Page 88 of Vow to Claim You

Something flares inside me before I can stop it. All I can focus on is the way she looks at him, and how much I don’t want her to. She holds his gaze a beat too long, and her steps falter for the briefest fraction before the music carries her on down the aisle. It takes me a moment to recognize it for what it is.

I am… jealous.

Me. Over a man I was sold to. At the wedding of the woman he lost.

So of course I look at him. To confirm it. To catch the proof that his eyes have followed her every step, but his gaze isn’t on Chiara.

It isn’t anywhere.

His eyes are fixed somewhere past the altar, past the sea, on nothing I can find—turned so far inward that wherever he is, it isn’t this garden, and it isn’t her. I can’t read it. I keep trying to lay the explanation over his face—he’s remembering, he’s regretting, he’s saying goodbye—and it won’t fit, because a man saying goodbye looks at the person he’s losing, and Aric is not looking at anyone at all.

And the not knowing claws at me far worse than any look at Chiara would have.

The priest begins. The ceremony is in Italian—one of the half-dozen languages a royal childhood pressed into me before I was old enough to resent the lessons, so the words arrive without anyone needing to translate them. Amore. Fedeltà. Due vite che diventano una. Love. Faithfulness. Two lives becoming one. They settle in my chest like salt in an open wound, because it reminds me of my own wedding, when I got a clause and a deadline and a kiss that came with a sentence attached.

It’s just an arrangement. That’s what he breathed against my mouth at our own altar, weeks and a lifetime ago.

And now I’m witness to a wedding no different from mine. Just an arrangement. The only difference is the circumstances that led each of us here. It makes me wonder—are any of the marriages in this world even real? Or is all of it just business?

I watch Hyun-seok take Chiara’s hands and give his vows in English. He looks at her like he’s aware of what today costs her, and he’s marrying her anyway, to keep her breathing. There’s a strange grace in it that makes my throat tight.

Beside me, Aric still hasn’t moved. But I catch the small things, because I can’t stop cataloging him. The single hard set of his jaw. The shift of his bruised hand against his thigh. Whatever’s churning beneath that impossible control, it’s pulling at him.

“Puoi baciare la sposa.” You may kiss the bride.

The priest finally says, and applause breaks over the garden like surf.

Hyun-seok leans in and kisses his bride—careful, respectful, a vow more than a claim—and I feel my own mouth remember a colder one, the press of just an arrangement, and I have to look away from them toward the water before my face does something I can’t afford.

The guests begin to rise, the music lifting, the crowd loosening toward the terrace and the reception beyond.

Aric lets out a slow breath, as though setting down a weight he carried through the whole ceremony.

I rise, smooth my dress, and put the mask I was raised in back into place before following my husband into the noise.

As I climb toward the lights, the music, and the most dangerous guest list in the world, I realize I spent an entire wedding watching my husband because not knowing what he felt had somehow become unbearable.

I think I’ve run out of ways to lie to myself.

I’ve fallen in love with Aric Vold.

And that might be the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Aric

I’ve stood through worse ceremonies than this. Funerals. Executions disguised as negotiations. Men swearing loyalty they planned to betray the moment the room emptied.

Compared to those, a wedding should be easy.

It isn’t.

I’ve spent my whole life perfecting the art of appearing to watch one thing while every nerve I own tracks another. Tonight it’s the only skill keeping me in my chair.

Because the ceremony is unfolding at the head of the garden—the priest, the vows, the woman in white I once believed I’d spend my life beside—and I can’t make myself give it more than the edge of my attention. My focus has exactly one setting tonight, and it isn’t the altar.

It’s the woman beside me.