Chapter 5
five
Vincenzo
The second the suite door shuts behind me, I understand how men end up crawling into bottles and never climbing back out.
I just had to breathe the same air as Nikolaj for the first time in eight years and pretend it didn’t split me open. Eight fucking years should have weakened the effect of his voice. It hasn’t.
I stride through the suite in the dark, not bothering with the lights. My pulse is still too chaotic, as though I’ve come up from deep water too fast with half my chest still crushed by the pressure beneath it.
Tearing off my jacket, I throw it over a chair without my usual care as I head to the drinks cabinet.
Then comes the tie, dragged loose with a hand that isn’t steady enough for finesse.
The top two buttons of my shirt go next.
Every inch of tailored perfection feels like another fucking hand around my throat.
The cabinet is built into the wall beside a large entertainment section. Whiskey. Bourbon. Scotch. The sort of curated collection hosts like to provide for men in my position because wealth assumes it understands appetite.
I don’t reach for a glass; I don’t have the patience for ceremony. My hand closes around a bottle of bourbon because it’s closest, and I twist the cap off so hard, the metal bites into my palm.
The first swallow is brutal and perfect.
It scorches all the way down, and I welcome every inch of it.
The second one is worse—bigger and less controlled.
By the third, I’m leaning with one hand against the sideboard and trying to forget the confused look on Nikolaj’s face when he laid his eyes on me as soon as I walked in.
That look nearly put me on my fucking knees. Hatred would have been easier.
I’d prepared myself for it and told myself I could survive that look again. I could meet hate with civility. I could smile with all the grace my cursed bloodline bred into me and let him direct every ounce of his contempt at a face trained to never crack in public.
I could withstand cruelty from him again… but cruelty isn’t what he gave me. It was curiosity tinged with confusion. He studied me like I was a word on the tip of his tongue he couldn’t quite remember.
When I spoke, he reacted viscerally. He grabbed his head and flinched so minutely, I know the others didn’t catch it. But I still know Nikolaj even after all these fucking years. I know his tells.
I lift the bottle again and drink until I’m forced to stop for breath, then I walk toward the bedroom. I lower myself down onto the edge of the mattress and shrug my shoulders, trying to shake the phantom feel of his stare.
The bed is too soft and neat, with the sheets tucked in with military precision. It makes me think of another bed in another life, one that smelled of clove cigarettes and expensive cologne. Sheets twisted from nights we pretended we had any right to each other.
“Don’t go there, Vincenzo,” I say out loud because the last thing I need is to drown in that room when I barely survived leaving it.
I drink instead. Another long pull from the bottle, the liquid burning a path down my throat until it hits my stomach with a warmth that should be nauseating.
It doesn’t help, not really. It only clears space for the truth to come stalking in without the mercy of distraction, and the truth is that seeing him again is one thing, but really looking at him is what ruins me.
My mind keeps dragging itself back there, whether I want it to or not, back to that first impossible second when I walked in and saw him wearing thirty thousand dollars’ worth of tailoring and the kind of violence no suit can hide.
He isn’t the boy I knew at Vintermoor—not even close—and that should make this easier. It should put distance between memory and the place where it keeps trying to collapse. Instead, it does the opposite.
Twenty-year-old Nikolaj had been feral in a way that made common sense feel optional. Back then, he carried himself like a man perpetually on the verge of either starting a fight or fucking someone senseless against the nearest wall, and half the danger came from the fact that.
Now he is something far worse—now he is violently beautiful.
The years have put weight on him in all the ways that matter, broadening him through the shoulders and chest until the old athletic leanness has hardened into something denser and more dangerous.
At twenty, he had looked built for speed and impact, a young predator who was all long muscles and arrogant grace, made to stalk hallways in black uniform and scandalize God with every filthy thing that came out of his mouth.
At twenty-eight, he looks built to end wars. There is nothing unfinished about him now. The strength in him has settled and thickened until it reads less like youth and more like inevitability. Now the danger in him is quieter. More expensive and more absolute.
I close my eyes, and I see him again.
More beautiful in a way that feels nearly cruel. A jagged scar over one eye, making him look not ruined but mythic, the kind of man painters in older centuries would’ve called war-touched, and priests would’ve denounced on sight.
