Page 167 of Vow to Claim You

The phone goes off in the console. Eero again. I answer it without slowing.

“Aric.” His voice is cracked, none of its usual ease. “I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry, I couldn’t do anything⁠—”

“Where is she?”

“They’re gone. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.” The words come tumbling, and Eero doesn’t tumble. “Leandro was going for the cars, and Father came down—came down to argue with him, got in his face about the marriage, the contract, all of it, shouting like I haven’t heard him shout in years—and then he just—” He lets out a breath that shakes. “He went down, Aric. Father collapsed. Right there in the hall. He couldn’t get air. I ran to him—everyone ran to him—and that’s when they fled. By the time I had Father breathing again, the cars were already through the gate.”

My jaw tightens. “Is he alive?”

“Barely. Kirill’s man has him. He’s bad, Brother. But he’s breathing.” Eero swallows. “They took Naomi too. They made her go.” Something raw moves under his voice. “She didn’t want to, but Leandro made her, Aric.”

Everything in me tightens. Every muscle, every nerve ending, every fiber. I cannot let Leandro take both of them back to Monsera. Because the man isn’t just their father. He might be the one responsible for Luca’s death, the one trying to set me up for it, the one lying straight to his daughters’ faces without batting an eye.

“Which road?” My grip on the steering wheel tightens too.

“South. The airfield. His plane’s⁠—”

“Stay with Vidar.” I cut the wheel into a hard turn, the back end breaking loose across the road before it bites. “Call Tassilo. South road, the airfield. Tell him I’m ahead of him and not to lose me.”

I end the call.

The airfield is forty minutes. Leandro has fifteen on me. His convoy is heavy and careful. Mine is one car and I no longer mind whether I survive the night. I’ll close it.

The light blurs. The road unspools. And the thing in my chest that I’ve kept chained since the ballroom—since Kirill’s face, since the gray came down over my wife and never lifted—it’s off the chain now, running loose, and it doesn’t feel like rage. It feels like fear. The plain, animal fear.

I grip the steering wheel even harder, to the point my knuckles turn white.

I did not say the words to her. I never once said I am destroyed, Ayanna. I say her name every night. I would trade every year I have left to have heard her heartbeat once. I saved it. I hoarded it because that’s all I’ve ever known. Contain it. Compartmentalize it. Lock it away.

And now she’s in a car with her cases packed, believing I felt nothing, and I might… lose her.

And the thought of losing her feels worse than any war. Any betrayal. Any blood I’ve survived. Worse than all of it.

Taillights snap me out of my reverie. Far ahead, strung along the black ribbon of the road—the convoy, four sets of red eyes in the dark.

I close the distance past the rear car. Past the second, my engine screaming, gravel spitting. The third. Their drivers see me now. The lead car speeds up, tries to make a race of it. It isn’t one. They’re protecting cargo, and I’ve stopped protecting anything at all, including myself.

I pull beside the lead car. I hold it. And then I cut the wheel and put my car across the road in front of theirs and brake.

The shriek of tires—mine and theirs. The car skids sideways across the road before lurching to a stop ten feet ahead, the driver’s face drained of color behind the glass. Dust hangs in the air. The smell of hot rubber lingers. The immense silence of the fjord settles over everything.

For a moment the world seems to still. Again, just the sound of my heartbeat thudding in my ears.

Then I open my door, and I get out onto the road.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

Ayanna

There is a peculiar kind of loneliness in grieving beside someone who won’t grieve with you, and I have had weeks now to learn every shade of it.

Aric moves through the house like the tide, always there and never quite reaching me. He is infuriatingly steady while everything inside me comes undone, and I’ve come to resent him for it.

I keep waiting for one crack. One night when his voice breaks. One morning he can’t get out of bed. Anything that tells me this loss reached him too. But there is nothing. There is only the wall.

And after weeks of being the only person in this house who seems to be bleeding, the thing inside me that had been holding on so quietly finally lets go.

I call my mother.