Chapter 10 Ruslan #3
He lifts his gaze to mine. There are no defenses left in it. No polish or Vieri discipline. Just grief and guilt and the raw, impossible shape of a man who knows exactly what he’s become.
“What do you want me to say?”
I stare at him, and my chest hurts so badly it feels structural, like something inside me is actually giving way.
“You look at me,” I say, and my voice has gone so quiet it scares me more than shouting would, “and tell me why you still came back to my house.”
I watch the memory move through his face, and I hate myself for asking because I already know it’s going to hurt, but I ask anyway. Of course I do. I’ve always gone for the wound when I know exactly where it is.
His voice breaks on the reply. “I needed one last night where I wasn’t losing you already. One last night to remember you still loved me.”
That lands clean and fatal. It means everything I fear. The grief in him that night was real, and the softness wasn’t performance. It means he loved me enough to drown in me one last time before he put the knife in.
That’s worse than if he’d never loved me at all.
“You should’ve let me hate you cleanly. You should’ve let me walk away from this with something simple.
But you didn’t. Why?” My voice cracks, and I hate that he hears it.
“Why make this harder than it already is, Salvatore? Why make me love a ghost of you at the exact same time I’m supposed to bury the man? !”
His face crumples enough to let me see the boy under the heir, the son under the Vieri, the wreckage under the posture. The human thing he’s spent his whole life being punished for every time it dares to show.
“Because I loved you,” he says.
Past tense.
That hurts in an entirely new place.
I nod because I can’t trust myself with anything larger than that. If I move too much, I’m going to fucking fold. “And now?”
“Now I don’t know what to call what’s left.”
I do.
Poison.
Inheritance.
“You picked them,” I say quietly. “You picked your bloodline after I told you I would kill my father for you.”
His eyes close like I’ve struck him. “I know.”
That’s it. That’s the whole sickness of us. Love and betrayal braided so tightly that there’s no way to separate them without tearing flesh off with the rope.
I reach up before I can stop myself and touch the bandage over my eye.
His mark.
His sentence.
Our ending written right into my face.
He watches my hand and looks like he might stop breathing altogether. There’s horror in him. Horror and grief and that useless love still burning under all of it, and I hate him for making me see it.
“You should’ve killed me,” I say. “Instead, you leave me alive with your father’s politics carved into my skin and your love still sitting inside my chest like a fucking splinter.
And that’s the cruelest thing, isn’t it?
We don’t even get to die for this. We just get to live long enough to watch what it turns into. ”
I think of sons not born yet. Of boys with our faces and our fathers’ tempers. Of future heirs raised under the same poisoned stars, carrying this war in their blood before they can ever choose anything for themselves.
Then I lower my hand from the bandage and look at him properly one last time.
“I’ll never forgive you,” I say.
The words ring between us, and for a second, I think that’s enough, that maybe that can be the clean edge, the border, the thing that lets me walk away with something intact.
Then the truth comes anyway, because love’s always been the ugliest part of me where he’s concerned, and I’m too ruined now to dress it up as anything else.
“But I’ll love you until I die.”
That one lands so hard, I see him physically absorb it, shoulders pulling tighter as if the words themselves hurt.
He takes a step toward me, hand reaching out. “Ruslan—”
“No.” I step back before he can say anything else. “That’s all you get. That’s all that’s left of me.”
The rain is getting heavier now. It runs off the awning in thin cold sheets. Somewhere in the city behind us, bells start ringing the hour. Time moving. History writing itself over our bones.
I look at him one last time and see everything at once.
The boy I first wanted because he’s beautiful and vicious and looks at me like he’d rather set the room on fire than let it own him.
The man I build stupid, impossible futures around in hidden houses and quiet mornings and beds that smell like us instead of war.
The heir who picks bloodline over me because our fathers are buried too deep inside us to ever fully outrun.
And finally, the man who hates what he was born into, and becomes it anyway.
I turn first because one of us has to, and because if he turns first, I really might follow him like the last idiot in a dead story, and I’ve already made a career of dying for him in ways that don’t leave a body.
I don’t look back, and he doesn’t follow.
That, more than anything, is how I know it’s over.
I learned that exile isn’t loud. It’s the sound of your own footsteps carrying you away from everything you build your name around. While the man you love stays standing in the wreckage because he chooses legacy over you and loses the very thing he thinks he’s saving anyway.
By the time I reach the gate, the silence has already started doing its work.
I look out at the road ahead, the wet black ribbon of it disappearing into a country that no longer belongs to us, and feel the exile settle in for real.
Not just the loss of territory or the money or the alliances or the name spoken differently in rooms we’ll never enter again.
The loss of him.
The loss of the version of me who believed love might be enough to make a different kind of ending.
It settles into the cut over my eye. Into the seat beside me in the waiting car, where my father should be and isn’t. Into the knowledge that one day, a son of my blood and a son of his will inherit this poison without ever consenting to it.
We’re not the end of this story. We’re only the first wound