Page 169 of Vow to Claim You

My father rides in the car ahead of mine. I sit in the back seat in the middle car, and I wait to feel the relief I came for. It doesn’t come. The house grows smaller behind us, and the ache only widens. But there’s no turning back now.

I rest against the backrest and watch the fjord passing behind the window for what feels like an eternity until the car brakes so hard the belt cuts across my chest. The tires scream. The world pitches sideways. Ahead of us, my father’s car screeches to a halt, and behind, the car where Naomi and mother are stopped at the last moment.

I look through the window and beyond my father’s car is another one, thrown across the whole width of the road at a violent angle with its door already swinging open.

Aric steps out into the road, and for a moment, the world stands still.

Then my father’s men are out of their cars, hands sliding inside their jackets. Aric stands alone in the center of the road facing every one of them with nothing in his hands and nothing on his face but a raw, stripped-open focus that is fixed entirely on me, as though the guns simply aren’t there, as though there is no one on this road but the two of us.

Then more headlights sweep in behind us—Tassilo, and men I recognize, sliding their cars in tight and stepping out—and all at once the odds even and the whole road becomes a held breath with a gun pointed on every side of it.

My father gets out of his car. “Vold.” His hands spread wide. “My daughter has chosen to come home. That is her right. I’m not taking her. She came willingly. There is nothing dramatic happening here.”

“Ayanna.” Aric doesn’t so much as glance at him. He looks only at me, through the windshield, and says my name in a voice so raw it makes my heart beat faster. “Get out of the car.”

My hand is on the door handle before my brain catches up.

“Ayanna.” My father’s voice turns sharp now, like a warning. “You don’t have to⁠—”

“Give me a few minutes.”

“Habibti—”

“A few minutes. Please.”

Whether he hears the please or reads something in my face that tells him arguing will cost him more than it gains, my father inclines his head and steps back toward his car without another word.

I walk toward Aric, each step feels like a negotiation with gravity. The wind off the fjord cuts through my clothes, and the road is uneven beneath my shoes, and every part of me is shaking—not from the cold but from the weight of standing this close to the man I’ve spent weeks resenting for being whole when I was in pieces.

I stop a few steps from him. Close enough to see the shadows carved beneath his eyes, the raw edge to his breathing that tells me the drive here wasn’t careful.

“You can’t stop me from leaving.” My heart stumbles as I speak, my tone quiet and pained. “You can’t block a road and⁠—”

“You think I didn’t break.” His voice low and unsteady, in a way I have never heard from him in all our marriage.

“Aric—”

“I burned those men alive, Ayanna.”

The words come out as a broken hiss through his tightened jaw, his fists clenching and trembling. His forehead narrows, eyes searching mine as his head tilts slightly as if on its own. He looks wrecked. Undone in a way I have never once seen him.

“The men who shot you. Who took her from us.” His voice drops to something barely audible, as though speaking it louder would make it more real than he can stand. “I doused them in accelerant, and I set them on fire, and I stood there and watched them burn, and it did nothing.” His breath shudders, and it cracks something open in my chest that I didn’t know was still sealed. “And it did nothing. Do you understand me? Nothing. The guilt didn’t lift. The pain didn’t ease by even a breath. I walked out of that fire exactly as hollow as I walked into it, because there is no blaze on this earth big enough to warm the place she left behind.”

Tears are already falling down my cheeks, and I don’t know when they started. “You never told me,” I whisper, my voice breaking. “You never said a single word⁠—”

“Because I thought you needed me strong.” The words scrape out of him like something being torn from bone. “Because one of us had to stay standing, and I have thirty years of practice at carrying things that should have killed me, and I thought…” He pauses, muscles in his jaw working as he swallows. “I thought if I could just hold long enough, just stay upright long enough, I could carry you through the dark and find the man who did this and give you something that looked like justice, and maybe that would be enough.” His voice fractures on the last word. “It wasn’t. I know that now. I know that an hour too late.”

He takes a breath, then lets it out. And something in his face changes, but not a crack but a dismantling. Stone by stone, wall by wall, the fortress coming down because he’s choosing to take it apart in front of me, and the courage of that is more devastating than anything else he has ever done.

“You once asked me how much it would take to break Aric Vold.”

My chest constricts. I remember. I remember the words coming out of me like venom, designed to wound, to provoke anything from the man who would give me nothing.

“This, Ayanna,” he says low and rough. “This is what it takes. The look in your eyes when you’re not sure you can trust me.” His gaze flicks between mine with a rawness that makes my chest ache. “The look on your face when you want to leave, when all I need… the only thing I have ever needed… is for you to stay.”

His jaw tightens. His eyes glisten, and he doesn’t hide it.

“I need you, Ayanna.”