Page 78 of Vow to Claim You

Humiliation settles heavily in my stomach. Not hers. Mine.

Twice.

She came to me twice. Not because she wanted to. Because she thought she had to. The impossible fucking deadline hanging over her head while I walked around blissfully unaware because I never thought to read the goddamn contract I signed.

Something twists in my chest. I know the feeling. It usually comes a heartbeat before violence. Only this time it isn’t aimed at her. Or my father.

It’s aimed squarely at myself.

For not knowing. For not seeing. For letting her carry it alone.

“Ayanna.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “Look at me.”

She does. Jaw set, braced for whatever cruelty she’s been trained to expect from men like me.

“I didn’t know.” It isn’t enough. Nothing would be. But she needs to hear it, and I need her to believe it more than I’ve needed her to believe anything. “Every time you came to me, I thought you were—” An exhale escapes my lungs. “You should’ve told me.”

“I assumed you knew what you signed.” A hundred different emotions flicker across her face.

My expression remains the same. I’ve been trained to keep a poker face even when something inside me detonates, peeling me apart from the inside out and exposing things I’d buried long ago.

“Besides…” she whispers. “Would it have changed anything?”

“Yes.” No hesitation. None.

Because no one touches her. Not my father. Not that contract. Not whatever clause some goddamn lawyer buried in the fine print while I was too arrogant to read it.

I signed her into a grave.

Now I’ll burn the world to the studs before I let it claim her.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Ayanna

For a moment, Aric just looks like himself.

Cold. Composed. The stone mask I’ve spent weeks learning to read, settled back over his features like nothing I said reached him at all.

But I’ve learned to look closer. And underneath the ice, the man is on fire.

It’s in his eyes—too bright, too fixed, his pupils blown wide until they’re almost all black. It’s in his skin, stretched taut over the sharp bones of his face. It’s in the way he breathes. Too controlled. Too even. The way a man breathes when the only alternative is doing something that can’t be undone. He is the calmest furious thing I’ve ever seen. And the contradiction lifts the hair on my arms.

Then he turns on his heel and walks out without a single word.

For a beat, I just sit there, stunned. Then instinct takes over, and I’m on my feet to follow—and remember, all at once, that I’m wearing almost nothing. A sheer robe that covers nothing. I tear it off, drag an oversized sweater over my head, shove my legs into the first pants I find, and run.

The house is dark and quiet, but I know where he’s gone. The one door in this place that’s always closed.

His office.

I push it open without knocking, and the sight stops me on the threshold.

Aric is bent over his desk, weight braced on his fingertips, head bowed over a stack of pages I recognize at a glance. The contract. Our contract. He’s already read it—I can tell by the set of his shoulders, by the way the fury isn’t banked anymore but pouring off him in waves, thinning the air until the room feels too small to hold it.

I open my mouth, but I don’t get the chance to speak because his hands close on the pages and tear them clean in two with a controlled and precise rip. He squares the torn halves, sets them in the heavy glass ashtray on the desk, and reaches into the drawer for a lighter.

The flame catches with a soft snick.