Page 103 of Vow to Claim You

Her gaze drops, half a second, to my left hand. To the ring. And something dangerously close to pain flickers on her face.

“I don’t blame you,” she says, quieter now. “I know you didn’t ask for any of this. I know you didn’t go looking for him.” She locks her eyes with mine. “But that ring was supposed to be mine.”

She doesn’t give me room to answer. She turns for the door and pulls it open onto Aric, his hand half raised as if he’d been about to knock. His gaze flicks from Chiara to me in a single sweep, and I watch his expression harden. His jaw tightens, something in his eyes going darker as if he’s calculating what he’s walked into.

Chiara glances back at me over her shoulder, and she smiles.

“Remember,” she says, her voice sweet as arsenic, “every time he kisses you, those lips kissed me first.”

I hold her eyes and give her nothing. Behind her, Aric’s brows draw down, trying to assemble what is going on.

“Every time he touches you, I felt that touch before you did.” Her eyes glitter with a sharp, broken light as if she knows she’s setting fire to something she can’t rebuild. “Everything he does to you, he’s done to me first.”

“That’s enough.” Aric’s voice fills the room. “What are you doing, Chiara?”

She turns to him without shrinking. I’ll give her that too. She lifts her hand toward his face, her fingertips reaching for his jaw, but Aric’s hand catches her wrist midair, and her fingers stop an inch from his jaw.

“The truth,” she says, like it pleases her.

Something locks in his face, that near-invisible tightening I’ve learned to read like a second language.

A shadow falls across the doorway, and I see Hyun-seok appear just behind Aric, his expression carefully blank, but the set of his jaw tells me he heard every word. His dark eyes move from his wife to Aric to me, reading the room in a single sweep.

As soon as Chiara sees him, she snaps her wrist out of Aric’s grip and walks out without another word. Hyun-seok follows.

Aric stands in the frame, his gaze fixed on me. His chest rises and falls with a breath he’s working to control.

“Ayanna—”

“Don’t.” The word comes out harder than I intend. I can feel the cracks spreading through my composure—thin fractures racing outward from the place where Chiara’s words lodged themselves—and if I stay in this room, if I let him look at me with those pale-blue eyes that see too much, I will shatter in front of him.

And I refuse.

I walk past him. Through the doorway, past the space his body occupies, close enough that his scent hits me, and I keep walking.

“Ayanna.”

I don’t stop. My heels strike marble, each step counting down to my own demise. Even so, I walk like a princess instead of a woman coming apart, because my composure is the last fortress I have left… and I refuse to let it crumble.

Every time he kisses you, those lips kissed me first.

My eyes sting, but I blink it away.

Every time he touches you, I felt that touch before you did.

My throat closes. I swallow through it.

Everything he does to you, he’s done to me first.

I turn a corner, putting a wall between us, and press my back against the cold stone. My hands are shaking. I fold them together, fingers lacing tight, and breathe through my nose—the kind of breathing you do when you want to scream but can’t.

She’s right.

Everything I have from him—every reluctant touch, every almost tender gesture, every fraction of a second where the ice thaws just enough for me to glimpse the man underneath—she had first. She had it willingly, freely, in a version of his life where he chose to give it. She had the original. I’m left wondering whether everything between us is only what survived after she was gone. The version of him that’s left once someone else has already had the first claim.

“Well, well. Mrs. Vold.”

I jump a little, startled at Bobby Thorne leaning against the corridor wall, a drink in his hand.