Chapter 3
Salvatore
illicit affairs / Death By a Thousand Cuts – Taylor Swift
Itell myself it’s only physical, the same way men tell themselves a knife is harmless if they keep holding the handle.
I repeat it often enough that the lie starts to wear grooves into my head. It’s only sex. The only relief that bleeds off the pressure every six months when the Five Families meet.
It doesn’t touch politics outside the bed where he holds me down and takes what he wants. It doesn’t follow me home or change anything essential.
I can still sit at my father’s right hand and be proud of my name. I can still look a man in the eye and discuss shipments, marriages, punishments, or votes without thinking about the taste of a forbidden heir’s taste on my tongue.
It would be easier to keep believing that if it hasn’t already been going on since Vintermoor.
Two years of hotel rooms and safe houses, of summits and half-night disappearances. Of stolen cigarettes on balconies and bruises hidden under expensive shirts. Of pretending in daylight and unraveling by midnight.
Two years of telling myself I’m not in love with a man I should want to kill.
The car to the airstrip is due in twenty minutes, and my father is in his office taking a last call before we leave for the bi-annual summit.
I drift to the only place that feels like home in this cage—wherever my little sister is.
Lucia stands barefoot in the grass near the rose hedge with a book tucked against her chest, and sunlight catches in the dark ribbon tying back her hair.
She’s thirteen now, all long limbs, serious eyes, and the kind of beauty that hasn’t realized what danger it will invite in a family like ours.
She lifts her head the second she hears me, and smiles—and just like that, the whole fucking morning becomes easier.
She is the only light in my life.
Not in the dramatic way poets write in their bad little books because they’ve never seen real darkness and think sadness makes them profound.
I mean something simpler—she is the only person in this house whose presence doesn’t demand performance from me. The only one who doesn’t want my name, my usefulness, my obedience, or my future.
She wants stories, sweets, and for me to stop looking so tired. She is sunlight in a place built of stone and expectancy. She is softness untouched by our father’s hands; my only weakness and my only joy.
“You’re late, Salva,” she says as I cross the garden toward her.
“I’m not.”
“You are by my standards.”
I huff out a laugh despite myself. “Your standards are unrealistic.”
“They’re excellent. I am a Vieri, after all,” she says primly.
I stop in front of her and wipe the red frosting from her chin. “You sound more like me every time I leave.”
Lucia makes a face and wrinkles her nose. “Oh, that sounds awful.”
“It is,” I say. “You should stop while there is still hope.”
She grins, then fixes the lapel of my jacket even though it doesn’t need fixing. It’s an old habit of hers she picked up from our late mother.
“Will Pappa be angry this time?” she asks quietly.
I look at her for a moment before answering. There’s no point in lying to Lucia if I can avoid it. The whole house lies to her already, mostly in the name of protection.
“Probably,” I say.
She sighs. “He’s always so angry.”
“He is not always angry.”
“He is with people.”
That gets a real smile out of me, brief though it is. “That’s because most people are disappointing.”
“And are you disappointing?”
Her voice is careful around the question because we both know what she’s really asking. I rest my hand lightly on the top of her head, smoothing her hair back from her temple. “Not enough to matter.”
She doesn’t believe me; she never does when I answer her that way.
“Bring me something back,” she says, tipping her face up to mine with deliberate bravery. “Not jewelry. Something real, like a book from wherever you’re going, or those awful little spoons tourists buy.”
I raise my eyebrow. “You think I’ll buy you souvenir spoons?”
“I think you’d do it if I asked,” she says matter-of-factly, and the worst part is she’s right.
I bend down and kiss her forehead. “I’ll bring you something real, Tesoro.”
Lucia wraps her arms around my waist then, quick, fierce, and still young enough to do it without wondering if affection is dignified.
I hold her back just as tightly, and a second longer than I should. If anyone saw me like this, they’d call it softness, and they’d be right. But I don’t care.
“Come back safely, Salva,” she murmurs into my jacket.
The words land somewhere ugly in me because safe is not a promise we make in a family like ours. Safety is for people whose fathers aren’t kings of organized violence.
“I always do,” I lie gently.
