Page 113 of Vow to Claim You

I don’t spare the dead a glance. My eyes stay on her. If she has to see anything in this room, I want it to be me. Not the blood soaking into the floor. Not the men collapsing around us. Me.

When the shooting stops, the only people left standing are mine, and her, and Farida.

Farida still has the knife on Ayanna’s throat. Her hand shakes so badly now it’s a wonder it hasn’t fallen on its own.

“It’s finished, Farida.” I slowly walk closer, hands open, and stop close enough that I could take the blade or take her throat, and she knows I could do either. “Your men are dead. The ones who used you are not in this room. They sent you in here to do the part they didn’t want their hands on.” I look into her wrecked eyes. “Take the knife off my wife.”

Silence. The kind of quiet that comes before everything burns.

She breaks as though she looked into my face and saw her own death looking back at her. The arm across Ayanna’s chest loosens, and the blade drops away from her throat.

The knife clatters to the floor, and Ayanna runs to me. I catch her against me, one arm wrapping around her, and the feel of her—alive, whole—hits me with a violence I don’t have words for.

“Don’t—” Her voice is shaking as she speaks into my shirt. “Don’t hurt her. Please.”

I could. Every cell in my body demands it. She’s the reason my wife looked at death and accepted it, and she’s just an arm’s length away, still breathing. Everything in me screams to finish it.

But Ayanna asked.

And I need Farida alive if I want the person who orchestrated this.

“Take her,” I order Tassilo. “Alive. I’m not finished with her.”

He seizes Farida himself, her wrists pinned, hauled back, and she’s weeping now—something about her son, about justice, about blood for blood. I don’t listen. Nothing matters except Ayanna in my arms.

Eero appears in the doorway, blood on his sleeve that isn’t his. His eyes flick from me to Ayanna and back. He nods and follows Tassilo out. The door closes behind them, and we’re alone.

Ayanna continues to tremble against me, already trying to rebuild what Farida tore down—the spine, the chin, the mask.

“Aric—”

“Don’t.”

Harder than I mean it. I don’t trust my voice for anything else, not with her face still burning behind my eyes and the blood now starting to make itself known down my arm.

I take her hand. Her pulse hammers against my fingers, rabbit-fast.

She almost died tonight. Because I wasn’t here. Because she didn’t tell me. Because she walked into a trap alone, and I was an hour away.

The rage rises like floodwater against the walls I built to contain it.

I pull her gently forward and walk out.

Eero drives. I sit beside Ayanna in the back and stare straight ahead, because if I look at her I’ll see it again—her face, stripped bare, deciding how to die—and I don’t know what to do with that right now. Burn the country, maybe. Start with whoever moved Farida and work my way outward until no one left alive would ever mistake my wife for a door to me.

Eero doesn’t speak. Twice in one day. A record. But I catch him in the mirror, reading the set of my jaw, the stillness that isn’t calm.

And my mind won’t stop replaying the scene from the goddamn café. The knife at her throat. Her face. If I hadn’t put a tracker on her. If Farida’s hand had been steadier. If we’d waited the ten minutes Tassilo wanted…

Something cracks behind my ribs. Fear. I’d almost forgotten the shape of it.

We pull up to the house. Eero stops the car and gets out to deal with Farida. The door shuts.

We sit in the silence a moment longer. Then I get out, walk around, and open her door. She looks up at me. Those dark eyes. That face I can’t get out of my head. The face that almost became a memory tonight.

“Inside,” I say.

She doesn’t argue. She gets out, and we walk toward the house. The thing I’ve been holding down since I saw that blade against her throat is still there. Still pressing. Still looking for somewhere to go.