Page 158 of Vow to Claim You

I take another drag.

The shooter is still talking. Still begging. The words wash over me like water. Truth is, I don’t even hear them because Kirill’s voice is louder.

I’m sorry, Aric.

Tassilo appears at my side, the canister I ordered him to bring on my way here in his hands. He doesn’t speak or ask, just waits. Like the rest.

I nod, giving him signal, and the accelerant splashes across the shooters’ bodies. The smell is sharp and chemical. The smell of endings.

“No—please—we’ll tell you everything we know—” the middle one shouts, thrashing against the chains. “We don’t know the name! We never knew it! That’s the truth, that’s God’s own truth, we were paid through cut-outs, we never—please⁠—”

The other men start screaming too. Begging. Offering everything they have—money, information, their mothers, their children, their souls.

I don’t hear them. I hear Ayanna’s laugh, the one she only gives when she forgets to be composed. I hear her voice in the darkness of our bedroom, soft and sleep-warm, saying my name like it means something. I hear her heartbeat against my chest. And beneath it—beneath everything—I hear the heartbeat I’ll never know. The one that stopped before I ever got to hear it. I hear Ayanna’s cries when she finds out what was taken from her.

“Aric—” Nikos’s voice reaches me from behind, reminding me of their presence.

They must be wondering what’s going through my mind right now. I’m the one who’s always controlled. Calculated. The cold Viking. But there’s nothing controlled about what’s happening inside me. Nothing calculated about the way I’m unraveling.

The three shooters watch me like I’m something to pray to. I feel their eyes as a physical weight. Waiting. Praying what comes next is not what they think.

They won’t see me break.

I take one last drag of the cigarette.

They won’t see the damage they’ve done.

I let the cigarette fall.

They’ll only⁠—

“Burn.”

The flames catch instantly. Orange and red and ravenous, spreading across their bodies like living things, like something that’s been waiting for permission to devour. The screaming fills the warehouse. Fills the night. Fills every empty space inside me that used to hold something human.

And I stand there, watching, as the men who put a bullet through my wife and killed my child burn to death three feet in front of me.

Their skin blackens. Blisters. Splits. The smell of burning bodies is sickening.

No one speaks behind me, but I feel them watching me. They’re seeing something they’ve never seen before. Something that existed beneath the control, the calculation, the careful mask I’ve worn my entire life. Something savage. Something that doesn’t care about rules or consequences or the version of myself I’ve spent twenty-eight years constructing.

People think I’m cold. Controlled. I’ve always been fire. I just learned to carry it without burning down the room.

And now?

Someone almost took my wife from me. They took my unborn child from me.

So the room burns.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

Ayanna

I’m standing in a room I don’t recognize. White walls, white curtains drifting in a breeze I can’t feel, and there’s a large bed in the center and a little girl sitting on it. Three, maybe four years old. Dark hair falling in soft waves around her face. Her skin the color of honey and cream. And her eyes… Her eyes are his. Pale blue, clear as a winter sky.

She looks at me with an expression that cracks my chest open and lets the cold in. Sad. She looks so unbearably sad.

I try to speak but can’t. I try to go to her, to cross the small distance between us, and my feet won’t obey. It’s like I’m rooted where I stand, reaching for something I can’t touch.