Page 116 of Vow to Claim You

Ayanna stares at me with her lips parted, and the silence that follows is thick enough to choke on.

“Why are you this angry?” she asks quietly. Genuinely asking, genuinely trying to understand why the fury in this room is so disproportionate, why it feels like more than the situation warrants.

She’s acting like I didn’t kiss her in Italy like a man possessed. Like Bobby’s hand on her arm at Chiara’s initiation didn’t put something in my veins that felt like murder. Like the image of her cornered against that wall isn’t going to haunt me until I die.

Is she serious, for fuck’s sake?

“You’re acting like last night, and the one before didn’t happen.” My voice is rough, and there’s something in it I don’t recognize. “Like I didn’t stand between you and a knife tonight. Like I didn’t spend the entire drive to that café calculating every possible way I might find you dead and feeling like⁠—”

I stop. The word is right there. On the tip of my tongue.

“Like what?” she whispers.

My jaw tightens, every muscle in my body coiling. “Like it would end me.”

The confession comes out raw. Hoarse. Nothing like my voice is supposed to sound.

“If she’d hurt you. If I’d been five minutes later.” Every syllable fights its way past my throat, each costing me more than the last. “If I’d lost you⁠—”

“Aric—”

“I would have burned this city to the ground.” I look into her eyes, and stop trying to conceal what she was always going to find anyway. “I would have killed everyone responsible and everyone who ever spoke to them. I would have torn apart anyone who stood in my way. And then I would have⁠—”

And then I would have followed you into the ground.

Her breath shudders out of her, and her hand lifts, fingers hovering just shy of my skin. Tentative. Like she’s afraid I’ll break. Or maybe afraid I’ll burn. Then she sets her fingers against my jaw, fingertips tracing the edge of it, and my control goes up in flames.

I wrap my arms around her, one hand at the back of her head, the other at the small of her back, and I pull her and kiss her. Hard. My mouth claims hers like I’ve been drowning and she’s my first breath of air. She gasps against my lips, and I swallow the sound, deepen the kiss, pour the fear and fury into it.

Her fingers slide into my hair. Grip tight. She’s kissing me back with the same desperation, the same hunger, like she’s making up for every second she thought she’d never get to touch me again.

I walk her backward until her back hits the wall. My body presses against hers, trapping her there, and the sound she makes—a small, breathless moan that goes straight through me—almost undoes me completely.

“Aric—”

I kiss her jaw. Her throat. The spot below her ear that makes her gasp.

“Tell me to stop,” I murmur against her skin. “If you don’t want this, tell me to stop, and I will.”

Her fingers tighten in my hair. “Don’t stop.”

Fuck… her permission is my ruin. My downfall. My damnation.

Control is the only thing I’ve ever trusted. The only thing that’s kept me alive in a world that devours weakness. And right now—with her back against this wall and her fingers in my hair and her breath hot against my mouth—I have none.

None.

I lift her, and her legs wrap around my waist like they belong there. Like her body already knows mine. My hands grip her thighs, holding her against me, and the sound she makes—fuck, that sound—grinds whatever’s left of my restraint into dust.

I carry her to the vanity beside us and clear it with one sweep of my arm—her perfume, her jewelry, everything—all of it shatters across the floor before I set her down on top.

“Aric.” My name rolls off her lips. Soft. Urgent. “Please.”

I’ve never heard her say please. It almost kills me.

I kiss her, hard and demanding, one of my hands kneading her thigh and the other at the back of her neck. I’ve killed men with these hands. Pulled triggers. Broken bones. Signed death warrants without blinking. I don’t even know what a man like me, an irredeemable criminal and a killer, does with a woman like her. A real-life princess untainted by the darkness of my world.

I pull back just enough to look at her face. “You should hate me.”