Chapter 5 Salvatore #2
Maybe because it reframes everything. I’ve spent two years seeing his arrogance and mistaking some part of it for freedom.
Now I understand that he’s performing too.
Different costume, same role. And under it, there’s the same problem I’ve got: a son shaped toward a throne with no right to ask whether he wants it.
My lover is being groomed into a king, and I’m the only man alive who’s ever made that king come apart with my mouth alone.
By the time the evening begins to dissolve for real, the guests have split into predictable patterns. The older men retreat to private studies, libraries, and rooms with soundproof doors where actual business gets done.
The younger ones drift outward, some toward cards, some toward bars, some toward beds they have no business climbing into.
My father remains in conversation longer than most, which means he’s either winning or setting a trap for later. I’ve inherited enough from him to usually know the difference. Tonight I’m too distracted to care.
Ruslan catches me in the corridor outside the winter garden.
Not with a dramatic gesture. Not even with words at first. He just appears at the edge of the lamplight, stepping out from a side hall as if he’s always been there waiting, and the house itself has been keeping his place warm.
His jacket is back on. His expression is unreadable until his gaze lands on me properly.
“Well,” he says, voice low. “That was educational.”
“Is this the part where you pretend your family isn’t insane?”
A short, humorless laugh leaves him. “Depends. Is this the part where you pretend yours isn’t just quieter about it?”
“Touché.”
He watches me for a second longer than comfort allows. “You’re looking at me differently.”
The fact that he notices makes irritation flare through me, quick and defensive. “You flatter yourself.”
“Maybe.” His mouth curves slightly, but there’s no real mockery in it. “Still true.”
I should lie, instead I say, “I didn’t realize how it worked.”
He narrows his eyes at that. “What?”
“Your family.”
Something in his face stills. “That’s vague.”
“I’m being polite.”
“Don’t bother. I’m not.”
I glance up at the hotel, then back to him. No one close enough to matter. Good. “The eldest protects. The youngest inherits.”
His expression doesn’t change. That alone tells me enough.
“So you hear things,” he says.
“I pay attention.”
“Dangerous habit.”
“I could say the same about you.”
He leans one shoulder against the wall, studying me with that same infernal focus he uses when he’s trying to decide whether to fuck me, fight me, or take apart something I’ve said. “And what’d you conclude, Vieri?”
That I understand you more now. That I want to touch every bruise your father leaves where nobody can see. That I should run in the opposite direction because a man being made into a weapon is no safer than a loaded gun, just because he kisses well.
What I say instead is, “That you’re not as untouchable as you act.”
His gaze sharpens. “Nobody’s untouchable.”
“No,” I say. “But some people work very hard to look it.”
A quiet beat passes between us, then Ruslan laughs softly, and there’s nothing pleasant in it. “You think figuring out my father owns a leash means you understand me now?”
“I think,” I say carefully, “that maybe I understand enough to know the arrogance isn’t the whole picture.”
His jaw flexes once. “You shouldn’t want anything to do with the whole picture.”
I hold his gaze anyway. “And yet.”
“And yet,” he echoes.
The garden is dim and too narrow and suddenly charged with the kind of tension that has very little to do with sex and everything to do with recognition. That’s somehow worse.
His mouth twists faintly. “You really should get better instincts where I’m concerned.”
“I’d say the same to you.”
“Mine are fine.” He takes a step toward me. “I’m just ignoring them.”
That almost makes me smile, because if there’s one thing about Ruslan I’ve never had to doubt, it’s his willingness to walk directly into the worst possible decision if it interests him enough.
He stops close enough now that if either of us leaned wrong, this would stop being a conversation and become another problem we’ll both pretend isn’t one.
“You look different, too,” he says.
I lift a brow. “Should I be offended?”
“Depends on how attached you are to the polished little prince act.”
My smile is brief and cold. “You’re in a dangerous mood tonight.”
“Maybe I’m always in one.”
“That much is obvious.”
His gaze drags over my face, slower than it should. “No. I mean with you.”
There’s a warning in that. I hear it. Ignore it anyway.
“Should I be flattered?”
His gaze flicks down to my mouth, then he smirks. “You should be fucking worried.”
I don’t answer, because if I do, it’ll come out sounding too much like a confession.
He leans in just enough that anyone turning the corner at the wrong moment would understand exactly what this is. Not the affair itself, maybe, but enough of its shape. Enough to start asking the kind of questions that ruin men.
“You seeing how my family works should’ve made you smarter.”
“Maybe I’m tired of being smart.”
The second the words leave my mouth, I want them back.
Something dark and hungry passes through his face. “That right?”
I don’t trust myself to answer that one at all.
Before he can say anything else, one of my guards appears at the end of the corridor and stops, head lowered.
“Mr. Vieri.”
That tone alone is enough to cool the blood in my veins.
Ruslan straightens at once, not far, just enough. His face empties. Not the disappearance of feeling, but the locking away of it. I know the move because I do it too.
“What?” I say.
The guard keeps his gaze respectfully lowered. “Your father wants to see you in the smaller conference room.”
I step back from Ruslan, smoothing one hand over my jacket as though I haven’t just been standing too close to the one man in this hotel my father would most like to see me nowhere near.
The guard nods once and waits; that tells me this isn’t a request. He’s under orders not to leave until I move.
When I glance back at Ruslan, his eyes are on the messenger, then on me, and the ease has goes of him entirely.
“Seems you’re wanted,” he says. The words are light, his face isn’t. I know why he looks that way: he’s leaving tonight, and that means another six months of waiting.
Another six months of pining.
I say nothing. There is nothing to say that wouldn’t sound strange in front of the guard, and we both know it.
But Ruslan leans forward and whispers, “See you in six months, lyubimiy,” before walking off.
I follow the guard down two corridors, through a narrower hall lined with portraits and heavy drapes, and toward the private study the hotel uses for high-level guests who need quiet rooms and thicker walls.
The walk doesn’t take long. It feels endless anyway. Something under my skin has gone taut, some instinct older than sense pulling tight the closer I get.
The conference room door stands half open when we arrive.
The guard knocks once, then steps aside.
I don’t know what I expect when I walk in. A lecture, maybe. Another task. A correction about something I say at dinner or failed to say at the right moment. My father doesn’t summon me after midnight for trivialities. Whatever it is, it matters.
The room is warm and dim, lit by the desk lamp and the fire. My father stands behind the large table with his back half-turned, one gloved hand resting on the polished wood. He does not look up when I enter.
I take two steps inside before I see what’s spread across the table.
Photographs.
Black and white. Grainy. Intimate in the most brutal possible way.
Ruslan and I standing too close in a corridor.
My hand is caught in the lapel of his coat.
His mouth at my neck on a terrace half-hidden by shadow and still unmistakable.
Another outside a hotel entrance in Prague, his hand at the small of my back.
Another, worse than all the rest, the angle caught through a barely open door, his body pressed to mine, my face turned up toward his.
Every drop of blood in me goes cold, and I stop breathing.
My father still hasn’t said a word, but he doesn’t need to. The silence in the room is no longer pressure—it’s judgment.
And standing there in front of his desk, staring at the physical proof of my ruin laid out in neat, merciless rows, I understand with perfect clarity that whatever shape my life had before this moment, it has just been split clean in two.
My father finally lifts his eyes to mine.
He says nothing.