Page 164 of Vow to Claim You

Tassilo nods and reaches for his phone.

“Who’s Vivienne Laurent?” Ayanna asks from the doorway.

“I don’t know yet.” I set the tablet down. “It’s a name Farida gave me. It may be nothing.”

Tassilo reads the room and lets himself out, the door clicking shut behind him.

Ayanna stays close to the door. She’s dressed, which is something. Her hair is down. She looks at the tablet, then at me, and I watch the small spark of interest gutter out and something harder move in behind it.

“That’s what you do.” She nods slowly, lips pressing thin. “Every night. You come down here, and you work.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been working for weeks.”

“Someone shot you in our home, Ayanna. Someone is still breathing who paid for it.” My eyes flicker between hers. “I’m not going to stop until I find them.”

“Of course you’re not.” Something is rising in her now, and I let it, because anything is better than the numbness. “Because that’s a problem you can solve. A name to chase. A man to hunt at the end of it. That’s something you know how to do.”

“Ayanna—” I whisper, but she cuts me off.

“Do you even grieve her, Aric? Do you grieve our daughter at all? Or did you file her under problems-to-be-handled and move on to the part you’re good at?”

The words stop me where I stand, and they hurt in equal measure.

“You stand there every day so calm. So controlled. So perfectly fine.” She’s shaking now, her voice fracturing. “I keep waiting for you to break. For one crack. One sign that losing her affected you. And there’s nothing. There’s just… work. And that flat voice. And you, standing there like a wall.”

She takes a breath that shudders going in.

“How much would it take?” she whispers, voice cracking and her eyes that flicker between mine are full of pain and hatred and something I can’t name. “What would it actually take to break Aric Vold? Because I’m starting to think nothing could. I’m starting to think there’s nothing in there to break.”

I want to close the distance between us and tell her the truth—that I learned our daughter’s name from her crying it out of a dream, and I have said it every single night since in the dark like a prayer to a God I don’t believe in. That I burned three men alive weeks ago and felt nothing but the cold, because the warm thing in me died on the ballroom floor with our child and I have not been able to find it since. That I am not calm. That I am holding myself together by a thread because the alternative is something I cannot let her see.

But then what?

If I break, who catches her? She’s already drowning. If I go under with her, we both drown. There’s no one left to drag us back to the surface. If I let myself feel all of it now, it will bury me. And I can’t afford to be buried until I’ve buried the man who did this.

One of us has to stay standing. It was always going to be me. I have almost thirty years of practice at carrying things that should’ve killed me. This is just one more, heavier than all of them put together.

So I don’t break. I cannot allow myself to. I owe her at least that much.

“You’re wrong.” I keep my voice level, and I hate myself a little for how well I do it. “But I won’t argue with you about it tonight.”

It’s the worst possible thing I could’ve said.

“Right,” she says, hollow. “Of course.”

She turns and goes, and I let her, because the only thing that would stop her is the truth, and I can’t afford to give it to her yet.

I sit back down. I pick up the tablet. Vivienne Laurent. A ghost of a name, attached to the hand that took my daughter and nearly took my wife and is, slowly, taking my marriage too.

I’ll find you.

The world is no longer big enough for you to hide from me.

I will find you.

CHAPTER SIXTY