Chapter 10 Ruslan
Ruslan
We leave in a three-car convoy that feels too much like a funeral procession and not enough like one, because funerals at least have the decency to admit what they are.
The summons came at dawn and tasted wrong before I even broke the seal.
Emergency summit. Immediate attendance. Full family representation required.
Those meetings don’t happen unless somebody’s already decided blood is an acceptable cost.
The summit hall is in Milan this time, one of the restored family buildings. Marble steps, bronze doors, and security at every entrance. The sort of place men pretend is neutral because the floors are expensive enough to absorb blood without staining.
I feel it the second we walk in.
The air isn’t merely tense. It’s arranged.
Guards are positioned slightly differently than usual.
Too many men from Conti’s side are near the eastern wall.
Two unfamiliar Americans in dark suits are standing with the Moretti Capo, rather than by the back doors, where outside observers are usually parked.
Marchetti is avoiding our eyes entirely, which means he’s been bought or threatened and still hasn’t decided which is more humiliating.
Barone looking overeager, as if he’s been given advance knowledge and mistaken it for importance.
The room is full before we take our seats, but it still feels as though everyone’s waiting for the actual performance to start.
And then I see Salvatore.
He won’t meet my eyes immediately. That, by itself, wouldn’t mean anything to another man. We’ve survived too many years of rooms like this to be careless with our eyes.
But I know every shade of his refusal. I know when he’s being careful, when he’s being proud, when he’s punishing me, when he’s wounded, when he’s simply tired.
This is none of those. This is a stillness so tightly held it looks borrowed. His face is perfect—too perfect. His mouth is set in that fine, hard line he wears when the inside of him is a fucking war zone, and he’s determined nobody gets to hear the artillery.
And suddenly I’m back in the villa.
I’m back to him in my shirt in the kitchen.
Him on the terrace saying Lucia comes first. Him in my bed that last night, colder than usual, eyes too dark, mouth giving me every answer except the one that matters.
Him saying nothing while I hold him. His warning me without warning me, telling me I trust too easily when I love someone.
Me kissing him instead of dragging the truth out by force because I love him enough to mistake restraint for mercy.
My father speaks first. “This urgency was not in the original schedule.”
His tone is calm, almost bored. That’s his way. He likes the room to understand that inconvenience alone is never enough to unsettle him. Men like my father and men like Aldo Vieri differ in style, not in appetite. They both know how much force lives inside ease.
Aldo folds his gloved hands on the table. “Certain developments don’t tolerate delay.”
“Developments,” my father repeats. “Interesting word. Usually, men choose it when they’re not yet brave enough to say accusations.”
Around the table, I feel everyone else lean inward without moving at all.
Aldo’s mouth curves faintly. “Then let’s use the proper word. The Dragovich family has overreached.”
A murmur shifts through the room. Theater, exactly as expected. But even now, part of me is still hoping this can be fought in the old way. Denials. Counters. Exposure of whoever they’ve bought to prop up their case. The usual dance.
Then the pictures appear.
“This emergency session has been convened in response to escalating destabilization within the Five Families’ eastern structures and mounting evidence that your family is no longer interested in alliance, only absorption.”
Aldo lays it on the table with one gloved hand and slides copies outward to Marchetti, Conti, Barone, and the Americans. Another set goes to the legal advisers at the back.
My stomach drops clean through me when I notice the papers in those pictures. But my father doesn’t move. “You’ve called us here to read.”
“No,” Aldo says. “I’ve called you here so the room understands what it has tolerated.”
The pictures begin moving. Men turn pages, eyes sharpen, names start to hit faces. Trieste. Bari. Shell companies. Intermediaries. Quiet alliances I know too well because I’ve watched them being built in real time.
The pictures aren’t of everything incriminating that I left in the safe in Kolomna, but it’s enough—more than enough.
Enough to map expansion routes, off-book funding, back-channel pressure, and the beginnings of a coordinated effort to erode Italian dominance over eastern access and replace it with Dragovich influence.
Enough to make our strategy look like an invasion. Enough to make Mikhail look not ambitious, but actively destabilizing. And threaded through all of it, invisible to anyone but me, is the shape of the villa study. The trust I handed my lover like a fool.
