Chapter 7 Vincenzo
Vincenzo
The brand on my arm still burns. A mark meant to shame, to restrain, to remind me that even at the top, there are walls I cannot breach without consequence.
Vintermoor doesn’t give warnings lightly.
A single strike is a stain, and stains never vanish in the world I come from; they fester.
They get whispered about in corners, folded into dossiers, and handed off to enemies waiting for the first sign of weakness.
I know this. I knew it even before the hot iron kissed my skin and left me breathing through my teeth.
But knowing doesn’t change the fact that I let him get to me.
I walk through the East Wing with my coat over my arm, tie undone, shirt unbuttoned at the throat. Everyone who crosses my path moves without being told. My name clears hallways, and my presence silences conversations. Still, it does nothing to quiet the hum building in my chest.
Because I know the call is coming, and when my phone buzzes, it’s not some convenient accident of timing. It’s fate arriving exactly when it means to ruin me. I slide my finger across the screen and lift it to my ear without a word.
“Vincenzo.”
My father’s voice doesn’t need to rise; it never has. It cuts clean, deep, and without ornament. Like a scalpel in the hands of a man who never hesitates.
“I received a call from Mavre,” he says.
I keep walking. Past the glass-paneled conference room, past the black marble busts of our ancestors watching with hollow eyes. “I assumed you would.”
“One day,” he says, his tone flat. “One. You lasted less than twenty-four hours.”
I swallow the instinct to explain because I know he doesn’t want apologies. He doesn’t care about context. He only wants results.
“You were supposed to arrive and reaffirm our legacy,” he continues. “Instead, you’ve put it in question. A brand, Vincenzo. A fucking mark burned into your skin like a collar.”
I stop outside my quarters, fingers curling around the doorknob. This part of the East Wing is quiet since I chose the most isolated suite on purpose. Not for privacy, but so no one would hear me fall apart, if I ever did.
“I handled the situation,” I say quietly.
“No. You reacted. Dragged into chaos by a boy you were born to bury. Is that what you call handling it?”
He always knows where to strike. I lean my forehead against the door and close my eyes briefly. “He provoked me.”
“Then let him provoke you. Let him burn in his own fire. But don’t step into the flames with him and expect me to applaud you for surviving it. You don’t survive messes, Vincenzo. You erase them.”
My hand tightens on the brass. “He was assigned to me,” I say. “Deliberately. Someone wanted a reaction.”
“And they got one,” he snaps. “You gave it to them on a silver platter.”
I inhale, slow and deep. “I’ll correct it.”
“See that you do. Or someone else will.” The line goes dead before I can answer.
I drop my arm, letting the phone fall into my pocket. My fingers brush over the brand beneath my shirt sleeve, and the burn pulses in response. Not in pain, or even in shame.
In rage.
I enter my suite and shut the door behind me, locking it with a flick of my wrist. The lights emit a dim glow, and the glass of scotch I poured this morning before orientation remains on the table, untouched.
I should change or eat. I should do something that makes me look less like a cracked heir standing alone in a palace he no longer controls.
But all I can think about is him. The filthy-mouthed storm that walked into my life with blood on his sleeves and a smirk that made me forget every lesson I’d ever been taught.
I should’ve walked away. I should’ve laughed when he taunted me, turned my back, buried him under a wall of silence so thick he would’ve drowned in it.
I didn’t.
Something about him demands attention. Not just as a threat or even as an irritant. But as something I can’t name yet without betraying myself.
I go to the bathroom and roll up my sleeve, standing beneath the harsh white light.
The brand is red and blistered, the skin around it angry and raw.
Three daggers in a circle of thorns. My first mark.
A failure carved into flesh symbolizing a countdown.
Two more, and everything I’ve been raised for vanishes.
The crown. The inheritance. The seat at the table.
All for a fucking smirk.
I run cold water over it, jaw tight. The sting brings just enough clarity to start building the walls again. He won’t touch me next time. I won’t let him get under my skin again. Next time, I’ll be ready.
Not just for his mouth, but for the blade hiding behind his eyes.
My father wants finality. He wants silence and death, and I will give it to him. But not until I’ve figured out what the hell it is Nikolaj Dragovich wants. Because he isn’t reckless, he’s methodical. Every insult, every jab, every cocky grin and quiet threat—that was strategy.
