Epilogue - Salvatore
When I finish, the room goes so quiet that for a moment I can hear the rain gathering in the guttering outside the parlor windows.
Nikolaj does not move. That, more than anything, tells me the story lands where it should.
He stands in the middle of my parlor now, with the fire throwing low gold over one side of his face, and for the first time since he walked in, he looks his age.
Not young, exactly. Men like him are never permitted that luxury.
But startled in a way that strips some of the cultivated brutality off him and leaves behind the son beneath it.
The son who came here with splinters of memory in his head, expecting some political answer about exile, territory, votes, bloodlines, and instead finding out that the whole fucking thing began with love.
I lean back in my chair and let the silence stretch because he deserves that much, at least. The space to feel the shape of what I have just handed him—the shape of what his father and I became to each other.
Nikolaj’s mouth parts slightly, then shuts again. His eyes—so brutally his father’s that they still unsettle me in certain light—stay locked on mine.
He exhales once, and drags a hand over his jaw. “Fuck.”
It is, perhaps, the most appropriate response available.
“Yes,” I say quietly. “That was more or less my assessment as well.”
He looks down for a second, clearly trying to rearrange the architecture of his own history and finding the pieces don’t sit where he left them. When he lifts his head again, there’s still shock in him, but it’s less disbelief now.
“So that was it,” he says. “The exile wasn’t because of my uncle—”
“Yes.”
He gives a short, disbelieving shake of his head and turns away from me, pacing once toward the fireplace before stopping there with one hand braced on the mantel. His shoulders are tight under his coat, every line in his body pulled taut with the effort of fitting this new truth into old wounds.
“My father never said,” he murmurs.
I take a sip of whiskey that tastes like smoke. “He wouldn’t.”
Nikolaj’s laugh comes out hollow and mean. “No. He fucking wouldn’t.”
He stares into the fire for another second, then looks back over his shoulder at me. The expression on his face now is not soft.
“That’s why he’s like that. That’s why he’s always…” He cuts himself off, jaw tightening. “Guarded doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
He turns fully then, and the force of his attention pins me more effectively than any weapon would. “And that’s why I was sent to kill Vincenzo.”
I incline my head once. The answer settles between us with the weight it deserves.
Because yes, that is the other poison. Ruslan didn’t send his son toward my bloodline simply because of politics, balance, or old family hatred.
He sent him because men like us, once burned by love, become convinced the only way to keep our children safe is to make sure they never get the chance to make the same mistake.
He sent Nikolaj to kill Vincenzo because somewhere under all that discipline and legacy and rage, he is still the young man in the rain with a mark over his eye and my name lodged in the center of his chest like a bullet.
I don’t say that part aloud; Nikolaj doesn’t need it spoken. I can see from his face that he has reached the same conclusion already, and that it disgusts and wounds him in equal measure.
He lets out a slow breath through his nose. “Jesus Christ.”
There’s nothing I can add to that.
Nikolaj takes a step back from the mantel and studies me in a way that makes me suddenly, acutely aware of my age. Not fear, exactly. I have lived too long and done too much to start fearing a son for carrying his father’s rage into my parlor.
But there is a reckoning in his gaze that makes me feel the years sitting heavy on my bones.
I am sixty. I have handed my throne to Vincenzo.
I am alone in this room with a Dragovich heir who could kill me, and I have just given him the confession that poisons his entire understanding of where he comes from.
I set the glass down. “Well,” I say, because if I don’t put some kind of shape around this moment, the silence will start feeling too much like a grave, “are you going to kill me now?”
The question lands exactly as I intended. Blunt, dry, and honest enough to sound almost careless.
Nikolaj blinks twice, and some of the tension goes strange in his face, as if he genuinely didn’t expect that from me. Then he shakes his head. “No. That’s not why I came here, Salvatore.”
There is something almost boyish in that admission, if one ignores the scar at his throat and the violence in the set of his shoulders. He didn’t come here for blood; he came here for understanding. That is, in some ways, far more dangerous.
I lean back slightly in my chair. “Then why did you walk into enemy territory, if not to kill an old king?”
He looks at me for a long moment before he answers.
“I was at my father’s villa in Kolomna last weekend.
He thought he was alone on the terrace,” he says, and my heart starts beating faster.
He still kept the villa. “It was late, and so cold that even I wasn’t stupid enough to be out there for no reason.
There was a bottle on the table, and he had a revolver in his hand. ”
I suck in a stuttered breath. “Nikolaj—”
“He opened the cylinder, dropped a single round, spun it, and just… sat there.” Nikolaj’s jaw works. “I started toward him when he whispered, ‘You were supposed to be beside me, lyubimiy,’ and pulled the trigger.”
