Page 183 of Vow to Claim You

“You are Vidar’s son,” she says it as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “You carry his blood. I swore to myself—decades ago, in a room not so different from this one, with his handprints still bruising my skin—that I would wipe the Vold bloodline from earth. Every trace. Every heir. Every continuation of the poison he put into the world,” she hisses, eyes burn with something that goes deeper than hatred. “This is what he shaped me into. This is what he made me.” Her chin lifts. “I understood quickly that desire is what drives men. This primal instinct. The craving. The willingness to dismantle their own empires for an hour of something they could get from any woman if they weren’t so pathetically convinced that this one was different.” Her lip curls as she scoffs. “Disgusting. I resented every single one of them.”

“Not all men are like that.”

“Maybe not.” She studies me for a moment, her head tilting in that way, my way, the genetic echo that makes my stomach lurch. “But you’re his seed. And his seed must be annihilated.”

Every nerve in my body goes taut because this woman is so consumed by vengeance that she’s blind to everything else.

“You know you killed your own grandchild.” I barely hold my wrath on a leash that’s thinning by the second. “An innocent baby who hadn’t drawn a breath. Your blood.”

Something flickers across her face, but it’s gone before it had the chance to fully form.

“She was collateral,” she says flatly, and the wrath inside me grows so much I’m not sure it can be held back. “But in the end, she was the continuation of the Vold bloodline. It’s better that she’s gone.”

It’s better that she’s gone.

My daughter. Anabella. The child whose heart stopped inside the woman I love.

I feel the rage slipping through the leash. My hand slides toward the desk drawer. My gun is in there. Two feet from my fingers.

But she sees it, because she’s been reading men her whole life, and in a single, fluid motion, she reaches into the bag she set down on the couch and draws a gun.

Simultaneously, we point the guns at one another.

“Don’t,” she says gently, and that gentleness is the most disturbing part. “You’re still my little boy, Aric. The one who waited for his mother to come back.” Her eyes search my face as though assessing the features she gave me, the jaw and the cheekbones and the ice-blue eyes she sees in her own mirror. “Are you really going to kill me? After waiting twenty-eight years?”

“Yes.” I cock the gun. The sound of a gunshot splits the room, but it doesn’t come from my weapon.

It doesn’t come from hers either.

It comes from behind her.

Angelique’s expression changes. Shock. Confusion. Her eyes widen involuntarily. The eyes that were so controlled a second ago are now processing something the body understands before the mind catches up. Blood blooms across the front of her coat, spreading. She looks down at her chest, then up at me. And for one fraction of a second, I see something in her face that might be the woman she was before Vidar broke her. Something human.

Then she falls, the gun clatters against the hardwood floor, and I see Ayanna in the doorway, standing in the doorway of my office with a gun in her hands. Her arms still extended, her eyes streaming tears, her whole body shaking so violently that the barrel trembles like a leaf in a storm.

I run toward her, and her face crumples the instant I reach her—the composure, the iron spine, all of it dissolving as though my embrace is the permission she needed to stop holding herself together.

“I heard everything.” Her voice is a wreck. “I was outside the door. I heard what she said about Anabella. About our baby. About wiping out your—our⁠—”

I hold her tighter against my chest.

“I couldn’t let her take you too.” The gun is still in her hand, hanging at her side now, her fingers locked around the grip as though her body has forgotten how to release it. “She’s taken everything else. Luca. Our daughter. My father… and I couldn’t… I couldn’t let her take you. Not you.”

I pull her even tighter. My hand finds the nape of her neck, my lips press to the top of her head.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I murmur into her hair. “Do you hear me? You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I killed her.”

“You saved me.”

“I killed your mother, Aric.”

“You saved my life.” I pull back just enough to tip her chin up with my knuckles. “That woman stopped being my mother twenty-eight years ago. What you ended in this room was a threat. Nothing more.”

Tears carve paths down her cheeks, her dark eyes shining with devastation.

“I understand now.” Her voice steadies. “What you meant on the road. About dying being easy.”