Ravi was quiet for a moment. When he spoke his voice carried something she had not heard in it before. Not softness exactly. Something more unfamiliar than that.
"Something has shifted in how I regard you and I cannot find the correct name for it," he said. "The day you lost consciousness and would not wake up, I thought I had lost you." He looked at his hands. "You did not see what was on my face that day. I did not know what to do with it."
He paused.
"My mother and father did not show me love. Not once. What they showed me was authority and the mechanics of claiming what you want before someone else takes it. I was not allowed a childhood. I was beaten and trained as an assassin at seven years old. Sent on missions to steal weapons, plant explosives, decode locks. My earliest memories are the sounds of other people's fear." He said it all without self pity, the way someone reads from a document they have memorised. "I told them both, more than once, that I did not want this life. I wanted what Jokull had. A normal life. A mother who looked at me the way she looked at him." He stopped. "I never got that. She forced him away and kept me here and trained me into what I am."
The hill was quiet around them, the grounds below indifferent and green.
"I am not asking for your sympathy," he said. "I am not using any of that to justify what I did to you. I am simply telling you the truth because you asked me once if I was real and I told you I was." He looked at her directly. "I do not want to start over. I am not Jokull. This is the life I have and I am not unhappy in it." A pause. "But you are something I cannot make sense of. You interest me in ways that nothing else does. When you look at me with those golden eyes of yours something ignites that I have no framework for." He straightened in his chair. "So I am asking you sincerely. Not demanding. Not threatening. Asking." He held her gaze. "Would you like to stay as my wife? Or would you like to leave?"
Aine looked down at him from across the small distance between their chairs.
Something moved through her that she did not entirely have words for either. A strange and specific recognition, the feeling of looking at a person whose damage had been shaped by forces outside their choosing, the way hers had been, the way everyone's was if you looked back far enough. She did not forgive the damage he had caused her with that recognition. But she understood something she had not understood before.
And underneath the grief and the anger and the bandage still wrapped around her forehead, a thought assembled itself quietly.
Her mother's dream. The coffee business they had mapped out together on the kitchen table when Aine was small enough to sit on the counter while Primrose talked. The plan she had been carrying alone since the accident took its architect away. A transactional marriage to a man who had just offered her freedom was still freedom. She could build what she had always intended to build. She could honour what her mother left behind.
She could get what she needed and he would get what he wanted and perhaps in a world that had never once asked her what she preferred, that was the most honest arrangement available.
She looked at him.
"I forgive you," she said. "But only on one condition."
He waited.
"I return to school. Not Jade High. Somewhere else. And I can go wherever I want, whenever I want. No restrictions."
Ravi looked at her for a moment.
"You have my word."
"You look full of life this morning," Hayland said when she appeared at the bottom of the stairs.
Aine raised an eyebrow. "How was I doing previously?"
"You always had that face on. Composed as ever." He tilted his head slightly. "But your eyes were dim. Today they are not."
She looked around the entrance hall. "Where is Ravi?"
"He left early for a meeting."
Her eyes moved to the bags stacked neatly by the door. "What are those?"
"Your clothes." He watched her face. "Are you not going home?"
"Home?" She looked at the bags and then back at him. "No. I am not going anywhere. I am staying here. As Ravi's wife."
Hayland blinked. Just once. "That was unexpected."
"It is a transactional arrangement," she said simply, moving past the bags without touching them. "There is something I want and the only way to get it is from a position like his. The power, the resources, the connections. With all of that behind me I can build what I have always intended to build." She paused. "I am using the situation to my advantage. The same way he used me to his."
Hayland looked at her carefully. "Does he know this?"
"Why would I tell him? I am not planning to harm him. I am simply taking what is available to me." She met his eyes. "I doubt you will tell him either."
Hayland considered this for a moment. "My job is to protect him. Since what you are doing poses no threat to his safety there is nothing to report." He was quiet for a beat. "And for what it is worth, he has already gotten the one thing he truly wanted from this arrangement. Something you may not be aware of."
She waited.
"He lost certain capacities years ago. The inability to function fundamentally as a man. The training, the lifestyle, things forced on him from childhood. He was made to start drinking at nine years old. Given shots of poison shortly after so his body would build immunity over time. The physical and psychological toll of all of it took something from him that he believed was gone permanently." He paused. "You gave that back to him without knowing it. So in a sense, you have both already received something significant from this arrangement." He reached into his coat and produced a phone. "He left this for you."
She took it without a word and turned it over in her hands.