Page 168 of Vow to Claim You

“Mama.” The word comes out in pieces. “I can’t do this anymore. I don’t know how to do this anymore. I can’t stay in this house.”

Mother doesn’t ask me what’s wrong. She’s my mother, so she can hear it in a single word. “We’re coming,” she says. “We’re already on our way, my love. Just hold on for me.”

They arrive the next afternoon, and my mother holds me for a long time without trying to fix anything. She only rocks me the way she did when I was small, and for a few minutes, I let myself be a child again, held and hushed, someone’s baby instead of a woman who lost her own.

My father waits until she steps out to see about the tea.

“There is something else, Ayanna.” He lowers himself onto the edge of the bed, and his whole face is heavy with reluctance. “Something I’ve kept from you, because God knows you’ve borne enough. But I can’t keep it any longer and still live with myself.”

“Father.” I’m too tired for whatever this is going to be. “Please. Not now.”

“Luca.”

Cold moves through me at the name.

“I’ve been looking into his death. Quietly, since the funeral. Not the farce the Monserian police called an investigation. My own people, the real thing.” He clears his throat. “I didn’t want to find what I found.”

“Don’t.”

“Everything comes back to him, habibti.” His tone is careful and low. “I’m not telling you he pulled a trigger. I’m telling you the trail runs into his organization, to orders that came down from somewhere very near the top of it. You know what your husband is. You know what he’s capable of.”

“Aric didn’t kill Luca,” I say decisively. “He wouldn’t lie to me. He is a great many terrible things, but he is not a liar, and he would not⁠—”

“Wouldn’t he?” My father tilts his head. “Has he told you a single thing he’s found in all these months? Given you one answer? Or has he told you he’s handling it, over and over, while the weeks go by and nothing changes and no one is ever caught?” His brows crease while his eyes search mine. “Ask yourself, not as his wife, but as my daughter, whom I raised to be sharper than this. He has resources the police could only dream of. Money, men, reach into every dark corner of this world. If he truly wanted Luca’s killer found, they would’ve been found by now. It has been months, Ayanna.”

I open my mouth, but nothing comes. There’s a splinter of truth in what he said. I hate how easily it finds the crack in my certainty. Hate the way it settles there. Hate the way it turns into doubt.

“I know you don’t believe me.” He rises. “In your place, I wouldn’t believe me either. That’s why I’ve shown you nothing. But when you’re ready, if you are ever ready to look at the man you married and truly ask yourself whether you know him at all, I will put everything I have in your hands. Until then, I ask only one thing of you.” He touches my hair, the way he hasn’t since I was a little girl small enough to sit on his knee. “Watch him. Listen to what he tells you. And listen harder to everything he doesn’t.”

My mother comes back with the tea and reads the room in a glance. She sets it down on the nightstand without a word.

“Come home, darling.” She takes my cold hands into her warm ones. “Only for a while. Not forever. Just long enough to breathe air that doesn’t hurt to breathe. You are wasting away in this place, my love. Come somewhere you can grieve without performing being fine for a man who won’t grieve beside you.”

I let out a heavy breath. I am so tired. I am so tired, and the grief sits on my chest like a stone, and my father’s words have lodged in me like a thorn I can’t reach, and the thought of being far away from this place that’s full of pain and memories—it undoes the last of my resistance.

“Okay,” I whisper. The tears come again, and I don’t fully know what I’m agreeing to. Only that I cannot stay standing in this house for one more day.

Moments later, Ingrid packs my cases with her mouth pressed into a thin line and won’t meet my eyes. Another moment later—because everything happens so fast—I follow my father down the stairs in a kind of fog, and I see Vidar downstairs.

He lurches, dragging his oxygen line, throwing himself into my father’s path. And for a man with so little breath left in him, the voice that comes out is enormous.

“You do not take her, Almaviri.” He’s shaking, one fist pressed to his own chest. “That girl is a Vold now. She does not walk out of this house on your word. She belongs to my son, to this family, and you will take your hands off what is ours⁠—”

“She is my daughter,” my father snaps, and then they’re both shouting, the hall filling with raised voices and Ingrid crying out somewhere behind me when Vidar faints.

He goes down mid-word, a hand flying to his chest, crumpling onto the floor, and the sound he makes trying to drag air into his lungs makes my hair stand on its ends. In an instant, Eero is on his knees at his father’s side, roaring for help, and the whole hall lunges as one toward the fallen thing on the floor.

“Now, habibti. We go now.” My father’s hand closes around my arm in the chaos.

He leads me toward the door, and I’m too stunned to set my feet. Behind me I hear my sister, her voice high and frightened.

“No, I don’t want to. Let go of me!”

I turn my head to see two of my father’s men walking Naomi toward the second car, one at each elbow. My father says something to her that I can’t catch, and whatever it is drains the color from her face, stills her, and she stops fighting, letting herself be put into the car.

For a moment, I wonder what I am doing. I promised to protect Naomi from Father, from things like this. But then my father’s words echo in my mind, and the doubt presses in on me the way the weeks of grief and loneliness did, and before I know it, we’re through the gate, three cars strung in a line, the estate shrinking behind us.

The coast road runs the long way, pinned between the black water and the rock.