Chapter 10 Ruslan #2
Two men lock my arms behind me. A third shoves me to my knees on the blood-slick floor.
Viktor roars and tries to reach me, and a shot hits the marble beside his boot.
Another man’s hand is on his shoulder then, forcing him back at gunpoint while my father, pale now but still upright through sheer hatred, spits blood onto the floor and curses every family in the room with enough poison to kill lesser men where they stand.
I look up at my lover and see the villa. Morning sunlight. His head in my lap. The way he laughs when I tell him I’m going to keep him there forever. The way he says his sister will paint. Every soft thing crashes through me at once and becomes unbearable.
“Ruslan,” he says.
I could spit in his face or curse him. I could tell him to go to hell, to choke on legacy, to enjoy the empire he’s choosing over me.
I force calm on myself instead. If he’s going to do this, he can do it looking at me.
“Do it, lyubimiy,” I whisper.
He flinches, so I know the words cut him. His free hand comes up once, as if by reflex, like he means to touch my face before the blade does.
“Forgive me,” he whispers in Russian before the dagger cuts across my left eye in a burst of white agony so bright it erases the room.
I don’t cry out. Fuck him if I do.
The mark of exile—public enough that everyone will know what the scar means if I survive it. The left eye opened with Vieri steel—banished, not killed, because that would be easier. Exiled because legacy prefers men to live long enough to feel their sentences.
I look through blood and blur and find Salvatore standing there with the dagger in his hand and horror all over his face now that the act is done.
Everything else keeps happening at once.
Viktor hauls me toward the side exit and nearly gets us both killed doing it.
Another round tears through his shoulder on the way, but he barely slows.
My father is half-conscious between us, but still trying to stand because dying on his knees in front of Italians would offend him more than death itself.
The car waiting outside is one of ours—thank fuck for that. We shove our father into the back seat, and Viktor gets in beside him. I collapse on the other side, half blind, hand still clamped over my eye, the world streaked in blood, and the taste of betrayal so sharp it feels chemical.
For a few minutes, no one speaks except to curse, then Mikhail laughs, but it’s a wet sound.
“Father,” Viktor says sharply, pressing harder at the chest wound. Mikhail’s hand catches his wrist with surprising strength. He looks past him at me, one eye already glazing, the other still viciously alive.
“A Vieri,” he rasps.
I can barely see him. My left side is red haze and pain, but my right gives me enough to understand the shape of his mouth.
“Yes,” I answer.
He laughs again, then coughs harder. “I should’ve killed him the first time I saw him looking at you, instead of making you pursue him.”
The sentence lands like another blade. I suppose some part of him has always known, and in dying, he chooses to say it aloud instead of taking that knowledge to the grave with any fucking dignity.
Viktor’s face goes white beneath the blood on it. “Save it.”
My father ignores him. His fingers tighten once more on my brother’s wrist, then slip. “Weakness,” he says, and I can’t tell whether he means me or himself or the whole damned story. Maybe all three.
He dies before we hit the city limits. No ceremony, just a body that stops being animated by will and becomes weight in the back seat of a moving car while his blood dries on my hands and his last coherent thought is still of a Vieri.
We don’t stop moving, and by dawn, the news has already moved faster than we do. The Dragovichs are named expansionist traitors. The violence at the council is framed as our response to exposure, not the engineered slaughter it actually is.
Accounts freeze. Doors close. Neutral allies stop answering calls. Men who swore loyalty two days ago vanish into safer houses under safer names.
Exile doesn’t always arrive with a formal declaration. Sometimes it comes in the shape of every road home being shut by morning.
And all of it traces back to a folder in a safe and the man I let into my house.
Two days later, I go to meet Salvatore in an abandoned shipping yard in Moscow. Even after all of it, even after the eye, the blood, my father dying in the car, and the entire line being pushed out of the Five Families with a cut over my face to prove it, I still go when his message comes.
That’s the final humiliation.
The yard sits at the edge of the water, where the city begins to give way to industrial rot.
Rusted containers stacked three high. Puddles of oil-black rainwater reflecting broken security lights.
The smell of salt and diesel and old iron.
A place where things get abandoned on purpose because everyone who matters agrees not to ask what disappears there.
