Page 44 of Vow to Claim You

She doesn’t look like the woman I last saw trying to hold herself together while I dismantled her world with a sentence. This Chiara looks smaller, pale, with eyes swollen and red-rimmed, as if she’s been crying since the earth cracked open beneath her feet. Her hair is loose, unstyled, falling around her shoulders in caramel waves that frame a face stripped bare of its armor.

Her gaze finds mine instantly, and she freezes. Her breath hitches like her body needs a moment to catch up to what her eyes already understand. Then she runs straight at me.

“You fucking bastard!” Her voice tears through the room, raw and breaking. Her fists land against my chest again and again, small and weak and furious, the impact more sound than damage.

I don’t move. I don’t catch her wrists. She’s earned every strike and a thousand more.

“First you broke my heart—” A strike. “Then you killed my brother—” Another. “And now you’re arranging—” Her voice cracks. “You’re arranging a marriage for me?”

Hyun-seok stands by the window, hands loose at his sides, and watches his future wife pour herself into another man’s chest.

I lift my gaze over her shoulder for the first time. Serena stands just outside the doorway, framed in the space Remo left open, watching me with an expression that says it all. She told her. Maybe last night, maybe an hour ago. She told Chiara what we’d agreed to so that I wouldn’t have to break the news cold. So that Chiara would walk in here already past the shock, already at the rage, already at the bottom of her grief instead of the surface.

It was mercy. From Serena. Toward me. Toward Chiara, in her own way.

“What did I do, Aric?” Chiara’s voice fractures completely, and my gaze returns to her. She looks up at me, eyes wild with grief. “What is my fault in all of this? Please. I know you didn’t stop loving me. You couldn’t. You don’t stop loving someone overnight.”

I draw a slow breath. “I chose to stop loving you, Chiara.” I refuse to soften the truth for either of us. “The day I married Ayanna, I chose to stop loving you.”

“Of course.” A hollow laugh escapes her. “Because it’s as simple as that. You just turn off your feelings with a snap of your fingers. But what about me, Aric? Did it ever occur to you that it wasn’t that easy for me?” She presses her lips together, but the last words escape anyway. “All I ever did was love the wrong man.”

It hits me sideways. Somewhere deeper than her fists. Somewhere I haven’t built a wall thick enough to stop it. But I keep my face composed. I have to.

I catch her wrists gently but firmly, stopping her from hurting herself more than me. My grip is steady, controlled.

“Chiara.”

She breaks anyway. She literally collapses against my chest. All of her at once.

Her forehead drops against my chest. Sobs tear out of her in uneven breaths, her shoulders shaking as if her body finally surrenders to the pain her mind has been holding back.

I don’t push her away. I don’t pull her closer either. I stand there, letting her cry it out against me, taking the weight because there’s no one else left to take it. Her brother is dead by my hand, her mother will follow him by the end of the week if we don’t move fast enough, and her old life is gone the moment she lifts her head off my shirt. Because I was the last man she trusted with her body, and now I’m the man who’ll give her to another one before the sun finishes rising. So I just let her fall apart against my chest because I owe her that much and worse, her tears soaking through the cotton of my shirt.

That’s when I feel her.

Not Chiara.

Her.

I look up slowly, already aware of her before I see her. My wife stands in the doorway beside Serena.

Her posture is perfect, chin level, hands clasped just below her waist. The royal mask is in place. She could be at a state funeral. She could be presiding over a coronation. To anyone watching, she gives nothing away.

But I’m not anyone, and I see it.

I see the way her eyes have gone too still. I see the breath she’s holding without showing it. I see the way her gaze drops to Chiara’s fists balled in my shirt, the wet patches her tears have left on the fabric, on the part of my life that existed before her, colliding violently with the life she’s been forced to build alongside me. And then her eyes lift back to mine.

Guilt clenches low in my rib cage. Not for holding Chiara. Holding her is the only decent thing I can do right now. For Ayanna having to watch it. For the fact that the first time my wife has seen me show anything close to tenderness, it was for another woman. For the fact that this is what she has to carry into whatever the rest of our marriage becomes. For the fact that I asked her to stand at an altar a few weeks ago and call me husband, and I haven’t yet earned the right to be one.

Chiara’s crying slowly subsides. Her breaths even out into shudders. I loosen my grip on her wrists.

“This isn’t a punishment,” I tell Chiara, my voice even. “It’s a way out.”

She laughs weakly through tears. “You always were good at calling hell something else.”

Maybe. But hell with an exit is still better than the alternative.

I lift my gaze across the room one more time.