Mikhail reaches for the images at last, skims three pages, then four. His expression doesn’t change; that’s what makes it worse. If he raged, the room might’ve smelled weakness. Instead, he goes colder.
“This is fabricated,” he says. “You confuse expansion with overreach because you’re old enough to resent any growth you didn’t authorize.”
Aldo tilts his head. “Is it?”
Viktor is already on his feet before my father can speak. “You bring us to a public table with forged papers and call it evidence.”
“Sit down,” Conti snaps.
“Fuck you,” Viktor says pleasantly.
There’s the first crack.
One of the Americans at the back says, “The routing signatures are verified.”
Another says, “And the bank trail matches.”
Mikhail’s gaze slices across the room. “By whom?”
“By people you’re not paying,” Aldo says.
Don Barone shifts slightly in his chair.
Conti looks down at the papers in front of him with too much attention.
Marchetti’s heir avoids looking anywhere near our side.
They know. Every bastard in this room already knows what this is.
We’re not here to argue; we’re here to witness the performance of justification before punishment starts.
I look across the table, and Salvatore finally raises his eyes to mine.
There’s no denial on his face. Only devastation held so rigidly inside the frame of his father’s son that it almost becomes invisible. If I didn’t know him, I’d miss it. But I do know him, and what I see there is worse than guilt.
I see that he has already lived this moment a hundred times in his head, and found no version in which he survives it whole.
My father rises slowly. “If you intend to frame my family as expansionist threats to preserve your own decaying hold on the eastern routes, at least have the courage to call it politics instead of justice.”
Aldo says nothing—that silence is the signal.
I don’t see who shoots first.
One second, the room is full of men standing behind their chairs, and the next, the first gunshot cracks through the hall hard enough to rattle the chandeliers. Then another. Then a third. The entire room erupts into movement so fast, training takes over before thought can.
I move on instinct.
Gun out—two shots toward the balcony. Viktor lunges across the table, flipping it half sideways as cover while my father reaches for his own weapon with the kind of cold fury that turns whole rooms stupid.
Men are shouting in Italian, Russian, and Greek.
One of Conti’s guards goes down. Barone is dragged under cover by his son.
Somewhere behind all of it, someone keeps yelling that this is Dragovich escalation, Dragovich retaliation, Dragovich proof, as if naming a thing quickly enough turns chaos into evidence.
That’s when I understand the real shape of the trap.
They don’t just want us cornered politically; they want violence ugly enough to justify the decision publicly.
They want this to look exactly what Aldo calls it: a dangerous bloodline unable to exist inside a civilized structure without turning the room into a battlefield.
“They fucking planned this,” Viktor snarls.
My father’s trying to breathe around a chest wound no one walks away from in rooms like these, not with medics still outside and bullets still flying. “Go!” he snarls at me.
I don’t, because if Mikhail Dragovich goes down here and I leave him, the room rewrites the whole story before his blood cools. Because part of me is still too much his son to survive obedience when it looks like abandonment.
He looks at me, and whatever is in his face then strips every remaining illusion from the room. “Go, Ruslan!”
I ignore him and grab him under one arm, while Viktor is on the other side, and for three seconds it looks as if sheer force might drag us toward the side exit.
The first grab for me comes from behind. I drive the butt of my gun into a face, hear bone go soft, twist free, and fire once more before the magazine clicks empty. Somebody takes the weapon from my hand in the same motion, and another man hooks an arm around my throat.
I slam him backward into the edge of the table hard enough to break his grip, but there are too many now, my father is bleeding too much, and Viktor is half-holding his side while still trying to cut through three men at once.
Across the room, Aldo says something I can’t hear, then I see Salvatore move toward me with a dagger in his hand.
At first, my mind refuses to understand it. There are too many immediate threats, too much blood, too much noise. But he comes through the chaos with that terrible controlled calm of his, eyes locked on mine now, and I know before he reaches me that this is the part they build for spectacle.
Exile has to be marked, not just decided.
Marked.
It requires the room to see what happens when a line is broken and an entire family is cast out.