Page 98 of Vow to Claim You

“You still think about her.”

Alexei’s gaze drifts somewhere beyond the terrace, then fixes on a point in the darkness.

“Nina,” I say. A name I’ve only ever heard him say once, years ago, when he was bleeding badly enough to be honest.

He looks at me, weighing whether honesty is worth the risk again this time.

“Every day.”

He raises his glass and drinks.

Another thing in our world where fair doesn’t have the right to exist. Some men get the arrangement and make their peace. Some men get the arrangement and spend the rest of their lives looking at a point in the dark where someone else used to be. Some get lucky enough for the arrangement to turn out something they never knew they wanted.

And then the villa doors open, and she’s there.

Ayanna, walking in my direction. Her dark eyes find me across the floor the way they do now—the way they didn’t a month ago, when she couldn’t stand the sight of me.

Alexei says something, but I don’t hear it. Because the only coherent thought in my head, watching my wife cross the terrace to come back to where I’m standing, is how badly I would like to kiss her again.

CHAPTER FORTY

Aric

The door shuts behind us, and for the first time in hours, the air is ours to breathe.

I reach for my tie, slip a finger beneath the knot, and work it loose. My eyes are already on her. My wife. She’s bent to pull off her heels, one hand braced on the back of the couch, and I have to look away before the hunger she’s awoken in me decides it’s done waiting.

Because all I can think of right now is how badly I want to cross this room, put her back against that wall, and finish what I started on the terrace. I want to drag my mouth down the line of that bare throat I’ve been losing my mind over all night and hear her breath going ragged against my ear. I want every careful inch of distance I’ve kept since the altar burned to ash. I want her with a violence that feels almost foreign. Every instinct I usually keep on a leash is straining against it now, deaf to command.

All because of her.

Ayanna had become my intoxication.

But I’ve spent weeks refusing to touch her until she asked. I’m not going to stop being that man the first night it gets difficult. So I drape the tie over the back of a chair and let the want sit where it is.

“You left early,” she comments, snapping me back from the tug-of-war inside my mind.

“I thought you’d want to.”

She turns to look at me. “Why would I want to?”

Because half the room was watching you. Because the other half was watching me watch you. Because you stood across a terrace from a past I buried with my own hands, and I didn’t want you in that room one second longer than the optics required.

I say none of it.

“You’d had enough,” I tell her instead. “We were seen. We paid our respects. That’s all the night required.”

She studies me as though not convinced. She’s learning the difference between the things I say and the things I mean, and she’s getting dangerously good at it.

“Why can’t we just go home? To Norway.”

I move to the side table and reach for the decanter.

“I spoke to Nikos.” The whiskey pours in a smooth, controlled stream. “Chiara’s initiation is tomorrow. Here. In Olympus.”

“So soon? And here, not Seoul?”

“Domenico’s betrayal complicated things. There are men at the table who don’t trust her yet.” I set the decanter down. “Not as Hyun-seok’s wife. Not as one of us. They want to see her bind herself to The Gods in blood before the doubt has time to spread. Tonight, she’s married. Tomorrow, she’s bound. And everyone who matters is already here. Efficient.”