Page 102 of Vow to Claim You

I check the size of the dress, the heels, both mine.

He noticed. He knew exactly what I’d need, down to the height of the heel.

It would be so much easier if he’d just stay cold.

I shower, dress, take my time with my eyes until they look darker and deeper, and leave my hair in loose waves gathered to one side.

I jolt when I hear the knock on the door.

“Come in.”

Aric walks in. His gaze sweeps over me, and then stops, arrested somewhere it never intended to linger. Something raw flickers behind those glacial eyes, and I catch the exact moment his composure fails. His lips part. The hard line of his jaw loosens.

For one unguarded heartbeat, the most controlled man I have ever known forgets to be controlled—and he forgets it while looking at me. It’s like his brain malfunctions before his control rushes in to repair the damage, but I catch every millisecond of it, and the satisfaction is so sharp it borders on dangerous.

“We should go.” He clears his throat.

I close the distance between us and take the arm he offers, and we head out.

That malfunction of his might be my new favorite thing to collect. Not that I’ll ever tell him so.

Chiara’s initiation is no different from mine. Same oath. Same ritual. Same knife cutting her palm the way it did mine. Nikos presides with that bored, bottomless authority, as if he’s done this so many times he could perform the ritual in his sleep.

I watch Chiara’s face as she drinks the mix of blood and vodka without flinching and recites the oath in a voice that doesn’t shake once. I’ll give her that. Whatever else she is, she isn’t weak.

When it’s done, when the masks come off and the room loosens back into something like a party, I slip out to find the powder room.

I push the door open and stop in my tracks.

Chiara is at the sink, one hand under the running water, a pale thread of blood unspooling pink against white porcelain. Her head is bowed, her hair done in a half updo with some strands curtaining her face, and for a moment, she doesn’t see me.

My first instinct is to slip out and find another bathroom. Any reasonable woman would do that.

But I don’t.

Because I am so thoroughly, bone-deep tired of arranging my life around this woman. Around the idea of her. Around every room she might be in and every ghost of her left in the corners of my own marriage. We swore the same oath tonight. We are going to share this world for a very long time, and I refuse, categorically, to spend a decade of it backing out of bathrooms.

I walk to the adjacent sink and turn on the tap.

“We’re going to be in the same rooms for years.” I keep it level, pleasant even—the precise brand of pleasant my mother drilled into me for people I’d rather not speak to at all. “It would be far less exhausting for both of us if we learned to tolerate each other.” I find her eyes in the mirror. “I have nothing against you, Chiara.”

She shuts off the water before reaching for a towel and pressing it slowly to her palm. Then she turns to me, face-to-face.

“I do,” she says.

“I didn’t choose this either.”

“No.” She sets the towel down. “But you married the man I’m in love with.” She says it simply, like stating a fact of nature. The sky is blue. Water is wet. You took him. “At first, I thought he could’ve refused. That he chose this. Chose you.” Her eyes bounce between mine for a fraction before she tilts her head further. “Then I learned how this world actually works. The Gods. It wasn’t only his father and your family. It was a whole society with its hand on the scale. And that changed how I see all of it. He had no choice at all.”

Her bluntness catches me off guard. I clear my throat, but she doesn’t give me a chance to speak.

“But tell me something, Ayanna.” Her voice lowers until every word feels honed. “Do you truly believe that if Aric had been free to choose, he would have chosen you over me?”

The question embeds itself beneath my ribs like a shard of glass.

I don’t answer. Not because I don’t have words, because I have too many, each sharper than the last. But I recognize the shape of what she’s doing. She’s standing over a loss, trying to take a piece of me with her as she falls.

“That’s what I thought,” she says, reading my silence the way she wants to.