CHAPTER FIVE

Armando's POV

She left my study with her spine straight and her chin level, and I stood by the window long after the door clicked shut…watching her reflection dissolve into the glass instead of the woman herself.

Certainly, I will. Just three words, she said without a flicker of hesitation.

I had expected resistance. Like most women, who married into this kind of arrangement and wanted to negotiate, to soften the edges of a contract until it looked more like a courtship. 

But she simply agreed. Just the way a person agrees to terms they have no intention of honoring in full.

I told myself it did not matter. A wife who followed rules without asking why was easier to manage than one who fought me on every point. But something about her stillness sat wrong in my chest. The same way a locked door sits wrong when you already suspect what waits behind it.

I poured a drink I did not want and left it untouched on the desk...the same habit I had carried since the accident that took my parents and since sleep became something other people did without effort.

Insomnia had shaped me into a man who noticed things. Small things. The way Zahara's hand had trembled once…briefly, when I mentioned the east wing. The way her eyes had gone somewhere else entirely for half a second before she caught herself and came back to the room.

I did not know her. We just spent one reckless night together five years ago with a handful of clipped conversations, and yet some part of me kept measuring her against a memory I had no business keeping…The bar. Her laugh before she realized I was watching. The way she had vanished before morning without leaving a name, as though...she already understood I was not a man worth staying for.

I put the thought away and walked through the corridor heading toward the east wing— what I did most nights when sleep refused to come.

The house was quiet at that hour, the kind of quiet that pressed against the ears.

I passed the guest room where Zahara's things had not yet arrived…no light beneath the door, and told myself the tightness in my chest was only fatigue.

Grace was waiting outside the locked room when I reached it, seated in the chair the staff had learned not to question, her uniform pressed even at this hour. She stood up the moment she saw me.

"How is she tonight," I asked— my voice lower than it needed to be, though there was no one else awake to hear it.

"Restless. Her fever broke around midnight, but returned normal an hour later." Grace hesitated, just the way she always did before delivering something she knew I would not want.

"Doctor Ellery still cannot explain the pattern. It behaves like nothing he has treated before. Like something is working through her system on its own schedule…feeding on her a little more each week."

"And the tests?"

"Inconclusive. Again." She said it gently, but the word landed the same way it always did— Heavy. Final.

"Whatever this is, Mr. Ivas, it was not born in her body. Someone put it there."

I had heard versions of that sentence for months and it never lost its weight. Fiona was the only family I had left who had chosen to stay, who had raised a boy nobody wanted to inherit after his parents were buried— and I was watching something invisible take her apart piece by piece while every doctor in the city shrugged and called it a mystery.

I let myself into the room.

Fiona lay against the pillows, smaller than I remembered her being even a year ago. Her silver hair that always loose around her face that used to laugh easily, now looked carved from something fragile.

The monitor beside her bed traced her heartbeat in slow and uneven peaks. I sat in the chair Grace vacated and took her hand, just the way I always did every night whether she was aware of it or not.

Her eyes opened partway— unfocused, somewhere between sleep and the surface.

"Armando," she murmured...and something in me loosened slightly at the sound of my own name in her voice.

"I am here."

"The wedding." Her mouth curved faintly, as if the memory pleased her even through her haze. "She has kind eyes."

"You said that to her too."

"Because it is true." Fiona's fingers tightened around mine, weaker than they should have been.

"She reminds me of someone I have not thought of in a long time. Something in the way she held herself at the altar…like she was bracing for the floor to open."

"Who does she remind you of," I asked, more out of habit than real interest. Expecting a name that meant nothing to me.

Fiona's eyes drifted shut again— her breathing slowing, and for a moment I thought she had already slipped back under. Then her lips moved, barely more than a breath.

"Yvonne."

The name meant nothing to me. I had never heard her speak it before, not once in thirty years of holidays…quiet dinners and every ordinary conversation that fills a life.

But something in the way she said it…Soft. Grieving. Decades old…told me it was not a name chosen at random, and that whatever memory it belonged to had cost her something to keep buried this long.

I sat with her until her breathing evened out into real sleep, then I rose carefully so the chair would not scrape against the floor.

Grace was waiting when I stepped back into the corridor, and I told her to note the name in Fiona's file, to ask Doctor Ellery quietly whether it meant anything to the medical history none of us had ever been given in full.

Then I turned to make my way back toward my own room, but I stopped.

Standing at the far end of the corridor is Zahara, in her robe she must have thrown on in a hurry— one hand braced against her own doorframe as though she had opened it only seconds before. 

She was not looking at the floor or pretending she had wandered there by accident. She was looking directly at the door I had just come out from— and then at me. Her expression caught somewhere between confusion and something sharper underneath it...something that looked dangerously close to recognition.

Neither of us spoke. The hallway light caught the side of her face and for the first time since the wedding…I saw the question forming behind her eyes before she had the sense to hide it, the same question I had just carried out of that room myself.

Whatever she thought she understood at that moment, I was certain of one thing. She was not going to let it go.