Page 170 of Vow to Claim You

Tears spill faster than I can blink them away until he’s nothing but a blur in front of me. My legs feel unsteady, my body suddenly too heavy to hold upright.

“I’m so lost. I don’t know how to do this anymore, how to keep going.”

Aric pulls me into him on instinct, one arm firm around my waist, the other cradling the back of my head. My face presses against the steady thud of his heart, and whatever was left holding me together finally shatters.

“I lost a part of myself when I lost her, and what’s left doesn’t have a reason anymore. I get up, and I move through the day, and there’s nothing behind any of it. I am so tired, Aric. I am so tired of pretending that there is.”

He eases me back just enough to take my face in both hands. His forehead rests against mine, and he stays there, as though he could pour himself into me through the place where we touch.

“You have me.” He has to swallow before he can continue. “You will always have me.”

And then he lowers himself down.

He lowers himself deliberately, controlled even in surrender, his hands sliding from my face to my waist to my hips, until he’s on the road before me with his head bowed and his palms resting against the sides of my thighs.

Aric Vold is on his knees before me. The man who doesn’t bow. Doesn’t bend. Doesn’t break. Is on his knees for me. In the middle of the road, in full view of his men and my father’s, and he takes both my hands in his.

“Get up.” I try to draw him back to his feet and can’t move him at all. “Aric, don’t. You shouldn’t⁠—”

“I am exactly where I should be.” His head lifts. Those pale-blue eyes—red-rimmed, stripped raw, nothing left in them but the truth—find mine from below. “I would burn the world down for you. Every last piece of it. Every kingdom, every throne, every person who has ever cost you a moment’s pain. I would watch all of it turn to ash and feel nothing but satisfied.” His voice drops and roughens. “But I can’t bring her back. I can’t bring Anabella back. I can’t give you the daughter we lost, or the life we should have had. The only thing I can do, the only thing I have to give, is make certain the man who took her from us never takes anything from anyone again. And I know it isn’t enough. Nothing will ever be enough to fill the space she left. But it is all I have to give you.”

I lower myself toward him. I sink until my forehead meets his, until our faces are level, until we are two broken people on a cold road holding each other up because there is no one else in the world who understands the specific shape of this grief.

His hand cradles the back of my head, and his breath mingles with mine.

“I would die for you,” he whispers against my lips like a vow more sacred than any we spoke at the altar. “Without a second’s hesitation. Without a single regret. I would take a thousand bullets to keep you safe, and count myself lucky for the chance.”

His thumb traces the curve of my skull, gentle, as though I am the most fragile and the most important thing he has ever held.

“But that is the easy thing, Ayanna. Dying is easy. It’s one moment, one choice, and then it’s finished. The pain stops, the fighting stops, and you never have to carry anything again.” His eyes trace my face before he continues. “Living is the hard one. Living is waking every morning and choosing it again, even when everything inside you is begging you not to. It is carrying the grief, the loss, the wreckage of everything you believed your life would be… and still finding a reason to draw the next breath.”

“Aric—”

“I choose to live for you, Ayanna. Every day. Every hour. Even when it hurts. Even when the weight of it feels like it’s going to crush me. Even when I close my eyes and picture our daughter’s face, and the pain is so enormous I can barely breathe.” His forehead presses harder against mine. His eyes close for a moment, and when they open again, they are the most human I have ever seen them. “Live for me too. Please.”

A tear slides down his cheek and lands on my wrist. Then another. This man doesn’t cry. He doesn’t break, yet he’s crying on a road in front of a convoy of armed men.

“Not because it will stop hurting, because it won’t. But because I am asking you.”

Tears stream down my face on their own as I nod against his forehead.

“You broke me.” His mouth twitches. It’s not a smile; it’s something more fragile, something more precious. “In the only good way a thing can be broken. And I would let you break me a thousand times over if it kept you here with me.”

I have no words. I’m not sure there are any that would fit. So I just put my arms around his neck, and I hold him, and he holds me, and for a long moment, there is nothing on that road but the two of us on our knees. Two broken people choosing to stay broken together instead of breaking apart.

“Take me home,” I whisper.

“Home.” He nods, thumb caressing my jaw. “Yes. Come home.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

Aric

Idon’t let go of her until she’s steady on her feet, and even then, I hold her against my chest and feel the shaking in her body slow by degrees, steadying the way a heartbeat steadies after the worst of the fear has passed. Her forehead presses into the hollow of my throat, and I can feel her breath, warm and ragged, fanning against my skin.

She’s here. She’s staying.

The relief is so violent it nearly takes me down a second time.