Chapter 21
Vincenzo
I notice it before I admit it.
Nikolaj stops looking at me.
He doesn’t prowl around corners anymore, doesn’t linger in the shadows like he’s waiting to pounce and to sink his teeth into something soft beneath my surface.
His smirks vanish, his cocky remarks die before they’re spoken.
The casual brushes in the hall, the purposeful delays in the gym, the maddening stares during lecture—all of it disappears like it never existed.
He’s cold now, colder than I’ve ever seen him, and Dragovich blood runs in ice. He doesn’t feel like an heir anymore; he feels like a ghost. Something sharpened and silenced. Something lethal in how still it’s become.
It should’ve made me feel relieved. I told myself from the beginning that what he made me feel was a liability I couldn’t afford.
That he was a distraction. That if I wanted to wear the crown and not die with it, I needed to break whatever twisted pull there was between us.
I should be grateful that he’s finally done it for me.
But instead, it pisses me off.
It starts as a low simmer. A twitch of my jaw when I spot him in the ring, not even sparring with the same ruthlessness.
He trains like a machine, not a man. There’s no heat in his eyes anymore, no challenge when he sees me watching him from across the floor.
He glances at me, maybe once—and even then, it’s not a glare, it’s worse.
It’s nothing.
I grip the edge of the bench until my knuckles crack.
It deteriorates further during simulation week.
We’re put in the same group, probably on purpose, in some sick joke from the instructors who know how close we came to killing each other last time.
I wait for the insult. Wait for the teeth.
Wait for anything that shows he still wants to rip my spine out through my throat. But it never comes.
I give an order, and he follows it. I make a joke, and he doesn’t react.
He stands behind me as we clear the last checkpoint, and I feel the phantom itch at the back of my neck. From the expectation that he’ll lean in, that he’ll whisper something filthy or venomous—or both. That he’ll remind me how much he still wants to wreck me.
But there’s nothing.
Just that cold, glacial void that fucking haunts me.