Ice flushes through my veins; every breath tastes like metal. Lyubimiy. My heart nearly gives out at the sound of that endearment.
“The hammer clicked on an empty chamber,” Nikolaj continues, “and my father laughed—laughed like it was the funniest joke in the fucking world, finished his glass, and went inside. He never called my mother that endearment; never called any of us that.” A heartbeat’s pause.
“So I waited. When he passed out, I checked the gun.”
There is absolutely nowhere left to hide as he watches the truth land in me. Watches me understand exactly what he is about to say before he says it.
“There was a bullet in the chamber, and your name was etched into the brass.”
My lungs forget how to pull air; I close my eyes because I can’t bear the bitter horror on the boy’s face while he tells me this.
Ruslan—terrible, stubborn Ruslan—sitting where we once believed in impossible futures, playing roulette with a bullet engraved with my name.
Waiting for chance to decide whether loving me finally ends him.
When I open my eyes again, Nikolaj’s expression has changed: softer?
No—emptier, as though handing me this horror cost him more than he planned.
“That’s why I came,” he murmurs and folds his arms over his chest, a posture that is all Ruslan in the worst way.
“I wanted to look at the man who could bring my father—the man who single-handedly dragged my family out of ruin—down to his knees.”
The honesty in it lands cleanly. I absorb it without flinching because I deserve worse than words can express. “And?” I breathe.
His gaze drags over me, unsparing. “I thought you’d look crueler.”
I laugh then, a short, broken sound with no life in it. “That’s disappointing.”
“No,” he says, and something like emotion breaks through the marble mask of his face. “It’s worse. Cruel would’ve been easier to understand. You look like someone buried along with him.”
For one humiliating second, I think I might break in front of him. Not loud or theatrically—I am still a Vieri. But there is a fracture line in me now that wasn’t there when he arrived. The boy has somehow found his thumb on it without even trying.
“I was,” I say before I can stop myself, and look into the fire because looking at him now feels too much like looking at judgment wearing my lover’s face in younger skin. “I just didn’t have the decency to lie down all the way.”
When Nikolaj finally speaks again, his voice is softer, and that somehow hurts more than anything else. “Then why didn’t you go after him? After all this time, why didn’t you go to him?”
There it is—the question I have asked myself in a thousand different forms for thirty years, handed back to me by the son of the man I failed.
I have spent years wondering if he hated me.
I never doubted that he did. Hate is the easy half of a betrayal like ours.
I wondered how love survives it. How it remains recognizable through exile, blood, silence, and the next generation of pain.
I wondered whether he kept me because he couldn’t bear to let me go, or because not letting me go was the cruelest revenge available to a man who still had a heart against his own will.
Maybe the answer never mattered—he kept me, and I kept him. The method was merely detail.
“Cowardice wears many masks,” I eventually say.
That earns me the smallest shift of his mouth. Not a smile, just acknowledgment.
He rises after that and walks towards the door. I know a decision has been made inside him that he won’t explain to me tonight. Fair enough. Men like him and me are not built for easy disclosures. We circle what matters and leave the center alive whenever we can.
At the doorway, he pauses. I remain where I am in my chair by the fire, old and tired. “He won’t kill himself.”
The certainty in his tone startles me. “You sound very sure,” I say carefully.
He glances over his shoulder. “He’s too stubborn and too hateful.” There’s a pause, then he says softly, “and he’s still waiting at the villa, on that terrace, because he still loves you too much.”
The parlor smells the same when he closes the door, the rain still taps softly at the windows, and the whiskey waits where I leave it on the side table.
And yet the room is no longer the same one I was sitting in before Nikolaj walked through the door.
Now I know this too: somewhere, in the same villa where we once became stupid enough to believe in another ending, Ruslan sits with my name carved into a bullet and chooses, at least for one more night, to keep breathing.
A fresh wave of horror moves through me then.
I get to my feet—bones complain, ghosts whisper, but the decision feels clean; terrifyingly so.
If the man I ruined can still sit on that god-forsaken terrace counting heartbeats instead of bullets, then the least I can do is meet him there and let him decide whether to pour the whiskey or pull the trigger.
At the threshold, I hesitate, listening to the rain. It sounds like it did the night before everything went to hell. Behind me, the fire pops once, a last warning that ghosts travel light and follow fast.
With my mind made up, I walk toward my car without looking back, knowing my destination—because I finally realize there’s no one left alive to stop me.