Chapter 3

Arianna's Pov

I stared at him. A second passed, then another. The seconds stretched at the edges because my brain refused to process what it just heard.

"You're married," I said, not as a question, but to process what I had just heard.

"I'm aware." He responded like it meant nothing.

"You're standing here telling me that you're going to keep me beside you, and I belong to you?" I said it slowly, like I was explaining something to someone who hadn't heard themselves. "You have a wife, Nikolai."

"And you have a lot of nerve," he said, "lecturing me about what I do with my life." He tilted his head slightly. "Given everything."

The ‘given everything’ landed the way he intended it to, so I had to close my mouth.

He moved to the window. The city stretched out below him, indifferent and enormous, and he looked outside like he was already deciding what to do with it. The light caught the line of his jaw, the set of his shoulders, and I hated that I noticed. I hated that even now, even standing in the middle of something that should have cured me of him permanently, some part of my body still remembered what it had once felt like to be wanted by this man.

That part needed to be quiet.

"Let me be very clear about something," he said, still facing the window. "I'm not asking you to be my mistress. I'm not asking you to be anything romantic." He said the word like it was slightly beneath him. "What I'm telling you is that you owe me, and I intend to collect."

"Collect." I repeated it. "Like I'm a debt."

"You played with me." He turned then, and his eyes were very direct. He had the look of a man who had converted pain into something useful and had been waiting patiently to spend it. "You made me believe things. You made me feel things. And then you threw all of it back in my face and let me think you were dead." He paused. "So yes, like a debt."

My jaw tightened. "You don't know why I did what I did."

"Then tell me."

The words rose in my throat and stopped. Because the truth was a door I could not open. Not here and not to him. The truth had too many rooms behind it, and some of them contained things I had spent five years making sure no one would ever find.

"I can't," I said.

"Can't." He studied me. "Or won't."

I didn't answer. That was enough to answer.

He turned back to the window. "You know what your problem is, Arianna? You think you can decide what people deserve to know. You decided what I deserved. You made that choice for both of us." He paused. "I'm returning the favor."

I wanted to say something to that. I had things to say. But I was also, underneath the anger and the fear, deeply and exhaustingly tired, and I was thinking about Noah at Mrs. Kate's with his fever and his small hoarse voice, and I was thinking about what it had cost me to build the life I had now.

I had given up everything to disappear. Everything.

I had been a William, and that meant something, once. My father had stood at the right hand of the Voss family for twenty years, and was trusted with the kinds of things men like that trusted no one with. My father was once the Voss family's most trusted bodyguard, and that was how I got to know Nikolai.

"I'm not the same person I was," I said. "Whatever happened between us — that was five years ago. I was twenty-one years old. You don't get to hold me to who I was at twenty-one."

He looked at me. "No?"

"People make mistakes. People do things they regret. That doesn't mean they spend the rest of their lives paying for them."

"It does," he said pleasantly, "when the mistake was deliberate."

"Nikolai…."

"You didn't slip up." He said it without heat. Just a fact. "You planned it. You stood across from me and you said the things you said andyou looked me in the eye and you did not slip up. Not once." Something moved behind his expression, quick and it was gone. "I would have forgiven a mistake. I'm very good at forgiving mistakes."

The room felt smaller than it had before.

"I need to go," I said. "I have to get back to work.."

"Your family doesn't know you're alive."

I stopped on hearing that.

"What?" My voice came out wrong and thin.

"Your father. Your cousins. The people who mourned you." He watched me. "They don't know."

"That's not…" I stopped and started again. "That's my business."

"Maybe." He moved toward me slowly, not threatening, just closing the distance between us. "But I wonder what your father would think if he found out. Not just that you were alive, but how you left." He stopped a few feet away. "You didn't just disappear, did you, Arianna. There was a car. A fatal one at that. You ran over a hill, your car ruined to ashes, your face was barely recognisable. There was a body they couldn't identify because by the time anyone looked closely, there wasn't enough left to look at. The body has your bracelet on its wrist so we didn't question it. But deep down in me, a hope still lingered."

My heartbeat was very loud. I could feel the tears building up now, and I had to forcefully bite my lips to stop it from rolling down.

"The Voss family has a reputation to protect," he continued. "Your father built thirty years of loyalty on being the man who could be trusted absolutely. A man whose own daughter faked her death and destroyed property to do it…." He paused, and he let the sentence sit there unfinished. "I wonder how that story lands."

"You wouldn't." But even as I said it, I was doing the math, and the math was not in my favor.

"I wouldn't need to do anything," he said. "I'd just need to ask the right questions to the right people. Information has a way of traveling on its own."

I looked at him. The fear was real. I was not going to stand here and shake in front of him. I had promised myself a long time ago that I was done shaking in front of people who wanted to see it.

"My father," I said carefully, "has nothing to do with this."

"No. But he could." Nikolai tilted his head slightly. "That's the point."

"And if I just walk out that door right now? What then? You make a phone call?"

"I don't know." He seemed to consider it, genuinely, like it was an interesting question. "Maybe. Maybe I just let you walk out and see how long it takes before the world you've been hiding in stops being safe." He looked at me steadily. "Or maybe you stay and we talk like adults about what happens next."

The silence stretched. I could hear the faint sounds of the restaurant downstairs, the distant clatter of the kitchen, the muffled pulse of the city through the glass.

I thought of Noah's breathing this morning. I thought of the medication I hadn't bought yet, and all the careful invisible architecture of my life that I had built so that one specific small boy would never have to feel what I felt the morning I walked away from everything I had.

I had one secret that mattered.

Everything else — the fire, the Voss name, my father's pride, what Nikolai thought of me — all of that was secondary. All of that I could survive.

But Noah was not something I could afford to gamble with.

"You want to talk," I said finally. My voice was steady. I was proud of that. "Then talk."

Something in Nikolai's expression shifted, almost imperceptibly, like someone who had expected resistance and was recalibrating.

"Good," he said.

He moved back to his seat like the conversation had been decided. Like the outcome had never really been in question. And I stood there, and I told myself the thing I had been telling myself for five years whenever the ground started to give way beneath me.

He can't find out about Noah.