Chapter 7 Salvatore
Salvatore
Take Aim – Sleep Token
Ruslan is asleep for exactly eleven minutes before I start thinking about killing him.
That’s the kind of sentence that should belong to another man. Someone colder or simpler. Not someone lying half-naked in the bed of the only person who has ever made me feel understood and hunted in equal measure. But I’ve learned by now that nothing in my life gets to be simple.
Every time I close my eyes, I see Lucia’s face.
Not how she was before I left for the summit, but how she looked when I got home after my father pulled me into that meeting and gave me an ultimatum.
I see the badly hidden bruises on her face. I see the haunted look in her brown eyes and how she tried to smile, but winced at the split in her lip.
So, no, my father didn’t touch me. He had an example made out of the one person I would gladly die for.
And therein lies the lesson. He knew I would understand it better if the pain landed somewhere I couldn’t dismiss. Men like him know exactly where to press.
You can survive a blow to your own ribs and call it discipline while filing it under the usual cost of being a son. But watching your little sister trying to hold herself upright because of your sins?
If I ever have children, I will make sure they don’t end up as each other’s weaknesses. They won’t even love me—that is my fucking vow.
I should leave.
That thought has been circling me all night, useless as a prayer. I should leave this bed, this apartment, this fucking city, and this man.
Instead, I’m lying here watching the man I love sleep, while my father’s ultimatum sits in my chest like a second heartbeat.
My father stands behind the conference desk, evidence of my ruin laid out before him, while I can do nothing but stare.
Then he looks up at me, but there’s nothing in his gaze—no fury, no disgust, and no shouted accusation. That would have been easier.
“Interesting,” he says in the same tone he might use to comment on the weather.
I keep my face still. “Father—”
I shut up when he glances back down at the photographs and adjusts the edge of one with a gloved finger, making it line up precisely with the rest. That, more than anything, unsteadies me—the casualness of it.
“I’ve been noticing details slipping out of Vieri orbit,” he says. “Small things at first—route changes repeated too quickly, discussions reappearing in rooms where they should never have reached. Timings adjusted before the proper men are informed.”
He doesn’t look at me while he speaks; he looks down at the photographs.
“Someone inside the Five Families’ structure is leaking,” he continues. “That in itself isn’t remarkable, as most structures leak eventually. What interests me is the nature of the information.”
At last, he raises his eyes to mine. “It’s yours.”
I say nothing again, because what answer would I have? Denial would be insulting us both, and confession would be suicide.
“The compromised details originate in conversations and files only available to my heir and me,” he says, tilting his head. “Meaning either I am losing my edge, or you are losing your discipline.”
“I haven’t given anyone anything.”
It’s the truth…sort of. Not directly. Not with an intention clean enough to state that way. I have not sat across from Ruslan and handed him ledgers like a lovesick idiot.
But intimacy is its own kind of theft. Careless words spoken after midnight when I’m angry and tired. Men don’t need full documents when they know where to look. Sometimes all it takes is one detail and enough intelligence to build the rest.
My father’s expression doesn’t change. “No?”
“No.”
“And yet details known only to you continue to bleed outward.”
His gloves creak softly when he holds his hands in front of him. “Do you know what weakness actually is, Salvatore?” he asks.
I keep my jaw locked. “No, sir.”
“It isn’t desire—desire is common. Men are animals, so that has never been a problem.” His gaze flicks once toward the photographs, then back to me. “Weakness is allowing desire to alter judgment. Weakness is when a private appetite starts costing the family publicly.”
I absorb that without blinking because he expects me to. Because men like my father don’t want flinching sons, they want sons who can be carved open and remain standing through the process.
“I should kill you for this.”
I don’t move or say a word—he knows I won’t. That’s part of why he says it this way. To remind me that my life belongs more to the line than to me, and that he could choose to end it if the line demanded it.
“But your death would solve the wrong problem,” he says nonchalantly. “A dead heir is messy, but a compromised one can still be useful.”
There’s the real knife.
My mouth goes dry. “What do you want me to do?”
A faint smile touches his mouth, and it’s the smile of a man hearing the only question that matters asked at last.
“I want the Dragovichs cut out at the root. The leak doesn’t begin and end with you.
You’re just the access point,” he states.
“Mikhail is expanding too confidently and too quickly with information he shouldn’t have.
That means one of two things: either he’s smarter than I’ve given him credit for, or my son has been fucking himself into becoming a liability. ”
Heat flares up the back of my neck, but not from shame, exactly—from helpless fury. Part of me wants to lunge across the desk and throw the photographs of us in the fire. The other part wants to deny that Ruslan had anything to do with this.
“I can fix it, Father,” I say.
He raises a brow. “Can you?”
“Yes.”
The answer comes too fast and too eagerly; we both know it. My father studies me for a long time before he nods. Then he says, “Good.”
And from that single word, I know whatever comes next will be worse than anger.
He walks around the desk and stops near the sideboard, where he pours himself a finger of whiskey but leaves it untouched. The implication is clear: he has all the time in the world because he owns enough of mine.
