Page 180 of Vow to Claim You

“Aric.” A female voice reaches us from behind.

I stop, and Ayanna instinctively does too. For a moment I don’t turn. The voice doesn’t belong to anyone I know. Not Ingrid, not any of the women who attended the service. It’s unfamiliar, yet something about it hooks into a place so deep inside me that I feel it in my spine before my brain has finished processing the sound.

I turn and see a woman standing on the path behind us. She’s alone. No escort, no entourage, no one accompanying her. She’s tall—taller than average, though not as tall as Ayanna—and slender in a black coat that falls to her knees. Her hair is dark, threaded with silver, and pulled back from her face. She’s in her late forties, maybe early fifties. But her eyes are what stop me. Pale blue. Ice-cold. Identical to the ones I see every morning in the mirror. The same ones I thought I’ve had from my father.

No, it can’t be.

“Yes?” I ask low and cool.

“My name is Angelique.”

My blood runs cold, something thudding in my ears.

She looks at me for a moment longer before she speaks again. “I’m your mother.”

Ayanna’s hand tightens around mine as if she feels the way the ground tilts beneath my feet.

I look at the woman who gave birth to me and abandoned me the same night. The woman Ingrid described in whispered fragments. The woman whose name was forbidden in this house. The woman who ran from the man we just put in the ground and didn’t take her son with her.

“We have nothing to talk about,” I say coolly, as though I’m closing the door—the same door she closed twenty-eight years ago when she walked out of this house and left me in it.

“I know you don’t want to know me.” There’s something in her posture—straight, composed, carrying its own weight without apology—that reminds me of someone, and it takes a full second before I realize who.

Ayanna. She reminds me of Ayanna.

“I know you probably hate me,” Angelique continues, and her voice is steady but her hands—clutching the bag in front of her, pressed tight against her stomach—are trembling. “And you have every right to. I’ve spent twenty-eight years knowing you would, and I’ve never once tried to tell myself you shouldn’t.”

“Then there’s nothing left to discuss.”

“All I’m asking for is ten minutes.” She takes a single step forward, though carefully as if she understands she’s standing on ground that could collapse beneath her at any moment. “Ten minutes to hear my side. Not to excuse it. Just to tell you what happened, from my perspective.”

My jaw locks. Every instinct I have—every wall, every defense, every scar my father carved into me—screams to turn and walk away. To get in the car and drive back to the estate and never think about this woman again. But something else stops me. Something small and stubborn and irrational that lives in the same place where Ayanna’s name is written and Anabella’s is carved. The part of me that was a child once. The part that never stopped waiting for his mother to come back.

“I’ve been waiting twenty-eight years for your father to die,” Angelique says with a quiet, shaking voice, “so I could safely come back.”

The words hit me like the final piece of a puzzle I didn’t know I’d been building. Safely. Not until I was ready. Not until I’d moved on. Safely.

I stand on a cemetery path between the grave of the man who kept me and the ghost of the woman who left me, and I don’t know what to do with either.

“Ten minutes,” I say.

And the door I swore I’d never open cracks.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

Aric

We drive back to the estate. Ayanna is beside me in the back seat of the middle car, her hand resting on my thigh. Angelique sits in the back of the car behind, flanked by two of my men. She may share my blood, but she’s still a stranger, so I need her watched.

“How do you feel about it?” Ayanna turns her head toward me, her voice quiet. “Her showing up.”

“I don’t know what to think.” I let out a breath. “I don’t know what to do with a woman appearing at my father’s funeral claiming she waited twenty-eight years for him to die so she could safely come back.” I meet Ayanna’s gaze. “But I know that woman is not my mother. She’s a woman who gave birth to me. That’s all.”

Ayanna nods. “I understand.”

She leans her head and rests it against my shoulder. I reach for her hand still resting on my thigh and cover it with mine.

The car stops in front of the estate’s entrance, and I get out and open Ayanna’s door before the last car has finished pulling in behind us.