Page 59 of Vow to Claim You

The funny thing about control is you spend your whole life forging it, tempering it, sharpening it into the one weapon that never fails you—and then one woman falls apart on your bedroom floor, and you understand it was never armor. It was only ever a story you told yourself between bullets.

I don’t regret the decision. Letting Luca walk out alive was already more mercy than he’d earned. A man who orders a bullet with my name on it, drags my wife into the crosshairs, and turns against The Gods signs his own ending. But I didn’t end him. Death is a door that closes. Clean and quick and forgettable. I convinced Nikos to see it the same way. So I spared Luca’s life for her. But there was always going to be a price.

Kirill had brought me the slug he’d dug out of my shoulder days before—the bullet Luca paid good money to put in me. I set it on the steel tray in front of him and let him look at it a long moment.

The last thing I ever let him look at, because then I took his eyes slow enough that he understood it was a sentence. He screamed so loud that some of my men flinched. And before Kirill closed him up, I pressed that bullet into the meat beneath his collarbone. The mirror of mine, same place, same depth. And had it stitched beneath the skin. A parting gift before I sent him home to Monsera blind, marked but breathing. A living reminder. A ruined man walking back through his own gates says more than a corpse ever could.

Still. I didn’t account for this ending.

I set the glass down. The sound cracks through the quiet office. Then silence settles again.

I lean back in the chair, thumb rubbing absently over the ring with the Vold crest.

What bothers me isn’t Luca. It’s the way Ayanna looked at me.

Like I crossed from necessary evil into something she might never forgive, which shouldn’t matter since this is just an arrangement. Political alliance. Mutual obligation. Except it stopped feeling simple somewhere between taking that bullet for her and watching her cry like she’d lost the air to breathe.

And that irritates me more than anything else, because attachment is a liability. My father drilled that into me early. Love makes men sloppy. Sloppy men die. Or worse—they get someone else killed.

I drag a hand over my face.

She said she hates me.

Good. I’d rather have her hate me and pour herself into that than grieve a man she should’ve long since forgotten.

And I’ll do what I’ve always done. Protect what’s mine. Even if she still insists she isn’t.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Ayanna

The moment my mother said he killed himself, something inside me fractures—a small, soundless break, the kind you don’t notice until it’s already done. I don’t scream. I don’t collapse dramatically like they do in movies. There’s only silence, like someone pulled the sound out of the world. I don’t even remember ending the call. Don’t remember what she said afterward. Whether she cried. Whether I did. All I know is that when the phone slips from my hand onto the carpet, my heart goes down with it.

Hours pass. Or minutes. Or maybe an entire lifetime.

Aric comes, but I barely register what he says, what I say. I only register him leaving while I stay on the bed, staring out at Norway’s cold, indifferent sky. At some point the tears stop—not because the pain lessens, but because my body refuses to make any more. What replaces them is worse.

Numbness.

The kind that makes you question whether you’re still inhabiting your own skin. Eventually, I fall asleep.

When I wake, I don’t remember why my chest feels hollow. Then it all rushes back at once, and I have to close my eyes again just to breathe through it.

Luca. Gone. Really gone this time. Not forced away. Not separated by circumstance. Not waiting somewhere in another country.

Gone.

I sit up slowly. My muscles protest like I’ve been holding tension all night—which, judging by the ache in my shoulders, I have.

That’s when I notice the blanket draped over me, but I didn’t cover myself, and I don’t remember Aric coming to bed.

He must’ve checked on me. Covered me. Left again without waking me.

Typical Aric. Care shown in actions, never in words.

No. There’s no version of Aric who simply cares. There’s a man with blood on his hands—so much of it that it’s soaked through his skin and fused to the marrow of him.

I glance at the clock. 6:50 a.m.