Page 109 of Vow to Claim You

He lifts his head just far enough, jaw slick, eyes blown black and fixed on my face.

“Come on my tongue, Princess.”

He seals his mouth over my clit and sucks, and I shatter. I come apart with his name ripping out of me—loud, helpless, fingers clawing the lacquer—my hips bucking up into his mouth, and he growls, holds me down, and works me through every wave of it, relentless, dragging it out of me until nothing is left, drinking down every sound like he’s been dying for them.

He doesn’t stop after I’ve come. He gentles me—slow, soothing passes of his tongue—easing me through the aftershocks until I’m trembling and oversensitive and boneless on the lid of his piano.

Only then does he lift his head again, his mouth slick and eyes still black. He licks his lips clean of me, holding my eyes the entire time.

I’m wrecked, shaking, the aurora still burning overhead, and I look down at my husband on his knees with my taste on his mouth and the leash nowhere in sight. The cold, silent, untouchable man the whole world fears does not exist in this room. There’s only this one. The starved one. The one he’s kept chained since the day we married.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Ayanna

Iwake to weight and warmth and the unfamiliar fact of being held.

For a moment, I don’t move because I don’t want to break it. Aric is a furnace at my back, one heavy arm banded across my middle, his breath slow and even against the nape of my neck—and somewhere in the night, the careful inches he’s always kept between us in this bed disappeared entirely. There’s a tenderness low in my body, a bone-deep softness, and a mark on the side of my throat I can feel without touching it. Evidence, all of it. Proof that last night wasn’t a dream I invented to torture myself.

“You’re thinking too loudly,” Aric murmurs against my skin, voice rough with sleep. He doesn’t open his eyes. His arm tightens, drawing me back into the heat of him. “Stop.”

“I’m allowed to think.”

“Not before coffee. It’s against the rules of this house.”

I can’t help but chuckle softly. “Well, we should be getting ready for the said coffee, or Vidar will scowl at us.”

“Stay. Five minutes. The world can wait five minutes.”

Now that’s astonishing. Aric Vold, who spends every second of his day like it’s ammunition, is asking me to waste five of them lying still in a warm bed. So I do. I stay.

Eventually, he rises—pressing his mouth to my bare shoulder first like he’s done it every morning of his life—and goes to the bathroom. A moment later the shower runs, water drumming against stone, and I lie in the wreckage of the bed listening to it, grinning at the ceiling like a fool. Until my phone rings.

I reach for it on the nightstand. Unknown number. Monserian prefix.

I slide to answer and press the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

“Princess Ayanna.” The voice is rougher than I remember like something has been scraped out of it. “This is Farida Bassi.” Luca’s mother.

I’ve known this woman for years—long before Luca and I were ever anything. The Bassis are an old aristocratic family, and once, Farida and my mother were as close as sisters. I sat at her table on summer evenings, ate food she cooked from recipes her own mother had pressed into her hands, and listened to her melodic laugh. She used to take my face in both her hands and call me ya omri. My life. The way Monserian women do with the girls they’ve decided are their own.

And then the warm memory curdles into the other one. Farida at the funeral. The accusation etched into her face. The raw, jagged grief of a mother who’d buried her only child—and who looked across that grave and laid the blame at my husband’s feet.

“Farida.” I keep my voice careful. “How did you get this number?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Her breathing is uneven. “I need to speak with you. In person. I know who killed my son, Ayanna. And I can prove it.”

The world seems to hold its breath.

She knows. She has proof.

“Farida, what do you⁠—”

“Not over the phone. Meet me.” She sounds concerned. “And Ayanna, you can’t tell your husband. Please, I’m begging you. I’m terrified of what he’ll do if he finds out I reached out to you.”

I let out a heavy breath.

Come alone. Tell no one. Be afraid of the one man on earth who would burn down a continent to keep you safe.