27. Twenty-Seven #2
The pressure made her eyes flare, not with pain, but with a craving so dry and violent I could have wrung it out and set it on fire.
She leaned in until her ear was a breath from my mouth and whispered, “Know this, Romanov. The day will come when I will kill you.”
The words stayed in the air between us. She was close enough that the brush of her hair left a static charge around my jaw.
Goddamn, she had a way of making death sound like an invitation home.
“Careful, Virelli,” I said, so close our cheeks almost touched. “You come for me, you better bring two coffins.”
Her laugh—fuck, that sound—shuddered the space between us. She didn’t step back. Neither did I. We hung in the angry hush of an inch between us.
Frank was watching with a resigned holiness, as if he’d seen a thousand young lovers trade threats at a thousand wakes and weddings, yet somehow he knew that neither of us would be able to keep from touching the trigger first.
She tilted her chin up, her eyebrows sharpening, nostrils flaring.
I wanted to ruin her.
I wanted to take her hate and wire it permanently to my own.
I wanted to fuck her, then kill her, then fuck her again in whatever afterlife we both ended up inhabiting.
Holding my ground, I never left the magma well of her gaze, until she reached out and wiped her bloody fingers down the lapel of my jacket, like she was sketching the outline of a target.
“The next time you touch me without asking,” Harlowe murmured in a hush that didn’t reach even Frank’s ears, “I’ll put a knife between your ribs. There’s no security check you can invent that will slow me down.”
A honeyed smiled, then she vanished into the crowd.
I wanted to watch her try. Wanted the old Virelli blood feud to combust right there in the center of New York, with her naked on my bed, a knife to my throat as the room watched, or, better, we just didn’t let them see it at all.
Frank cleared his throat. If anyone else had dared, I’d have let him die for disrespect, but in the Virelli kingdom, Frank was part of the myth.
He locked eyes with me, and in a single flicker of muscle, communicated everything you’d ever need to know about what it would take to make this girl kneel.
The answer was, nothing in my power. But maybe . . . maybe if I were lucky enough, everything would be hers.
He trailed after her with the posture of an undertaker, and I had no doubt that if he ever guessed I wanted her more than I wanted to end her, he’d shoot me in the head and then make me dinner after.
The only people left beside me were memories and rivals.
My father watched from the mezzanine, a specter in the blue light, flickering a sardonic half-salute as the evening’s currents realigned.
The clockwork of the city—always shifting pieces, always recalculating incomprehensible debts.
I toasted him with the same glass she had marked me with, her lipstick ghosting the rim.
Jesus Christ, my cock was so hard I wanted to laugh.
It should’ve ended there. I should’ve walked away, pretended it hadn’t meant anything. But something inside me cracked open that night, something I didn’t know how to put back together.
Because in a room full of polished puppets and poison smiles, she was real.
Untamed. Reckless. Divine.
She didn’t just look like chaos. She was chaos. And I’d been hungry for it my entire life.
I remember the exact moment it hit me—somewhere between her third lie and her death threat—that I’d never get over her.
That I wouldn’t even try.
I was seventeen the night Luca Virelli was murdered.
The warehouse smelled like rust and cold blood.
The kind of scent that sinks into your lungs and stays there, no matter how hard you scrub.
Chains hung from steel beams like decorations in hell, and the only light came from a single overhead bulb, swaying slightly from the wind slithering through the broken windows above.
My uncle insisted I be there.
He stood in the middle of it all like a conductor about to cue a symphony of violence. He always wore black leather gloves—expensive and unnecessary. He didn’t like fingerprints. Didn’t like mess, except when he did.
“Get over here, nephew.”
I didn’t move fast enough, so his hand found the back of my neck and shoved me forward, closer to the boy tied to the chair.
Luca Virelli.
He couldn’t have been much more than twenty. His face was a ruin of blood and swelling, one eye sealed shut. But he looked up at me with the other, defiant even through the split lip and shattered nose. My uncle and his men had done a number on him.
Considering the amount of blood he had lost and the fact that he still had the strength to look up at me, unafraid, was impressive.
Luca wasn’t scared of the death he knew was coming.
He was old enough to understand that the Romanovs didn’t leave survivors; we sent messages.
And the death of the Virelli prince would shudder through Manhattan like a mass-grave earthquake.
He spat at my shoe, a bright red arc. “Go on,” he rasped. “Do it.”
Somewhere outside, sirens wailed blankly into the night, fading in and out on swells of city wind. My uncle circled, reading the tension in the room like braille. He wanted to see if I could finish something. Wanted to know the measure of violence inside me.
“He’s the reason your mother’s dead,” my uncle whispered into my ear, like a lullaby. “He’s the reason our family bleeds.”
I knew it wasn’t true. At least, not all of it. The war between the Virellis and the Romanovs went back decades—bigger than me, bigger than Luca. But none of that mattered in this room. The truth didn’t live here.
Only power.
The blade caught the warehouse light. I was the quiet type—the observer. The kid at the back of the church with a pocket full of switchblades, waiting for the grown-ups to lose. I glanced at Luca.
He recognized it—the flicker of nerves—and he smiled with bloody teeth.
“Not so easy, is it, Romanov prince?”
He wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t right, either. I wasn’t scared of the kill. I was scared of getting it wrong.
“Watch, nephew. Learn what happens to loyalty misplaced.”
Luca started coughing, and the sound was wet. Blood bloomed down his shirt in waves, each pulse another second he was losing.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered, not sure if I meant it or not.
Luca smiled. Or tried to. “You don’t have to become him.”
“Do it,” my uncle commanded.
I stared at the knife.
He scoffed. “Still soft. Still your mother’s son.”
My uncle ripped the knife out of my hand and carved an R into Luca Virelli’s chest.
“I’m going to make your little brat of a sister suck my cock. I’m going to leave her alive just long enough that every time she says her name, she remembers it’s mine.”
“You motherfucker. I’ll fucking ki—” Luca said as my uncle slid the knife across his throat.
When you cut a man’s throat, it doesn’t explode like in the movies. It peels open with a silent red smile, and the body tries to talk, words gurgling out in punctuation instead of grammar.
For a moment, Luca’s good eye was pure crystal—no hate, no fear, just the surprise of it. His body jerked once in the chair, and then slumped forward, blood soaking through the ropes.
His eye—the one that was still open—stared at me even in death, like it was asking if I’d ever sleep again.
I wouldn’t.
Luca made it easy, in his way. He provoked it. Maybe that was his real talent. He died like he lived, with his throat wide open, looking for air where there was none.
Sleep didn’t come for a week. Not from the blood. Not even from my uncle’s cackling. But from the eye—that moment when death crosses into the body and something else looks back. You never forget it—the question it asks without speaking.
What I saw in Luca’s face after the light died .
. . I never told anyone. Couldn’t afford to.
Because admitting it would mean admitting my mother was really gone.
That no amount of Virelli blood spilled in the dark would bring her back.
That all these scars, all this violence .
. . it was just me trying to fill a hole that couldn’t be filled.
My uncle exhaled like it had been a religious experience.
“There. You’ve seen it now. You’ve been baptized.”
I didn’t say anything.
He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Next time, it’ll be you ending a Virelli’s life. That’s how you become a king.”
Looking down at Luca’s corpse, the truth was simple: I didn’t feel like a king.
The cold that rushed in wasn’t new, it was ancient. It had been waiting inside me all along, just needed the right catalyst to wake it up.
They say Virelli’s and Romanov’s are the same in the end—a waste of a bloodline.