Page 81 of Vow to Claim You

He looks at me a long moment, adjusting the signet ring on his finger. “I had a woman I couldn’t keep, once, too.”

My jaw tightens.

He doesn’t get to do this. He doesn’t get to reach for her.

“Your mother.”

Something in me splinters, though none of it reaches my face. Of course he’d reach for the deepest wound and mistake it for wisdom.

“I controlled every corner of her life. Every door. Every hour. I thought that was enough.” His gaze drifts away for a fraction. “It wasn’t. She ran the first chance she got. She left you behind—her firstborn—and never looked back.”

I bite back a scoff. Because that’s what he took from it. Not that he’d caged her. That she’d escaped.

“You can hold every piece of a woman’s life in your hands and still fail to keep her,” he adds, and I want to shoot him just to interrupt the sermon. The man has believed his own bullshit for longer than I’ve been alive.

But I know the older, uglier truths—how Vidar wanted a woman who didn’t want him and decided wanting was reason enough. What he stole from Angelique to make me and called the violence of it duty. How she spent years surviving inside the life he’d forced around her before she finally broke free.

She escaped. Her only crime was leaving me behind with him.

Only Vidar could look at the devastation he’d carved into a woman and salvage a lesson about the dangers of loving too much.

“Love is a luxury, Aric,” he continues. “I told you that the day I arranged this. Men like us cannot afford it.”

“She’s not my mother.” My voice comes out level, though it costs more than it should. “And I’m not you.”

“No.” He leans back, and the light slides off his face entirely. “You’re worse. I never once believed I could save anyone. You’ve started to.”

“Is that all?” I toss, as though he’s already exhausted whatever interest I had left to give him.

“No.” He lets out a thin, rattling breath. “You made quite the impression in Monsera. A dead boy’s voice at his own funeral, accusing my heir of murder in front of half the Almaviri court.”

“The boy’s death wasn’t my work.”

“I know that. If you’d killed him, there’d be no recording. There’d be nothing at all.” Something that might have passed for approval, if he were a man who approved of things. “Which means someone wanted my son’s name attached to it. Find out who. Quietly. Before it costs us the alliance we bled to build.”

So he sees it too. The frame. For the length of a breath we want the same thing, which is rare enough to be its own kind of warning.

“I’m already on it.”

I’m at the door before the temptation to shoot him wins.

“The heir still has to come,” he says, and I stop at the door. “Burn whatever you like. The families haven’t forgotten what this marriage is for—and her father least of all. Leandro needs that child more than I do now. Think on that, when you decide who you’re protecting her from.”

I turn back. Our gazes lock across the room.

“Your wife’s deadliest enemy walked her down the aisle, son. And he gave her away with both hands.”

“You’ll have your heir,” I say at last. “When she wants to give one, and not a day before. On our terms.” My voice turns colder. “There’s no contract above her anymore. No Council. No father. Whatever comes for her will have to come through me first.”

I can’t erase the world, but I can make myself impossible to get past.

For a moment, Vidar only looks at me, as though I’ve spoken a language he doesn’t understand.

“You’d set yourself against your own house. Against The Gods. Against me.” His eyelid twitches faintly. “For a woman who walked to that altar hating the sight of you. You’d burn almost thirty years of standing for a clause that hasn’t even come due.”

“I’d burn more than that.” I speak in that impassive tone he taught me. “You want to know how far I’ll go? Leave the clause in. Find out.”

Silence, save for the rasp of his breathing through his ruined lungs.