Chapter 1 #2
Our predecessors had no idea what they did when they trained us. The monsters they created learned how to outgrow their leashes.
They used to call me a weapon. Something to be pointed outward; something to be controlled. Now they call me The Blade, and men say it the way other people whisper a prayer right before the end.
My boots echo through the corridor as we walk toward the main staircase that leads up to the operational level. Kai keeps pace without crowding me, matching my stride the way only someone around violence knows how.
My office sits in what used to be the abbot’s private chambers. I kept almost none of the old furniture. The room is large, all dark wood and old stone with tall windows overlooking the east grounds and the forest beyond. We replaced the stained glass with bulletproof windows.
Icons are gone, but shelves remain, now filled with ledgers, dossiers, maps, encrypted SAT phones, and enough blackmail to level governments. Monitors line one side of the wall where nothing escapes my eyes.
Nothing hangs behind my desk; there are no family portraits, no flag, no sentimental relics pretending to soften what I am. Men come in here, and there’s nowhere for their eyes to rest except on me.
Kai closes the door behind us, and I cross to the sideboard to pour vodka over my blood-smeared knuckles. I watch the pink rivulets run into the steel sink built into the marble, then pour two fingers into a glass and knock it back in one swallow.
Kai waits near the desk, hands loosely clasped behind him.
“Spit it out. I can tell you’ve got something on your mind,” I say.
He lifts a folder from my desk and holds it out to me. “The Five Families reached out.”
That earns my full attention, though nothing in my expression shifts. I take the folder from him and open it. Inside are the usual polished lies dressed up as diplomacy.
Formal request. Neutral language. A summit. Strategic discussion regarding a realignment of interest after recent instability in several sectors.
An invitation extended to Nikolaj Dragovich, Pakhan of the Dragovich Bratva, with assurances of respect, security, and mutual benefit.
The Five Families. The same sons of bitches who exiled my family are now begging us to realign.
The Italians love dressing up threats in silk and expensive wine—they always have. Give a wolf a tailored suit, and suddenly everyone calls the bite politics instead of what it really fucking is.
“Who signed off?” I ask.
Kai points to the signatures. “Helena Byrne, Kieran King, Stefano Reyes, and Alonso Conti before he was killed last week. But the final endorsement came from Vincenzo Vieri himself.”
I lower the papers without really seeing them now. “Vincenzo Vieri.”
“Yes,” Kai answers, although my statement wasn’t really a question.
Vieri.
My enemy since birth.
That much has always remained. Even walking half-dead years ago, with my head split open and my memories burned out, that truth sat intact beneath my skin.
Vieri is the enemy. Vieri blood is poison. Vieri men smile while their hands are already around your throat. I remember enough around the edges of the war to know what shape came after.
I healed. I hunted the Dragna down to extinction for what they did to me. I finished the mission I was sent to Vintermoor for—although the bullet went into his mirror, Silvano. It should’ve felt like failure, but Vieri blood looked the same when it hit the floor.
I’ve crossed paths with the Vieri empire only through shipments, rumors, retaliations, and the occasional gunfight. Never face-to-face.
“Where are they proposing we meet?” I ask.
“Bucharest.”
I hum. “That’s convenient.”
I set the folder down and move to stand by the window. Outside, dusk has begun to creep across the grounds, turning the pines black at the edges. Soldiers move below in disciplined lines, headlights cutting over gravel.
Saint Helena looks serene from up here—that’s the beauty of fortresses. They’re the prettiest from the angle that hides the corpses.
I rest one hand on the cold stone of the windowsill and let the silence stretch.
My father would tell me to ignore the summons and make them come here instead, since Ruslan has zero trust in anything when it comes to the Italians. He would say to go armed to the teeth and assume treachery even before the plane takes off.
I will always take advice from the man who single-handedly saved our family from ruin. We may not see eye-to-eye a lot of the time, but his advice is gold whenever he decides to bestow it on me.
“Your father heard about the invitation,” Kai says behind me, and I offer a humorless laugh. “He thinks Vieri wants to size you up.”
I turn from the window and shake my head. “No, he already knows what I am.”
Kai meets my gaze evenly. “Then he wants something else.”
That possibility sits ugly in my mouth. Men like Vincenzo Vieri never move pieces without purpose. From everything I’ve had reported over the years, he rules the exact way I expected a Vieri heir would if you gave him enough corpses to climb over.
Efficient and ruthless. Elegant in public, filth underneath. Married for politics. Cold enough to make his own men nervous.
He’s the kind of king who understands that brutality is more effective when delivered with clean cuffs and expensive whiskey. I should respect that; maybe I do. But respect doesn’t keep a man from becoming a target.
Kai shifts his weight slightly, and I know he’s studying me as carefully as he ever does when the room goes quiet. “You’ll go.”
I glance down at the folder again, then out at the darkening grounds and feel that strange internal drag I always seem to get when I think of the Vieri name.
Memory? Irritation? As if my body knows something my mind can’t be bothered to retrieve.
I smile without warmth. “Of course I’ll fucking go.”
That gets me the faintest exhale from him. I move back to the desk and flip the folder shut.
“We don’t ignore invitations from men who think they’re our equals. We attend, we let them look, and then we remind them why their predecessors exiled our bloodline in the first place.”
He nods once, already expecting that answer. “I’ll have security start the arrangements.”
I sink into the chair behind the desk and steeple my fingers.
“I want every attendee profiled again before we leave. Updated routes, private scandals, hidden debts, mistresses, sons they don’t acknowledge, daughters they’d kill to protect, judges on payroll, and police commanders in their pockets.
All of it. I want enough leverage on that table to choke them with it. ”
“It’ll be done, Pakhan,” Kai says with an incline of his head and turns to leave.
“And Kai.”
He pauses at the door and turns his head back to look at me.
“If any of them think an invitation means parity, correct that understanding before we arrive.”
A faint smile touches his mouth. “I’ll make it clear they’re inviting the man who has them terrified,” he says. “Not the boy they remember.”
“There is no boy,” I agree. “He died a long time ago.”
Kai’s gaze searches mine for a heartbeat, as if he’s tempted to disagree. I know that somewhere in that meticulous mind, he keeps a ledger of who I used to be and who I am now.
That Nikolaj died on the stone floor of Vintermoor.
“Of course,” he says, then he leaves me alone with the hum of the monitors and the old stone silence of Saint Helena.
For a minute, I just sit there and listen to the building breathe. The empire moves because I move it. Money, fear, allegiance, death. Every current answers to my hand now.
Russian sectors speak my name with caution, reverence, hatred, or all three. They feared Arseniy once; they feared my father longer. But fear changes when it meets something that doesn’t blink back.
Whatever waits for me in Bucharest will be handled the same way I handle everything else—with a steady hand and no remorse.
Let the Five Families come polished and look at me, wondering if the rumors have teeth. Let them test the shape of my silence and search my face for the boy they once heard stories about.
That boy is dead. What’s left is worse.
And when Bucharest opens its gates to me, it won’t be receiving a guest. It’ll be receiving the fucking fire.