Page 53 of Vow to Claim You

I wander. Through corridors I’ve only half-learned, past doors I’ve never had a reason to open, deeper into a house that still feels like a stranger’s body I’ve been ordered to live inside. Restlessness drives me one hall farther than I’ve gone before, and at the very end of it, I find a door left ajar. I push it open, and the breath leaves my lungs.

The room is beautiful in a way nothing else in this house is. The entire ceiling is glass, a single vaulted pane arching overhead, and beyond it the polar sky is on fire. The Northern Lights. Ribbons of green and violet bleeding across the black, rippling and folding and alive, slow as something breathing. It’s like an otherworldly performance, like the heavens themselves lean down to watch.

And beneath all that impossible light, at the dead center of the room, is a piano.

Black lacquer polished so deep it drinks the colors straight out of the sky. A Steinway—the same model I trained on for fifteen years in Monsera. It stands alone, framed by nothing, surrounded by empty floor on every side, as though the room was built to hold it and nothing else. A shrine with a single relic.

I approach it, drawn to it like a moth to a flame, and lift the fallboard with reverent fingers.

I haven’t touched a piano since Monsera.

The keys are cool beneath my fingertips as I play. Nothing I learned from a tutor or performed for a hall of bored aristocrats. A melody of my own. It starts low and slow like a minor ache rolling up from beneath my ribs, and then it builds like the grief of a life I didn’t choose and can’t escape. Everything I can’t say out loud, everything I’ve swallowed since the day they told me I’d marry a stranger—it all pours out of me and up into that burning sky.

And this is the first time in weeks I’ve felt like myself instead of a ghost wearing my own face.

Until him.

I don’t hear him come in. I feel him, because somehow the air changes whenever Aric Vold enters a room. His scent reaches me a heartbeat later, and the steady, measured tread of him stops somewhere behind me.

How did he find me in here?

The thought cuts through the music before I can stop it. This room is tucked at the end of a hall I’d never walked, behind a door I stumbled on by accident. It felt hidden. Forgotten. Secret. Yet he came straight to it, straight to me, like he knew exactly where I’d be.

My hands keep moving until the melody folds in on itself and dies, and the silence that follows feels enormous.

I turn, and his pale eyes are fixed on me. He says nothing. He only watches.

“Sorry,” I say, my fingers curling off the keys. “I shouldn’t have… I didn’t ask if I could use it.”

“You don’t need permission.” His voice is low, rough at the edges.

He moves closer and stops at the curve of the piano, one hand coming to rest on the black lacquer. And there it is again—that flicker behind the frost, that shadow of something moving deep below the surface. I’ve spent days trying to read this man and failing. Whatever this is, I can’t crack it either.

“What is this place?” I ask, because the silence is unbearable and the question has been clawing at me since I stepped through the door.

His gaze lifts to the burning sky above us, then drops back to me.

“My hideout.” His head angles. “Well… was. You found it.”

Something in my chest pulls tight. His. This impossibly beautiful room, this single secret softness in a house built of cruelty—is his hideout?

I glance at the piano between us. “And this?” I run a fingertip along the edge of the keys. “Who plays?”

He approaches with that predatory grace of his and lowers himself onto the bench beside me. The heat of him bleeds into my side, making my heart skip a beat. Then he lifts his hands and sets them on the keys.

Those hands. Scarred across the knuckles, heavy with silver, hands I’ve watched hold a gun without a flicker of hesitation. And he plays.

It’s nothing like mine. Where I bled all over the keys, he is precise, controlled, every note placed exactly where he means it. But it’s beautiful—dark and slow and aching, a piece I don’t recognize, drawn-out of him with the same discipline he wears like armor. Control over chaos. Even here. Even in this.

“I didn’t expect you to play,” I admit, the words quiet, unguarded.

His hands don’t stop, but the corner of his mouth tips, faint and humorless.

“No one does,” he drawls. “A man like me is expected to have his hands on a trigger, not a keyboard.” The melody darkens beneath his fingers. “A man like me is supposed to take beautiful things apart. Not make them.”

For a moment I forget to breathe. Forget who he is, what he is, what we are to each other.

Then the last note fades, and he lifts his hands from the keys. The cold slips back into place as though it had only stepped aside for a moment.