Chapter 2 #2
I’m going to act as though the man seated opposite me isn’t the same one who once pinned me to chapel stone with murder in his eyes and want in his mouth, the same one who carved himself into me so thoroughly that I still reach for his absence when I’m too drunk to remember pride.
That’s what I’m going to do.
What I don’t know is what it’ll cost to stay that way.
“I’ll do my job,” I say.
“So will he,” he says. “That’s not what I asked.”
I turn fully then and lean one hip against the window ledge, facing him.
“What exactly would you like me to say, Lucien? That I’m going to throw him against the nearest wall and demand an apology from a man who doesn’t remember owing me one?
That I’m going to drag eight years of blood and politics into the open because somewhere under all this fucking silk and ceremony I still miss the boy who loved me? There’s nothing to do except my job.”
The room goes quiet after that. Lucien’s face doesn’t change, but I know him well enough to see the sympathy he’s trying not to show too openly. I hate that look from anyone else. From him, I tolerate it because he’s earned the right.
“You really did love him,” he says finally, and he doesn’t make it a question.
My mouth curves, bitter and brief. “Don’t sound so surprised.”
“I’m not surprised.” He glances toward the desk where the velvet box now sits shut and unobtrusive among ledgers and coded files. “I’ve seen the evidence for years. I just think hearing that you’ll be seeing him again has forced you to admit the shape of it.”
Admit it.
As though I’ve ever stopped knowing it.
I look away first. “There are a lot of things I’ve admitted in private that I’d never be stupid enough to repeat in public.”
“And with me?”
“With you, I’m selective.”
That almost gets a smile out of him again. Instead, he exhales quietly and shifts the subject with the mercy of a man who knows when to stop pressing on a bruise.
“He’s not the same as he was at Vintermoor.”
“No one is.”
Lucien nods. “Reports say he’s worse than his father ever was. Worse than Arseniy, too, in some ways. He’s built his own following. Half the Russian sectors now answer directly to him. There are rumors that his father defers to him in closed rooms.”
“I’ve read the reports.”
“I know. I’m saying them out loud so you remember you’re not walking into a memory.”
That hits harder than I’d like, because he’s right.
Whatever version of Nikolaj lives in my head—whatever composite of the boy from Vintermoor and the man from my worst nights—still shares space under my skin, and that isn’t who’s coming to the summit.
The man who will be arriving is twenty-eight. Pakhan. A leader forged out of blood, trauma, and whatever was left of him after memory loss gutted the softer pieces.
The reports are consistent in the ways that matter: calm detachment, ruthlessness, and no remorse.
His father’s fear was treated as fact, not rumor.
A younger sister who serves as his assassin and his two cousins as his right-hand men.
Men loyal beyond lineage, which is always more dangerous than inherited obedience.
He killed Arseniy’s pregnant wife in front of him after finding out she was a traitor feeding information to a rival Bratva sect. Then he killed that entire sect overnight. Arseniy abdicated soon after.
He’s not walking in as the broken boy who left my bed with hatred in his eyes. He’s walking in as a king in his own right.
And still, some ugly part of me wants to know whether his mouth still twists the same before a threat, or his hands still flex once when he’s angry. Whether he still looks at a room like he’s already calculated how to kill everyone in it.
Whether, beneath all that ruin, power, and missing memory, there’s any part of him that will look at me and feel something nameless claw against the cage.
I hate myself a little for even thinking the last part.
“Don’t worry, Lucien. I am under no illusion that he’s coming here to finish what we started,” I say.
Lucien’s gaze holds mine, but he shakes his head. “I’m not worried about him finishing it.”
I frown at that. “No?”
“I’m worried about you wanting him to.”
That’s almost enough to make me laugh. Instead, I toss back the rest of the whiskey and set the glass down on the windowsill with more care than I feel.
“That’s the nice thing about being King,” I say. “Wanting things rarely matters.”
“That’s one way to live.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got,” I say.
He can’t argue with that, so he picks up the summit folder, scanning through whatever he sees in there. Lucien has always done that when conversations cut too short—given both of us the dignity of a sideways glance.
I move back to my desk and place the velvet ring box back in my safe again.
Some of the sharpness is settling into the familiar architecture of work.
This part I know how to do: security routes, seating arrangements, secondary exits.
Then vetting the staff because I trust hospitality only slightly less than I trust politicians.
It’s easier to make up your mind when there are moving pieces to align. Easier to be Capo dei Capi than Vincenzo once the paperwork starts.
Still, when Lucien leaves twenty minutes later with revised instructions, the house falls silent again; the city goes on glittering beneath the windows as though nothing has shifted.
Everything has fucking shifted.
In two weeks, I’ll walk into a hotel boardroom in Bucharest and sit at the head of a table with four people who rule various underworld factions. People who want my power, influence, or my head.
For the first time in decades, the Russians will sit at our table again, with my old lover as King.
The bullet will still wait in my safe, the past will still wait in my chest, and the rest of the world will call it politics.
The Blade and the King.
What the world won’t know is that I love a ghost, and in two weeks, I have to face the man he became without me.