Empire (Of Ruin and Royalty)

Prologue - Salvatore

loml – Taylor Swift

This house is too quiet for a man who has spent his life ruling every room he’s walked into.

The parlor smells faintly of cedar, old cigar smoke, and the polish the staff uses on the wood every Thursday, whether it needs it or not. Rain taps softly against the windows overlooking the back gardens, and somewhere deep inside the house, a clock marks the late hour with a low chime.

I sit alone in the chair nearest to the fireplace with a glass of whiskey I haven’t touched in twenty minutes, while staring into the flames as if it’ll finally have an answer for me.

It never does.

At sixty, a man is supposed to have made peace with the shape of his life. That’s what people say, anyway. They say age sands down old grief, and time gives old tragedies sharper edges and softens regret.

They’re stupid.

Regret calcifies. It gets harder and becomes part of the architecture. You stop bleeding from it openly and start living around it so well that everyone mistakes it for healing.

It isn’t healing—it’s adaptation. Rats do it just as well as kings do. We’re all surviving the rooms we build for ourselves.

I also find that most of what they say about age is written by fools who have never spent the last thirty-five years carrying one sentence in their chest like a splinter.

I’ll never forgive you, but I will always love you.

It’s said to me in the rain with exile stamped across his face, and the words never leave me after.

They follow me into every room I rule. They sit behind my eyes during weddings, funerals, negotiations, births, and executions. They’re there the night Vincenzo and Silvano are born.

They’re there the night I watch Vincenzo learn how to hide pain behind stillness because I’ve taught him too well and loved him too wrong to teach him anything else.

They’re there when I hand power to my son and tell myself I’m finally done being what my father turned me into, as if men like me ever get the peace of retirement.

Tonight they’re louder than usual.

Maybe because the house is empty in all the ways that matter now. Maybe because retirement is such a laughably gentle word for what this really is.

I don’t retire; I step aside. I let Vincenzo take the chair that has been reaching for him since before he was old enough to understand what inheritance means.

Capo dei Capi. King. He wears power beautifully, my son. Too beautifully.

There are moments when I look at him in a boardroom or at the head of a table and see myself the way I used to think I looked before the years taught me otherwise.

Then there are other moments—smaller and crueler—when he goes still at the mention of a certain name, and I see not myself, but the weakness I gave him.

Or, perhaps, weakness isn’t the word. Perhaps love is simply the wrong thing in the wrong men.

Vincenzo tries very hard not to let me see how broken he is by Nikolaj’s amnesia. He fails, of course. Not because he isn’t good—he is. He’s better at masking his emotions than I was at his age.

But I know what heartbreak looks like when it’s trying to wear discipline as a disguise. I know the specific emptiness of loving a man who’s still alive enough to speak and walk through a room, but still lost to you in all the ways that matter.

Vincenzo may call it surviving, but I call it a curse—mine, more than his.

I see my own heartbreak in Vincenzo’s face. I see it every time he leaves my office wearing that same frozen expression I once wore throughout my thirties, as if grief can be made elegant enough if you tailor it just so.

It can’t. Believe me, I’ve tried.

The fire cracks, and I finally take a sip of my whiskey, letting it sit on my tongue before swallowing. Then, I set my glass down and close my eyes for a moment.

When I was younger, memory came in fragments sharp enough to wound. The sound of his laugh, the feel of his hands, the smell of the rain on his coat. The way he’d call me that infuriating nickname, the one I pretended to hate but secretly wished he’d say.

Age hasn’t softened that, either. It’s made it broader—less a collection of moments, and more a country I’m exiled from.

I can still walk through it if I’m not careful. The hotel rooms. The corridor outside the winter garden in Vienna. The villa where we both became stupid enough to speak about futures as if fathers were not already moving knives across tables elsewhere.

The council chamber. The dagger. The rain after.

I wonder sometimes if Ruslan hears my voice the way I still hear his.

I wonder if he ever forgives me in private, and then hates himself for it.

I wonder if he watches Nikolaj now and understands that our punishment is not just what we lost, but that we get to watch that loss repeat with younger faces.

I hear the parlor door open behind me, but tonight I don’t reach for the weapon in the drawer next to me. Instead, I grab my cane and get to my feet to welcome the would-be assassin.

Because that’s the only thing it could be—no one sneaks into an old King’s home after midnight as a courtesy call. I find, to my own surprise, that I am not afraid. Tired, yes. Curious, maybe. But not afraid.

The doorway darkens, and for one monstrous, impossible beat of time, I think it’s Ruslan.

Tall, broad-shouldered, and that same brutal stillness in the doorway, like violence has learned how to stand upright and wait. The blond hair pushed back, and those impossibly frost-bitten eyes have my old heart doing something grotesque in my chest.

Then the illusion shifts.

The jaw is wrong—younger, and the mouth is crueler in a different way. The eyes are colder, though God help me, they still carry something of Ruslan when they settle on me.

