Page 159 of Vow to Claim You

Then someone steps between us, and my heart stops.

Grandmother.

Exactly as she was before the cancer took her, when I was twelve, with silver threaded through dark hair swept back from her face. Those warm brown eyes that always saw more than I wanted them to.

She’s in white too. Like the room. Like the light. Like everything in this place that sits outside of time.

She doesn’t speak as though she can’t. Like I can’t and the girl can’t either. She only looks at me with what seems like compassion and sorrow. Then she turns, and takes the little girl’s hand, and they begin to walk away from me.

I try to follow, try to run after them, but I can’t. I’m held in place, watching, as they walk toward a darkness gathering at the far edge of the room.

The little girl looks back over her shoulder. One last glance, those pale-blue eyes finding mine.

Anabella.

I hear the name echoing around.

The dark folds over them, and I wake up crying. Tears are already streaming down my face before I’m fully conscious. My hands shake. My whole body trembles.

Anabella.

I don’t know how I know it. I only know that I do, the way you know your own name. The way you know the shape of your own hand in the dark.

Her name is Anabella.

“Ayanna—” I hear his voice. “Ayanna. I’m here. I’ve got you.”

I open my eyes and see a white ceiling, and hear a dull, distant beeping, and I feel a deep, tearing pain low in my right side. It’s like fire, like something tore through me and left wreckage behind. I try to move, and it pins me flat.

Then I glance slightly to the side and see him. Aric. He’s out of the chair and at the edge of the bed, his hands hovering like he’s afraid I’ll come apart if he holds on and afraid I’ll come apart if he doesn’t.

“Don’t,” Aric says, though his voice is different. “Don’t move. You’ll pull the stitches.”

I look at him, and the dream is still so loud in me I can’t tell yet which world is real.

“I saw her,” I whisper. “Aric, I saw her. A little girl. She had your eyes—she had your exact eyes—and my grandmother was there, and she took her hand and they—” My voice breaks. “They walked into the dark. And my grandmother told me her name. She told me her name was Anabella.”

Something happens in his face that I don’t understand. A flinch he can’t stop, deep behind the control.

I’ve seen Aric in a great many states in the months we’ve been married. Cold. Controlled. Possessive. Tender, in the rare unguarded moments. I have never seen him like this. Hollow. As though someone had reached inside him and scooped out everything vital, leaving only the shape of a man behind. There are shadows under his eyes the color of bruises.

“What happened?” My throat feels like sand. “Aric. What happened to me?”

Aric takes my hand, folds it between both of his. “You were shot. At the gala. The bullet caught you in the abdomen, the right side.” He speaks as though he’s walking on ice he already knows is going to break. “You lost a great deal of blood. Kirill stabilized you here. No major organ was hit. You’ll heal.”

“How long was I⁠—”

“Two days.”

Two days, gone to the dark. Then I remember the little girl walking into it, and something in me lurches.

“Ayanna.” He’s looking at our joined hands, not at me, and that frightens me more than anything yet, because Aric Vold does not look away. “Did you know?”

“Know what?” My brows twitch slightly, and suddenly, I realize how dry my mouth feels. How thirsty I am.

He lifts his eyes, and something is flickering in them, something I have genuinely never seen there before. Grief. Pain. Perhaps a mix of both.

“You were pregnant,” he barely manages. “Eight weeks.”