Page 82 of Vow to Claim You

He studies me the way he’s studied every man across that desk—hunting for the bluff, the fracture he can force open, searching for the boy who used to fold beneath that pale stare.

That boy isn’t in the room.

He finds nothing but a face that gives nothing back.

His own gift.

“I’ll call the lawyers in the morning.” His pragmatic response is the closest my father comes to surrender. “A dead heir-bearer serves no one, and a son who’ll burn down the alliance over a woman serves me even less.” His eyes narrow. “But understand what I’m conceding and what I’m not. I can take the knife off the table. I cannot take it out of Leandro’s hand. Strike every line and the families still want the child, and her father still wants his seat. You haven’t ended this tonight, Aric. You’ve only made it personal.”

It’s enough. It’s more than I walked in expecting to win—the deadline dead on a page by morning, the penalty gone with it. The rest I’ll handle myself.

Because Ayanna became the line I refuse to let anyone cross. And if anyone mistakes what I permit for all I’m capable of, they’ll learn exactly what my self-control has been keeping on a leash.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Aric

Imean to go back to Ayanna. I make it halfway down the corridor before I turn for the gym instead—the only room in this house that’s ever been entirely mine.

The lights are low when I step in, and the heavy bag still sways a fraction from the last time I worked it loose, as though the room never quite stopped waiting for me.

I brace my hands on the cold steel of the weight rack and drop my head between my shoulders. Breathe out, slow, through my nose.

Vidar shouldn’t have brought her up.

He almost never does. That’s the unspoken treaty of this house—we do not speak of Angelique. He broke it tonight on purpose, the way he does everything on purpose, because he wanted to watch the one wound he gave me that never scarred over.

My jaw sets.

I never knew her. That’s the part no one understands. There’s no face to miss, no voice, no scent, no warmth I’m grieving. Just stories. Stories told by servants who thought I was too small to follow them. Stories that died mid-sentence the moment I came into a room. How quickly Vidar married her. How quickly she vanished after I was born.

She left the night I arrived in the world. For years, he told it the same way—she ran, she couldn’t take the life, couldn’t carry the weight of it. I believed that until I was old enough to learn the uglier truth, and I didn’t learn it from him. I learned it from whispers. From the way the older staff looked at me with something that wasn’t pity but lived next door to it.

She didn’t run from the life.

She ran from him.

Because what he did to her was never meant to become a marriage. It was meant to be buried, forgotten, denied. Except it couldn’t be any of those things. Because nine months later, I existed.

I curl my hands into fists, knuckle by knuckle.

There’s a difference between knowing a thing and carrying it. I know what was done to her. I know the kind of man my father was capable of being on a night he decided a woman’s no didn’t apply to him. I know exactly what made me. None of it answers the question that’s lived under my ribs my whole life, quiet and rotting, patient as a needle working toward the bone.

Why didn’t she take me with her?

I walk to the bag and hit it. The chain jumps.

What kind of woman tears her way out of a cage and leaves her own child inside it?

I hit it again, harder.

Unless she never wanted me to begin with.

Maybe she looked down at me and saw him. Maybe every time she held me she felt his hands again, his weight, the night that broke her. I wasn’t a son. I was evidence. Living proof of the worst thing that ever happened to her, swaddled and screaming and impossible to set down.

I land three more, fast, the impact climbing up through my wrists.

How do you nurse a child who wears your rapist’s face? How do you look into a newborn and find the man who ruined you staring back?