Page 107 of Vow to Claim You

“I’ll be late,” he says against my hairline. “Don’t wait up.”

Then he’s gone down the corridor with Eero, who is saying something I can’t hear and very obviously shouldn’t, and I stand there with my hand drifting up toward my forehead like I can hold the warmth there if I try.

I don’t wait up. Officially.

Unofficially, I’m awake when the convoy comes back—headlights sweeping the bedroom ceiling, the low growl of engines, doors, voices, the house stirring and resettling. I lie in our bed and wait for the sound of him on the stairs.

It doesn’t come.

I give it twenty minutes. Then I give up the pretense, pull on a robe, and go looking for my husband in his own house in the middle of the night.

I find him in the piano room.

The door stands open a hand’s width, and I stop before I reach it because of the sound. Low. Quiet. A voice I know, shaped around words I don’t. Aric is saying something in Norwegian.

I edge closer and look through the gap. He’s sitting on the floor, his back against the leg of the grand piano, with sleeves of his black shirt shoved to the elbow. Elske’s enormous white head rests in his lap. He’s stroking her in long, slow passes, murmuring to her in the language I’ve only ever caught from him in fragments—soft, unhurried, none of the clipped flatness he wears in English. Whatever he’s saying, it’s gentle. It is the gentlest I have ever heard him.

I stand in the corridor and watch Aric Vold—the man who sits at tables with the most dangerous people on earth, who has not once in my presence allowed his face to do anything he didn’t first sanction—talk quietly to his wolf like nothing else in the world requires his attention.

I must make a sound, because his head turns.

For a moment we only look at each other across the room.

“You should be asleep,” he says.

“So should you.” I push the door open the rest of the way and step in. Elske’s tail thumps once against the wood. She decided long ago that I’m allowed. “You didn’t come up.”

“I didn’t want to wake you.” His hand moves over the wolf’s fur. “And it was a rough night. I needed a moment to think.”

I make my way across the room and lower myself to the floor beside him. Elske huffs and resettles, her head bridging both our laps now, and I sink a hand into the thick fur of her scruff.

“How did you end up with her?” I glance at her, then him. “A wolf. In a house.”

He’s quiet a moment as though traveling back in time in his mind. “We found her in the woods. Years ago. A cub, half starved, one leg torn open, left behind.” His thumb moves slowly over her fur. “She’d have died out there in a night. So I took her,” he says simply, as though there’d never been another choice. “Couldn’t leave her.”

Something turns over in my chest, slow and aching. The man beside me, who swears he feels nothing, looked at a wounded thing left alone in the cold, that everyone expected to die, and he carried her inside and kept her anyway. He did the opposite of what his mother did.

“What does her name mean?” I ask, trying to steer away from the topic because I’m afraid he might close like a door if I mention what’s running through my mind. “Elske.”

He looks down at her and strokes the white fur between her ears.

“Love,” he mutters, and goes on petting her like he hasn’t just dismantled me.

The man who doesn’t speak. Who doesn’t smile. Who insists he doesn’t feel. Named his wolf Love.

I look at him, and he’s already looking at me, and I think he knows exactly what I’ve just understood, because there’s an unmistakable tenderness in his eyes, and he doesn’t bother to hide it this time.

I lean across the space between us, and I kiss him.

He goes still for half a heartbeat—caught off guard—and then he turns into it, a hand rising to my jaw, and kisses me back.

Slow, at first. Then not.

Elske has the good grace to leave the room—and the last coherent thing I manage to think, before thinking stops being possible at all, is that I came to this frozen country certain it would be the end of me.

I was right. Just not in any of the ways I feared.

Because his mouth is crushing mine, his tongue pushing past my lips, his hands gripping my waist hard enough to bruise. He kisses me like he’s been starving for it—messy and desperate and nothing like the controlled man I married.