The meeting lasts an entire week because men like our fathers don’t simply gather twice a year just to sit around polished tables and toast to legacy.
They gather to posture, threaten, purchase, weaken, and decide whose sons will marry, whose ports will stay open, and whose debts have grown inconvenient enough to require blood. The official schedule ends early. The real one never does.
I usually see Ruslan almost the moment I arrive and spend the next four hours pretending I don’t.
We’ve become good at ignoring each other in rooms where it matters. Better than good. We nod with the same formal politeness we offer other heirs, say the correct things when our fathers are listening, and let meetings carry on while an entire separate current runs hot and filthy under the table.
He knows how to look at me long enough to be insulting but not suspicious. I know how to answer with the exact degree of cool contempt expected from a Vieri.
The problem tonight isn’t that he looks at me too much. The problem is that he barely looks at me at all.
Dinner is held in one of the hotel’s private halls; all candlelight, crystal, and too much polished silver reflecting amber across tabletops.
Men talk business over pheasant and red wine, while wives and daughters float at the edges in silk and jewels, ornamental and observant all at once.
I’m seated halfway down the table, close enough to my father for appearances, and far enough that I can breathe between courses.
Across the room, Ruslan has a woman on his arm.
She’s beautiful in the polished way these women are trained to be. Pale blond hair swept up, diamonds at her ears, a dark green gown that clings to her body without looking vulgar.
Ruslan bends toward her, mouth curved in that lazy, dangerous half-smile he uses when he wants to look amused and harmless at the same time.
He says something in her ear, and she blushes, then he takes her hand and kisses the inside of her wrist like he’s fucking done with me countless times before.
I turn away and focus on the table before my father notices me staring, but across the room, Ruslan laughs again. It’s deliberate now—I know it in the way I know the rhythm of my own pulse. He’s performing, flirting with the kind of easy, vulgar confidence that turns heads.
The Dragovich heir is exactly what he should be—dangerous with men and insatiable with women.
I should approve. Instead, I feel murderously, humiliatingly livid.
By dessert, I’m barely hearing the conversation around me. Men are discussing shipping concessions and customs interference somewhere to my left. My father asks me for my opinion at one point, and I give him the right one without really thinking, because some parts of me perform on instinct now.
But when dinner finally ends, and the older generation moves to cigars, brandy, and whatever private threats need to be discussed before dawn, I make myself visible just long enough to avoid suspicion.
Then I slip out through the side corridor.
Past the music room, past the smoking lounge, and past the last cluster of laughing wives and bored heirs. I climb the narrow staircase to the private terrace outside my room above the west wing.
I step out and slam the door shut hard enough that the glass rattles in its frame. The night air hits me cold, but it doesn’t do a fucking thing to cool what’s clawing through me.
I light a cigarette with steady hands that should shake, which irritates me because I feel on the verge of breaking apart, yet my body remains composed.
Scowling, I brace my elbows on the balustrade and inhale deeply, letting the smoke burn and my chest ache, pretending the tightness is from nicotine, not him.
I need to end this.
That thought has been circling my mind for months. Every meeting gets worse. Every goodbye takes more out of me. Every time I see him again, another layer of whatever lie I’m hiding behind gets ripped off and tossed aside until there’s nothing left but the raw truth underneath it.
I’ve been in love with Ruslan for so long that I don’t even know when it stops being lust and starts being a terminal condition.
Maybe it’s always both. Maybe that’s why seeing him with someone else downstairs feels less like jealousy and more like having a knife driven in under my ribs and twisted slowly while I stand there smiling like a fucking fool.
I hate that I’m angry at all, because anger means I care, and caring means I’ve already lost more of myself than I can afford.
The terrace doors open behind me, but I don’t turn.
I know his footsteps too well by now. I know the rhythm of him the way I know my own pulse. Even in silence, I know when he’s near. That alone feels like a humiliation.
“They said you retired for the night,” Ruslan starts.
His voice rolls over me, familiar and infuriatingly calm, and rage flashes so hard through me that for a second I have to shut my eyes. I take another drag of my cigarette, hold the smoke until my lungs ache, then turn to face him with every sharp edge I have left.