Nikolaj Dragovich steps fully into focus, and I nearly laugh at the irony… He looks so much like his father that it feels like punishment—my demise will come in the form of a blade my lover forged.

He closes the door behind him without looking away from me. The sound of the latch settling into place is very soft, but final, all things considered.

“Don Vieri.”

His voice is lower than Ruslan’s. Rougher and less amused by the world and more inclined to gut it. Good. That difference saves me the indignity of forgetting myself again.

“Nikolaj,” I say.

He doesn’t offer a hand, but I don’t expect one. There is too much history between our bloodlines for performance to serve any real purpose.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I say stupidly, but old men say stupid things when the past walks through the door wearing the face of its future.

Nikolaj’s mouth curves very slightly, and there’s no humor in it. “And yet.”

The echo hits me harder than it should. Ruslan used to say that to me the same way—half mocking, half resigned, as if fate itself had gotten too repetitive to deserve anything but contempt.

I study him openly then, because if this is the shape of the end, I’m allowed that much. The black coat. The rigid line of his shoulders. The left eye has an inherited scar.

He is Ruslan and not Ruslan. The son, not the man. The next generation of damage, standing in my parlor with old ghosts in his blood and fresh reasons of his own.

I think of Vincenzo instantly.

Of course I do. These boys, these men, these fucking sons. Always caught in the aftershocks of what their fathers set in motion and never had the decency to finish properly.

“You know why I’m here,” he says, his eyes flicking to the cane in my grasp.

I move back toward my chair, but don’t sit yet. “You should have come in the daytime. Unfortunately, I cannot offer you any hospitality with half my staff asleep.”

It’s a ridiculous thing to say to a man who is about to kill me, which is exactly why I say it. Habit, I suppose.

Nikolaj doesn’t smile. “I didn’t come for hospitality.”

“No, I suppose not,” I say, and because I am still a Vieri before I am anything else, my first instinct is defense. “Your father made his own choices.”

Nikolaj’s brow furrows slightly. Interesting. I continue anyway, because if he’s here to accuse, I’d rather steer the shape of it than wait to be cornered like a child.

“Whatever you think you know, whatever version of history he’s reconstructed, Ruslan was not some helpless victim unwillingly dragged to every decision. He—”

“Stop.”

The word cracks through the room, silencing me. Nikolaj finally takes a step toward me, and now I can see him properly. There’s no fury in his features and no weapon in his hands. “That’s not why I’m here.”

His words make me blanch, and I feel a sliver of irritation slide through me. “If you’re here to kill me, Nikolaj, then please understand that I no longer have the patience for speeches beforehand. I’ve earned at least the dignity of being shot without the melodrama.”

He looks at me for a long second, and there’s something so chillingly familiar in that silence that it almost makes me laugh. Ruslan did this too— letting quiet do the cutting before words ever touch the wound.

“I want to know what happened between you and my father.”

There are moments in a man’s life where the ground shifts beneath him and no one else in the room notices. This is one of them.

I don’t answer immediately. How can I? The question is impossible in ways Nikolaj doesn’t even understand. It’s not only about Ruslan, it’s about me before I became what I am.

“I know there was something,” he continues.

“Every time your name comes up in meetings with my father, he gets this look on his face. Every time I ask about the true reason we were exiled years ago, nobody answers me directly. Every fucking document is sealed, even to me, the fucking Pakhan. It feels like I’m standing in the middle of a story that started before me. ”

The boy has no idea how right he is.

Nikolaj takes another step closer, close enough that the resemblance hits me so fiercely that I have the insane impulse to say Ruslan’s name just to get it out of my mouth before it burns me alive from the inside.

“Did you love him?”

The question lands without ornament or attempt to soften it. Dragovich men never learn to ask for the truth politely.

I truly laugh then, but not because I find his question amusing. There is something so unbearably cruel about being asked this by his son after all these years of acting like the wound has scarred over, when in reality, it has just learned how to bleed inward.

I move past Nikolaj to the sideboard because I need the distance if I’m going to be honest tonight. I pour myself another whiskey, and this time I drink it. When I turn back to him, he still hasn’t moved.

“That’s not a question with a short answer,” I say.

He shrugs. “I’m not in a hurry.”

No. He wouldn’t be.

“You should be careful what doors you open, Nikolaj. You might not like what lies behind them.”

He offers me a sardonic smile, and my hand fists around the top of my cane. “You should have told your son the same thing.”

That one lands clean.

I sigh, pour myself another glass, and walk back to my gesture, gesturing to the one opposite mine. “Sit down.”

He does as he’s told, and I raise my glass to my lips, looking at the consequences of my betrayal so long ago.

I look at Nikolaj and see Ruslan in splinters. They’re enough to hurt, but not enough to save me from answering.

And somewhere far inside the house, the clock begins to strike again.