Page 84 of Vow to Claim You

Aric never comes.

At some point, I stop pretending and lie down on my side of a bed that’s too big for one person. I fall asleep listening for footsteps that never come.

When the morning comes, I dress in an elegant cream blouse and pair it with chocolate trousers, loose and wide where they fall. I leave my hair down, dark waves loose past my shoulders, because some small defiant part of me remembers he looks at it differently when it’s down, and a larger, prouder part refuses to admit I styled it for that reason.

I go down for breakfast, and I bump straight into him in the corridor.

Aric. Already dressed in a black suit, already lethal, already wearing the face that gives the world nothing. He steadies me with a hand at my elbow, brief, automatic, gone the instant I’m upright.

“Morning,” I manage.

“Morning.”

And that’s when my eyes drop to his hands, and I freeze. His knuckles are wrecked, swollen and red. The skin is split across two of them and scabbed dark. Not the ordinary wear of training. This is impact. Repeated. Punishing. The kind a man inflicts when he’s trying to bruise something that can’t be reached with his fists.

My chest tightens. “You didn’t wrap your hands.”

His gaze flicks down as if he’d forgotten the damage was there. “They’ll heal.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I needed to clear my head.” His eyes lift back to mine, and they’re calm. Too calm. Whatever cracked beneath the ice has frozen over again. “It’s nothing.”

“You punched something until your hands split open, Aric.” I tilt my head, keeping my voice even. “That’s not nothing. That’s not even training. That’s anger.”

For a moment, something flickers beneath his expression, but it’s gone before I can make sense of it. The man in front of me is not the one who almost kissed me last night. That man had been standing on the edge of something. This one has already stepped back from it, all the way behind the walls he shows the rest of the world.

“What happened?” I try again, softer this time.

“Nothing that concerns you.”

The words hit harder than I think he means them to. I fold my arms before I’ve decided to, the gesture pure reflex.

“Right.”

He notices—of course he notices because this man notices everything—and tension threads through his shoulders. “I didn’t mean⁠—”

“You did.”

Silence falls between us.

I shouldn’t care, but I do, which is its own small humiliation. Because a few hours ago, this man was a half inch from kissing me like the rest of the world had burned away, and now he’s looking at me from behind a foot of ice.

I let out a breath and gentle my tone, because pushing a closed door only bruises your shoulder. “So did things with your father… go well last night?”

“The clause is handled,” he says, matter-of-factly. “The deadline, the penalty. As of this morning, they’re being struck from the terms. You don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

For a moment, everything around me slips slightly out of focus.

For weeks that countdown has lived in the back of my skull, ticking under everything—every meal, every silence, every fertile date glaring up at me from my phone. Twelve months. A child or a coffin. And he’s just lifted it off my shoulders like it cost him nothing, like he didn’t spend the night somewhere in this house with his hands going to ruin over it.

“You—” My voice falters. I steady it. “How?”

“It’s handled,” he repeats, which is not an answer, and I’m learning that “it’s handled” is the closest Aric Vold comes to telling you he moved a mountain and would rather you didn’t ask about the weight.

“Thank you.” The words come out smaller than I want. “I mean it. Thank you, Aric.”

He only inclines his head, as though gratitude is one more thing he doesn’t know what to do with.