He clapped me once on the shoulder — firm, brief, the specific weight of it that I had known since childhood — and walked to the door.
I sat at the kitchen island in the quiet penthouse with a container of my mother's chicken soup and the knowledge that I was in love with a woman behind a closed door twelve feet away who had told me last night, clearly and without performance, that she would leave me if I kept making the wrong choices.
I picked up the soup.
I walked to her door.
I knocked.
Two, then one, then two.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
ADDIE
Islept soundly.
This surprised me when I surfaced into awareness and took stock of it. In the last forty-eight hours I had been kidnapped, chemically suppressed, rescued by a man covered in someone else's blood, had more orgasms than a reasonable person should attempt to count, discovered my husband was trying to exile my best friend, watched my brother kill our father, and stood helpless while a man I barely knew carried my best friend's unconscious body to a car. By any metric, my nervous system should have staged a formal protest.
Instead, I had slept as if I was made of stone. Deep and total and dreamless, the kind of sleep that only happens when the body has finally decided it had enough. I was still working out what I thought about that when I smelled it.
Chicken. Ginger. Something savory and slow-cooked. It came under the door and found me before I was fully awake. It didsomething immediate and involuntary to the tension I'd been carrying in my shoulders since yesterday.
Then the knock.
Two, then one, then two. Then his voice. "Can I come in?"
In the days since Vidar Blackwood had decided I was going to be his wife, he had walked into rooms I was in, appeared in doorways, materialized in offices and kitchens and hallways with the absolute certainty of a man who did not experience thresholds as barriers. He did not knock and wait. He did not ask.
"Yes," I said.
Vidar was in yesterday's clothes; the same suit pants, jacket gone, shirt untucked. His hair wasn't right. His eyes had the particular quality of a person who has been awake for a long time doing something that wasn't restful. He was carrying a bowl of soup and a spoon, and he looked, for the first time since I had known him, uncertain.
Not afraid. Vidar Blackwood didn't do afraid. Or at least he'd spent twenty years making sure nobody could see it. But uncertain — yes. Standing in my doorway with a bowl of soup and looking at me the way a man looks at something he doesn't have a formula for.
He came to the bed. He didn't hand me the bowl. He sat on the edge of the mattress, dipped the spoon, and held it out to me.
"It's from my mother."
I looked at the spoon. I looked at him. I opened my mouth.
He fed me in silence. Slow, unhurried spoonfuls. Between each one, he took a bite himself. Back and forth in that way; him feeding me, feeding himself, the steam rising between us in the gray morning light. He didn't look away. I didn't either. It was the strangest and most domestic thing that had ever happened to me. Sensation moved through my chest like the broth wasmoving through my body, warming something that had gone cold in the night.
When the bowl was empty, he set it on the nightstand and looked at me.
"I know I'm supposed to give you my heart," he said.
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Decided to see how this played out.
"I've been told that's the correct answer." Vidar looked at his hands, then back at me. "I'm not good with metaphors. Poetic language — it doesn't come naturally. I say things and they come out like a legal document because that's what I understand." He reached into his jacket pocket and produced his phone. He laid it on the bed between us. Then, from his wallet, a folded card — handwritten, dense with numbers and codes. "Those are my passcodes. Financial accounts, security systems, access points for every asset I control." He held up a finger. "Not my family. That's the only condition. Whatever you do with the rest of it, the family stays out of it."
I looked at the card, at his unlocked phone screen. Then at him. "Out of what?"
"Mutually assured destruction." He said it simply, as if it was obvious. As if it was the most romantic thing he knew how to say, which, I was realizing, it was. "If you have that, you can ruin me. Not my brothers, not my parents, not the pack — but me, everything I've built, the financial architecture I've spent fifteen years constructing. You could take it apart in a week with those codes." He held my gaze. "I know that's not how other men do this. I know there are… words for it, and gestures, and I'm aware that's what's usually expected. But I'm giving you the thing that would actually cost me something. That's as close as I know how to get to what you asked for."
"I don't want to destroy you."
Vidar breathed that in as if my words were chicken soup for his soul.
