Page 175 of Vow to Claim You

“I accept.”

I stand behind the mirror, and I watch my father-in-law agree to kill me without so much as a blink.

Leandro rises, shakes Nikos’s hand, and walks out of the room with the measured stride like he’s just been handed the keys to a kingdom. He doesn’t know that what he’s been handed is a noose, and that he just tightened it himself.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

Ayanna

“And?” It’s all I can manage when Aric walks through the door of our hotel suite.

He looks at me and nods, and the last small, desperate piece inside me that was still hoping my father might be innocent quietly dies.

The building where the meeting is set is old. I’m on the upper level, tucked behind a low wall that overlooks the room below through a gap in the floor where a section of ancient timber has been removed and replaced with reinforced glass. From here, I can see everything—the whole room laid out beneath me like a stage.

Aric is standing in the center of it, alone and unarmed, waiting for my father.

Eero is beside me. Close enough that I can feel the heat of his body, the controlled rhythm of his breathing. He hasn’t spoken since we took our positions twenty minutes ago, but his hand rests on my arm as if a reminder that if I start to fall, he will catch me.

“Breathe,” he murmurs, barely a whisper. “In and out. Stay with me.”

I try. In and out.

Nikos’s men are already in position below us—four, maybe five, I’ve lost count in the darkness. They’re so still they might as well be part of the walls. Weapons drawn, waiting for a signal. Waiting for a confession that might not come.

My heart is hammering so violently I’m certain Eero can feel it through my arm.

Because this confrontation means I lose one of them.

If my father confesses, I lose the man who raised me. The man I call my father, though, right now I’m not certain he can be called one.

If he doesn’t—if Aric is wrong—then Aric submitted himself to trial for a false accusation, and I lose the man who threw his car across a road and dropped to his knees and said live for me like it was the only prayer he knew.

Either way, I lose. Either way, something in me dies tonight.

“He’s here,” Eero breathes, and I go rigid as the door opens and I hear my father’s measured footsteps. The same rhythm I’ve known since I was small enough to recognize my father’s walk before I could see his face.

Then he steps into the light, and I can see him. He’s dressed impeccably, as though attending one of the royal meetings in Monsera and not appearing to carry out an execution. His face is composed in that expression I’ve seen a thousand times across a thousand rooms, but his right hand hangs at his side, and I can see the shape of the gun beneath his jacket.

Aric turns and his face shifts into something that might pass for surprise if you didn’t know him the way I do—a flicker of the brows, a fractional widening of the eyes.

“Leandro.” His voice carries up to me, low and steady. “I didn’t expect you. I was waiting for⁠—”

“Nikos.” My father finishes the sentence for him. “He isn’t coming. He sent me.” He takes a step forward. “To kill you.”

Aric looks at my father for a moment as though assessing him. “And why do I feel…” his head tilts in that signature way, “like this is giving you pleasure?”

My father scoffs, and with it, the mask drops, and what’s left underneath is a man I’ve never met. A man with cold eyes and the kind of smile that makes my blood run to ice.

“You have no idea how long I’ve waited for this,” he drawls before he points the gun at my husband. “Any last wishes?”

My heart plummets.

My father is aiming at my husband with the kind of look on his face that tells me everything I’ve ever believed to be true was a lie. All of it.

Aric nods. “Since it’s my last night breathing,” he says, and his tone is so measured, so calm, that it takes me a moment to realize what he’s doing, “I just want to know if I was right. About all of it.”

My father’s mouth curves. “Well,” he says, and the smile widens.