A mouth made for violence and sin. Hands marked in black ink. Shoulders built to bear empires or break them. A face I once knew in candlelight and secrecy now sharpened by age into something haunting enough to follow me straight into the bottle.
And God help me, the worst part isn’t that I still want him. It’s that seeing what time has made of him only convinces me I always will.
“You looked at me differently,” I say, taking another drink. “What do you remember?”
The bourbon is almost half gone. I look at the bottle, then give up and slide off the bed, letting my body sink down until I’m on the floor with my back against the base. I stretch my legs out in front of me, bottle resting against my thigh.
It feels more honest down here—less like a king and more like the twenty-something-year-old version of me who watched the door close behind Nikolaj and didn’t leave until morning.
I tip my head back and stare at the ceiling. “Congratulations,” I mutter. “King of the Five Families, and still pathetic over one man.”
One man.
That’s not even true, and that’s what makes it worse because I don’t just love one man. I love a ghost. I love a version of him that no longer exists anywhere except inside of me.
The Nikolaj I carry isn’t the Pakhan in a black suit giving me measured threats across a boardroom table.
He isn’t feared across Russian sectors and whispered about now with equal parts terror and devotion, whose men would burn cities down at his nod, and whose younger sister became a blade in heels with the same lethal eyes as his.
He isn’t even the last Nikolaj I actually saw—the one who woke in my bed with all the love gone from his face.
The man I love is the one in between all those things, and the only one I remember in full.
The boy with blood on his mouth and blasphemy in his soul.
The one I kneeled to in front of my saint, and the one I would have given all of this up for.
The boy who fought me as if the world might end and kissed me like he wanted to drag us both into hell before duty could separate us.
The one who carved my name into a bullet because he loved me so violently that even his tenderness came in the shape of a threat.
I’m in love with a dead language no one else speaks.
I love him more now, I realize, than I did back then when we were stupid enough to think we could win against our bloodlines.
Back when it was desperate, young, and needy.
Now, it’s heavy and exhausted, and threaded through everything I am.
My love for him has roots in every decision I make, even if it looks nothing like love.
Maybe that’s why the loneliness never leaves. Loneliness implies absence, and what I have is worse than absence. I have presence without return, and memory with no witness. I have eight years of carrying something too alive to bury, and too impossible to share.
I can see the exact faultlines between the man he became and the one I lost.
Only me.
Only fucking me.
The tears hit without much warning. My vision blurs, and I blink hard, annoyed at myself on instinct. Kings do not sit on hotel room floors crying over men they cannot have. Kings drink, fuck, fight, negotiate, repeat. They do not let grief drag them down eight years after the fact.
Except I am not grieving a breakup or an affair that burned out. I am grieving a phantom limb. Someone cut off half of me and sent it back to its homeland with new orders and new scars, and I’ve been stumbling around ever since, trying to convince the world I walk fine.
My chest tightens until my next breath comes out shaky. I press the heel of my hand against my sternum as if I can push it all back, but it doesn’t work. A harsh sound leaves my throat—somewhere between a laugh and a sob—and then the tears spill over properly.
“Fuck,” I whisper, dragging my hand over my face. “How can you still do this to me without even trying?”
I fold forward, elbows on my knees, as my shoulders shake and the tears come faster now.
I broke once when he left my room in the East Wing, and I break again now.
The awful part is that it feels exactly the same—down to the way my body tries to curl in on itself, and my heart keeps insisting that he’s the other half of it, no matter how many times I tell it that half is gone.
“I love you, even if you don’t ever remember. Even if all you ever feel when you look at me is confusion and contempt.”
I love the missing half of myself. I love a man who looked at me today as though the truth was moving under his skin and he didn’t know whether to trust it.
And tomorrow I’ll put on the suit again, knot the tie, smooth the mask back into place, and pretend I’m a king instead of a man kneeling in the ruins of the only thing he ever wanted to keep.
Tonight, though, there’s no one here to perform for.
Tonight I sit on the floor with a bottle of bourbon and the weight of eight years pressing my lungs flat, and I let myself feel the full, ugly shape of loving someone who still exists everywhere except where I need him most.
With a sigh, I get to my feet, lie back on the bed without bothering to get under the covers, and stare at the ceiling until my eyes finally close.
When sleep comes, predictably, it brings him with it.