He’s already waiting when I arrive. No guards that I can see, though I assume there are some far enough away to let us pretend we’re alone.
Salvatore stands beneath a broken stone awning with rain darkening the shoulders of his coat.
He looks exactly like what he is: a king’s son who’s just bought his inheritance with the man he loves.
Shattered in all the places his tailoring can’t hide.
The scar over my left eye is still raw beneath the dressing, throbbing with every heartbeat. I can feel it pulling when I look at him. The bandage beneath it is already wet again, but I don’t care. Pain feels honest, and honesty is in short supply between us now.
I stop several feet away from him, letting the silence build until it turns ugly enough to stand in. “You found the safe.”
He closes his eyes for a breath, then opens them. “Yes.”
The word goes through me cleaner than any bullet. Hearing it from him kills the last little lie still trying to survive in me.
I look at him and see it all at once now, every piece fitting so neatly I almost choke on it. His face when I came home that final night, and how he said I trust too easily when I love. The way he clings to me like grief before a death.
“For your father,” I say.
His eyes meet mine then, dark and exhausted and full of everything that should’ve made me stay away from him from the beginning.
“I chose my family.”
I stare at him and feel something in me split with perfect, silent precision. “All of this, and you still have the nerve to call that a choice.”
His face then changes, breaking—not cleanly. Salvatore never breaks cleanly, but this is enough. “My father was going to give Lucia to Giacomo Moretti. I had to give him your bloodline or lose my sister.”
The yard goes silent except for water slapping dully against the pilings. And because I’m still enough of a fool to love him, I understand—not forgive, never that. But I understand enough to make the devastation even more complete.
Of course, there’s another hostage. Of course, his father puts a girl on the scales and tells his son to choose which blood lives. Fathers like ours don’t force loyalty cleanly. They braid it into the people we can’t bear to lose and call it duty.
I almost wish he’d said legacy alone. It would’ve been easier to hate him. Instead, I get the truth, and it’s filthier.
“She was thirteen.”
For a brief, impossible moment, I feel confused. Then, the meaning of the sentence sinks in—she was. My entire body stiffens.
“Salvat—”
“Moretti didn’t wait. While I was with you, he decided he didn’t need the contract signed to take what my father had already promised.”
Salvatore’s eyes close briefly. When he opens them again, there’s nothing in them but wreckage.
“She threw herself from the north balcony. My father didn’t even have the decency to tell me when I went to see him that night in Kolomna. I did it all for nothing, and he knew it.”
I look at him standing there in the wind—my traitor, my love—and know that if the story ended there, I might’ve still hated him in a simpler way. Might’ve gone into exile with rage clean enough to keep me warm.
He chooses bloodline over me, yes.
But the bloodline eats his sister, anyway.
“You should have told me,” I say, and the devastation in my voice sounds almost childish to my own ears.
Tears well in his eyes, but he doesn’t let them fall. “I know,” he whispers.
My chest caves in around the words. “I could have gotten her out.”
He nods once, and that somehow hurts more than anything. “I know.”
“I would have.” My own voice sounds wrong to me now, rough and unsteady and too fucking late. “I would have taken her anywhere. I would have—”
“I know,” he says again, and each repetition slices deeper than the last because there’s no defense in it, no excuse, no lie big enough to hide behind. Just that ruined, useless truth.
He knows. He knows exactly what I’m saying. He knows I would have done it. He knows I would have torn up cities, names, and bloodlines to get her away from his own father. He knows, and it changes absolutely nothing.
“That’s our whole fucking legacy, isn’t it?” I say, and now there’s nothing in my voice but bitterness and blood. “Dress the knife up as duty. Call the loss necessary. Tell ourselves it meant something when all it ever does is leave bodies behind.”
He looks shattered. He looks like every choice he makes has cut him open, too, and that doesn’t save him. It just makes the knife harder to bear.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
A laugh tears out of me, sharp and ugly and half a wound all by itself.
“Don’t,” I say, stepping closer until there’s almost no space left between us, and every instinct in my body is screaming to either touch him or kill him, and I don’t know which one would hurt less.
“You don’t get to stand there after all this and give me sorry, Salvatore. ”