna’s face.

I’ve seen her sharp. Composed. I’ve seen fear flicker across her features before she buried it quickly enough that most people never noticed.

I have never seen her like this.

Not cracked. Gone. The armor she wears like a second skin—the sarcasm, the defiance—is stripped clean away, leaving only her. She looks like she’s stopped waiting to be saved and started deciding how to die with dignity.

The image sears itself into my skull. Burns there. I know it will never leave. I know I’ll see it every time I close my eyes for the rest of my fucking life. My wife, standing at the edge of death, and I wasn’t there to stand between her and it.

“Farida.” I keep my voice flat and even. The kind of voice that has talked men off worse ledges than this. “Look at me. You don’t want her blood. You came for me.”

“I came for justice.” The knife trembles against the pulse in Ayanna’s throat. “You took my son. Someone told me. Someone showed me how to reach her, how to bring you here. They said this was the only way a man like you ever answers for anything.”

Of course. Farida was never the architect. Only the weapon.

“Now,” she shouts.

Men step out of the dark I’d already written off as empty. The kitchen. The stairwell. A doorway I walked straight past. Four of them. Five. Guns up, and not on my men.

On me.

For one cold, suspended second, the whole room holds its breath, and I see exactly how this was always meant to end. Lure me in. Ring me with guns. Kill me on a filthy café floor. Whoever paid for these men built it clean.

It’s a good plan, but it has one flaw.

I step into every line of fire in the room, placing myself between every barrel and my wife. If they fire now, they fire through me before a single round reaches her.

“You should have brought more,” I tell them.

Then I give the order—one word, in Norwegian, quiet enough that Farida won’t know what it means until it’s already done.

Tassilo’s men were never at my back by accident.

The room turns to slaughter. One of mine takes a round to the shoulder going through the kitchen doorway, and the man at the stairwell nearly opens Eero up before Eero puts him down at arm’s length.