Page 181 of Vow to Claim You

We get inside, and I look at Ayanna, who seems to read me like an open book, no words needed. She goes to the living area toward confused Ingrid while I lead Angelique down the corridor to my office.

I open the door for Angelique, who walks inside, and I follow before closing the door. I circle behind my desk, though I remain standing.

Angelique stands near the doorway, holding her bag in front of her with both hands, still clutching it like a lifeline. Her eyes move across the room, taking in the bookshelves and the desk, and I wonder what she’s comparing it to. The house she left? The house she wanted? The version of this room that existed in whatever story she told herself about the son she abandoned?

“I don’t know where to start,” she clears her throat, her voice softer than it was in the cemetery. “I’ve had this conversation in my head thousands of times. Every possible version. Every way you might respond. Every word I could say that might make you understand.” She exhales a shaky sound. “But now that I’m actually standing in front of you, I don’t… I can’t find the words I practiced.”

“You wanted to tell me your side.” My voice is level and cold because Vidar’s voice still lives in my head, reminding me that emotion is a weakness I can’t afford. “So tell it.”

She nods as she swallows. “I had to leave, Aric.” Her voice cracks as she says my name. “Vidar was… he was dangerously obsessed with me. Possessive in ways that went beyond anything you could call love… or reason. And violent. The things he did…” She hesitates, her gaze drops for a moment as though all the memories come rushing back before she looks at me again and straightens. “I won’t waste your ten minutes listing them. There isn’t enough time for what I endured with that man, and you didn’t ask me here for a catalog of his sins.”

No. I didn’t. I lived my own catalog.

“But I want you to know,” she continues, her knuckles whitening around the bag, “that I thought about you. Every day. Every single day for twenty-eight years. I cried myself to sleep more nights than I can count, knowing I’d left you here. Knowing what he was. Knowing what he’d do to you.”

For the briefest moment, something twists inside me. As though something loosens that I’d kept pulled painfully tight.

“I couldn’t take you with me.” Her eyes glisten, and her voice cracks in a way that sounds practiced but feels genuine, and I can’t tell the difference, and I hate that I can’t. “If I had taken his heir—his firstborn son—he would never have stopped hunting us. He would have found us, and he would have hurt us both. Killed us both, maybe. The only way to make sure you survived was to leave you here.” She takes a breath that shudders going in. “To let him have you. So that you would live.”

Her eyes flick between mine like she’s waiting for me to say something, but I don’t. I can’t. I’m not sure what.

I’m not sure if I believe her.

“I waited for him to die.” Her whole body is shaking now, vibrating with the effort of holding herself together. “Twenty-eight years. Watching from a distance. Knowing you were in that house, growing up in his shadow, becoming the man he wanted you to become. And I couldn’t reach you. I couldn’t⁠—”

My phone buzzes. The vibration cuts through her words, and I instinctively glance down at the screen. A text message from Nikos.

Bobby sent the photograph. Vivienne Laurent. Forwarding now.

The image loads, and everything in me turns to ice.

The woman in the photograph is younger. Twenty years younger, maybe more. Dark hair without the silver. Smoother skin. The same bone structure, the same elegant proportions, the same face that is standing across my desk right now, clutching a leather bag and performing the role of the repentant mother.

I look at the photograph. I look at the woman. I look at the photograph again.

Vivienne Laurent.

Angelique.

They’re the same person.

The same face. The same eyes—my eyes, copied and returned to me across a desk in my own house. The woman Barry Thorne loved past all sense. The woman Leandro had an affair with. The woman whose name Luca told his mother to remember. The thread connecting every piece of every conspiracy that has tried to destroy my marriage, my wife, my child, my life.

My mother, standing in my office, performing grief.

I set the phone face down on the desk and straighten. Nothing of what I’m feeling reaches my face; every emotion has been returned to its proper cage. “You can drop the act.”

Her brow creases. The confusion on her face is flawless. Pitch-perfect, a microsecond of genuine bewilderment that would fool any jury, any judge, any son who wanted badly enough to believe in her lies, her act.

“Excuse me?” She hesitates, or at least, is pretending to. “Aric, I don’t know what you⁠—”

“I know you’re Vivienne Laurent.”

The echo of the name seems to vibrate in the walls, in the floorboards, in the space between us where the last of my illusions have just finished dying.

Her mouth opens for a fraction, then closes. The confusion on her face is visible for one more second—one last desperate frame of the performance—and then it drains away. The mask dissolves, the trembling hands go still, the glistening eyes dry, and the carefully constructed vulnerability peels back to something harder, colder, and infinitely more dangerous underneath.

“You’re the wild card that doesn’t follow the rules, aren’t you?” I never break eye contact. “The joker that never left the deck.”