“I have no interest in killing you for embarrassing yourself with a man,” he says. “The world is full of stupid sons; they come and go. What I am interested in, is strategic correction.”
The room goes quieter somehow. Even the fire seems to go still.
“What kind of correction?”
He sets the glass down. “You will bring me information that will destroy the Dragovich family. Not gossip or scraps. I want structure, routes, proof that son of a bitch has been overstepping and undermining us. I want enough to kill them politically if I so choose, and physically if I need to.”
I stare at him—there it is. The real price. Not apology, contrition, or even distance. Use the man you love as a knife that opens the neck to his own bloodline and call it redemption.
My father takes another step closer to me, and I can smell the whiskey on him. “You will do this cleanly and without attracting attention. You have my permission to go to him at any time if that is what is needed. If you succeed, we will consider this lapse contained.”
Contained. As if what happens between Ruslan and me is some infection to be managed.
“And if I don’t?” I ask carefully, knowing there must be a catch.
“Then Lucia marries Giacomo Moretti.”
The room drops out from under me. I don’t think my face changes—years of training saved me that much—but inside, something in me splinters.
Not Lucia… Not Giacomo. Anything but that!
She’s only thirteen with paint on her fingers and books under her pillow.
She still has sunlight in her hair and hope in her eyes, and thinks I can bring her small pieces of my world when I travel.
She still asks for sweets with her chin lifted and believes there’s a version of her future where she belongs to herself.
Giacomo Moretti has three dead wives and a penchant for crushing flowers before they bloom. Giacomo smiles well, sends flowers to funerals, kisses hands, and makes deals my father always approves of.
Giacomo also leaves bruises where dresses cover them, and likes his women frightened enough to confuse obedience with affection.
My father knows all of that. He knows because he allows men like Giacomo near our table precisely because their kind of evil is useful.
“She’s a child,” I say, though my voice sounds distant even to me. “Not to him, Father—”
“No?” he tilts his head. “Then to whom would you prefer she be given?”
The question is a trap, and we both know it. There is no one I would prefer because preference has never been the point. Women in our world are transferred, not chosen. Even Lucia—my bright, impossible Lucia—is only exempt now because she’s useful later.
“Not him,” I repeat.
My father lets the silence answer for him at first, then he sighs. “Bring me what I want, and you won’t have to watch it happen.”
That is the ultimatum. Just a father offering his only son a choice between betraying the man he loves and sacrificing the only innocent thing left in his life.
My stomach turns so violently that I have to lock my knees to keep still.
He picks up a photograph of Ruslan pinning me against a terrace wall. “You see the problem,” he says.
I look at him then, and think, ‘No, father, I see you. I see that you know exactly where to put the blade and still act as though the wound happened naturally.’
“You’d sell your only daughter to a butcher to test your son?”
His mouth flattens. “I’d secure my legacy by whatever means the moment demands.”
I hate him more than anything then. Not the boyish, temporary way children hate hard fathers when they’re denied something.
I mean pure hatred. I hate him with the clarity of a grown man seeing the architecture of another man’s soul and understanding exactly how little tenderness was ever meant to survive there.
So I nod.
That was three days ago.
Now, Ruslan sleeps with all the softness on his face that the world doesn’t get to see. While I lie here with my father’s ultimatum wrapped around my throat so tightly, I can hardly draw a full breath without feeling it cut.
I should wake him—that thought comes and goes. Wake him up and throw the truth between us while it’s still hot enough to deserve honesty.
Maybe he’ll tell me he understands, because if he has been spying on me, I know it must be because his father gave him that command.
Maybe he’ll tell me to be selfish and take Lucia and run.
Maybe he’ll pull me into his arms and tell me we’ll find another way.
Maybe he’ll do something dangerous and offer himself up in some half-sacrificial gesture that would only make things worse.
I don’t wake him. If I wake him, I have to hear his voice as I tell him the shape of the thing I may become. And some selfish, cowardly part of me wants one more hour where I can look at him like this.
Mine, in no legal sense, but every secret one. My man, my heart, my love.
My downfall.
“Cuore mio,” I whisper.
Ruslan stirs but doesn’t wake. I reach out before I can stop myself, and move the hair off of his forehead. He still doesn’t wake; if anything, he leans subtly into the touch, still deep under.
I shift onto my back and stare up at the ceiling for a while, images of Lucia flash in my mind. Lucia, laughing when I tell her she sounds exactly like me. Lucia, who still thinks I can fix things because I’m her brother.
If I fail, a monster gets her.
I turn my head and look at Ruslan again. His mouth parts slightly on an exhale. There’s a bruise low on his throat where I put my mouth a few hours ago, and seeing it now feels almost sacramental.
My mark on my weakness. My proof that for a handful of hours, he was simply mine.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, so quietly that even I barely hear it.
I know the shape of my choice without speaking it aloud, and understand that whatever happens next, will not begin with hatred. It will begin here.
With love, with fear. With my sister’s future held over my head like a blade, and with me lying beside a man I love, knowing I’m about to put a dagger in him.
I do not move.
I do not sleep.
I only lie there, staring at the first gray light touching Ruslan’s face, and wait for the morning to finish making a traitor out of me.