He’s already chosen me as his target and his war. He thinks he knows what I’m made of. He wants to see me break. He wants me to burn everything just to get to him.
And maybe I want to let him try, but only so I can make sure that when he finally does get close enough to see the cracks, I can wrap my hands around his throat and teach him what breaking really looks like.
The problem isn’t that he’s everywhere, it’s that I notice him, and I don’t even fucking know why.
Every hallway. Every classroom. Every drill session where he moves like he was carved for war and never quite cared who he bled. Nikolaj Dragovich isn’t just present, he’s an orbit, and everyone in this goddamn academy seems more than willing to rotate around him.
I try not to look. I try not to care. But it doesn’t matter because my body is already trained to respond, and not in the way it’s supposed to. Not in the way my father would approve of.
Every glance in my direction, every laugh that lands too loud in a room full of heirs with hands built to kill, every smirk he tosses at me across the classroom like a dare—he knows. He knows, and that’s what makes it worse.
This week is a test I keep failing. Day after day, whether I sit through classes on tactical negotiation and organized collapse, strategic elimination, or psychological warfare, I feel him.
Not just behind me or beside me. But under my skin, in the back of my throat, woven into every breath like smoke from a fire I should’ve drowned the second it started.
On Wednesday, he comes in late and slides into the seat across from me like he’s being paid to test my patience. The instructor barely acknowledges it—no one disciplines the Bratva prince. Not really. Not when they’d rather avoid what happens when you make him angry.
He leans back in his chair, arms spread, and starts spinning his pen between his fingers with that same casual recklessness he applies to everything else in his life.
Then he looks at me.
No words. No gestures.
Just a look. As if he’s already planning how to say my name again when we’re alone and out of reach of the rules. Like he’s wondering what it’ll take to make me snap this time.
I keep my posture perfect, my jaw tight, and look through him.
It doesn’t help because the second the lesson ends, he’s up, out the door, and halfway down the hall with two boys at his side—one of them laughing, the other touching his arm, and Nikolaj lets him.
Lets him lean in close. Lets him smile up at him like they’re not in a school that turns heirs into weapons and secrets into gravemarkers.
I grit my teeth until my molars ache.
That would never fly in the Cosa Nostra. Not even in whispers, not in the dark, not with locks on the door and a promise of silence. A man like that, a man who entertains other men, wouldn’t be protected in my world; he’d be erased.
And yet, he walks these halls like he dares someone to try.
By Friday, I stop pretending I can focus in any space he’s occupying. I get up halfway through a lecture on interrogation strategy, push past a group of silent Bratva loyalists who don’t even try to stop me, and head straight to the training grounds.
If I don’t put something through a target soon, I’ll start carving answers out of people who don’t deserve it.
The weapons hall is mercifully empty when I arrive.
Long, narrow, stone-walled with rows of targets lined against the far end.
Pistols, throwing knives, crossbows. All for practice, all sanctioned.
I slide my gloves off slowly, letting the leather fall to the table beside me, then I pull my sleeves back and lift a pistol from the rack.
The grip feels familiar and solid. I chamber a round and lift it, but I don’t see the paper target; I see him.
That stupid smirk. The way he asked, “Did I touch a nerve, Prince?” like he wasn’t already carving one wide open. He found something in me, some old nerve that never healed, and latched onto it like a hook into soft flesh.
I squeeze the trigger once, and the gun kicks back, smooth and mechanical, but it doesn’t clear my head. Doesn’t quiet the ache of being outplayed by someone who walks around this place like he’s already written the ending and I’m just a pretty sentence he plans to underline.
He needs to learn I’m not something you highlight. I’m the goddamn author of this place.
I reload, fire again. Slower precision shots and clean hits. But it doesn’t satisfy me. It’s not enough to shoot a paper man in the chest when the real one is walking around upstairs, still smiling, still flirting, still untouched by the storm he started in me.
I know what I need.
I leave the weapons hall and head for the gym.
It’s after hours, but that doesn’t matter; some rules bend for names like ours.
I swipe my card, let the reinforced doors slide open, and walk into the echoing space of the combat ring.
Steel floors, reinforced walls, and padded mats in the center. The lights buzz low overhead.