I nod like I’m not dying. Like my ribs aren’t folding around the empty place where my heart used to be.
“Okay,” I say again.
“Would you stop saying that like I’m asking you to walk into your own grave?”
I laugh once. It’s ugly. Barely a laugh at all. “Aren’t you?”
“No.”
Ami leans forward. Her hair falls around her face, messy and soft, and fuck me, she’s the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Not because she’s untouched. Not because she’s clean of pain. Because she’s here with all of it. Every scar. Every sharp edge. Every trembling breath. And she’s looking at me like I need to listen.
“I want the marriage over,” she says. “Not us.”
And it’s like the whole damn ground just opened up and sent me plummeting to my fate. I’m trying to make sense of what she’s saying. I don’t move. I don’t trust myself to. “Ami.”
“No. Let me say it. Please. If I don’t say it now, I might lose my nerve, and I can’t lose my nerve. Not with this. Not with you.”
She swipes at her cheeks, angry with the tears, like she can order them to stop by force. “This marriage was never ours. It was my father’s. It was Steel’s. It was a truce and a threat, and a bargain written down by men who thought they could move us around like pieces on a board.”
Her voice shakes, but she keeps going.
“We didn’t choose each other. We didn’t even know each other. I came into this hating you for things you hadn’t done. I accused you of being violent. Of being cruel. Of being like every other man I was afraid of. I hurt you.”
“No,” I growl, because that one I can’t let stand. “You were scared, you did it because Tracker forced you.”
“But I still hurt you. I should have told the truth long ago.”
I don’t have an answer for that. Because she did, and I let her. Though I understood why, even if she didn’t tell me.
“That marriage did that,” she says, pointing at the papers with a trembling finger. “The forced part. The ugly part. The part where neither of us had a say. Everything bad grew out of that. The lies. The resentment. The vendetta with Tracker. Me running. You thinking you had to hold on and let go at the same time. All of it started because everyone else made a choice for us.”
My chest is tight. Too tight.
“And I don’t want that to be our story,” she whispers.
Our story.
Fuck.
My hand closes harder around the pen until I’m surprised it doesn’t snap.
“I don’t want to look back and remember that I stayed because my father signed something. Or because Steel ordered it. Or because some alliance needed protecting. I don’t want you to wonder if I’m here because I had nowhere else to go or because the papers were never signed.”
She takes a breath that shudders through her whole body. “I want to be here because I chose you.”
I forget how to breathe. She reaches out, slow and careful. Like I’m the wounded one.
Maybe I am?
Her fingers touch the back of my hand where I’m still crushing the papers. “And I want you to choose me. Not as your arranged wife. Not as the woman your club handed you. Not as the damaged girl you feel responsible for saving. Me. Ami. A mess. A coward sometimes. Stubborn. Terrible at trusting. Worse at talking. But trying.”
My eyes burn.
I drop my head before she can see too much, but she sees anyway. She always fucking sees me.
“I want to end this sham marriage,” she says softly, “so we can start something real.”
Something breaks in me then. Not the bad kind. Not the kind my old man put there with fists and fear. Not the kind life carved into me with blood and loyalty and all the shit a man does to survive.
