Chapter 6
six
Vincenzo
Iwake up with a dagger at my throat and a man straddling my hips, and the first clear thought I have is that grief has finally developed a sense of humor.
Expensive cologne and clove cigarettes.
My head pounds with the blunt punishment of too much bourbon and not enough sense, my tongue tastes like smoke, and my shirt is half untucked from passing out on top of the covers instead of getting myself into bed like a grown man with an empire to manage and security to trust.
My eyes focus, and I see Nikolaj Dragovich above me.
For a moment, I forget how to breathe. Not because I’m afraid—I know I should be. There’s a dagger kissing the pulse in my throat, and the man holding it has turned entire territories into ghost stories.
He looks like violence made flesh. His hair isn’t as sleek as it was in the boardroom; a few blond strands have fallen loose around his forehead.
It makes him look less like the Pakhan who sat across from four Kings a few hours ago, and more like the boy who used to sneak into my wing at Vintermoor.
Déjà vu is a weak word for it. This is a haunting with teeth.
I can’t help but smirk. God forgive me, I can’t. A rough chuckle scrapes out of me before I can decide whether it’s wise, and his eyes narrow with immediate hostility.
Nikolaj’s eyes narrow. “You’re laughing.”
Sleep and bourbon still have their hands around my thoughts, but that voice slices straight through the fog. It takes me back with humiliating ease—a room at Vintermoor.
“I am,” I say, and my own voice comes out hoarse from sleep, whiskey, and the wreckage of the night before. “You’ll have to forgive me. This brings back memories.”
The second the word leaves my mouth, his whole expression hardens.
“Careful,” he says. “You’re lying under my knife and smiling like you’ve lost your fucking mind.”
“I’ve been accused of worse.”
“Nobody’s coming for you,” he continues, dipping the blade enough that the sting sharpens. “Your men are breathing because I allowed it. Your locks are embarrassing, security is too pretty, and your room has three perimeter flaws and two camera blind spots. You should kill whoever swept it.”
Despite everything, another huffed laugh leaves me. “I’ll pass along your feedback and let them know their performance disappointed you.”
His mouth curls with contempt, but it’s forced. Anger laid over the shape of something else. “Do you always talk this much when someone has a knife to your throat?”
“Only when I know they won’t use it.”
He stares down at me with the full force of that cold, furious attention, and any other man would take it as proof he’s about to die.
I know better, even though I know I shouldn’t.
Every sensible instinct I have should be screaming.
He could open my throat with one clean motion and be gone before my men discovered the breach.
But I know he won’t do it with the same certainty I had years ago that he loved me, before he ever found the courage to say it without turning it into an insult.
His eyes dip to my mouth for half a second, then snap back up. “You don’t know what the fuck I’ll do.”
“I know enough.”
“You don’t know shit about me.”
There it is. The lie he needs so badly that he has to snarl it.
I look at him too openly because I’m tired, hungover, and past the point of protecting myself from whatever damage his nearness can do.
“Why are you here, Nikolaj?” I say quietly.
His whole body reacts.
Not a flinch—he’s too disciplined for that, too brutal with himself, too well-trained in the art of not giving the world anything it can use.
But the name strikes him anyway. I see the impact in the minute stillness that follows, in the way his pupils widen, and how his breath catches behind his teeth.
His knife remains at my throat, and his weight remains over my hips. But for one suspended second, he is not Pakhan, and I am not Capo dei Capi, and this room is not a hotel suite in Bucharest.
It is a memory trying to crawl out of him.
Everyone else shortened him—claimed pieces of him with familiarity they hadn’t earned. Niko, Kolya, and now, Pakhan—spoken with fear, calculation, and obedience.
But for me, it had always been Nikolaj. I liked the weight of it on my tongue because nothing about him deserved to be shortened.
He was never easy enough for a nickname, or small enough for one.
Even when he was twenty, vicious, and half-feral with duty eating him from the inside, he was already too much to be softened by other people’s convenience.
The question snaps something back into him. Rage returns, fast and vicious, grateful for the chance to take shape. He leans down until his face is closer to mine, until the blade forces my chin up and his shadow fully covers me.
“That’s your question? I’m in your room with a knife to your throat, and you’re asking why I’m here as if I’ve interrupted your fucking bath.”
“You woke me from a very poor decision involving bourbon,” I say, letting my eyes flick toward the fallen bottle before returning to his face. “The bath would’ve been more dignified.”
His expression darkens. “You’re drunk.”
I shrug. “Less than I was.”
“That explains the stupidity.”
“No,” I say softly. “Unfortunately, where you’re concerned, the stupidity is mine while sober too.”
The dagger presses a little harder, and my heart beats too slowly for the violence of the moment. I look up at him, at the fury he’s wearing because confusion is intolerable and fear is unacceptable, at the man who came to me with a blade because asking plainly would’ve felt too much like kneeling.
He didn’t come here to kill me. If he had, I’d already be dead. He could have put the dagger through my throat while I was sleeping and let the guards find their King’s body cold in five-star sheets.
Instead, he woke me.
“What is it that you want from me exactly, Nikolaj?”
His right eye twitches. “I want answers,” he growls. “I want to know why every time I dream I hear your voice.”
The question guts me, but I hide it well on my face. A part of me knew this was coming. I saw the way my voice struck him, and how he tried to sit there with the whole room watching while he pretended nothing was amiss. I knew he’d come hunting for an answer.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say, keeping my tone and expression calm, but he’s not having any of it.
“Bullshit,” he snarls.
“Nikolaj, I—”
He flinches again, making me shut up. “Stop saying my fucking name like that,” he bites out. “I asked you a fucking question.”
“And I heard it.”
“Then fucking answer it!”
I almost do. It takes everything in me not to just spill it all out. But then I remember how he looked at me when Arseniy told him he had texted me for help before calling his own blood.
“I’d never trust a Vieri.”
I loved him enough to let him go once. I don’t know if I have the strength to do it twice, but I can’t shove the past down his throat while he’s bleeding inside his skull every time memory stirs.
I won’t do that to him, not even if it destroys whatever remains of me. So, I give him less than he deserves.
“Dreams are rarely reliable,” I say.
His stare goes murderous, and it almost comforts me. There’s the man who never tolerated evasions from me. Not when he knew me, not when he hated me, and not even now when he doesn’t understand the difference.
His grip tightens in the sheets beside my shoulder, and I expect even more fire from him. But instead, he asks, “Why is it always like this?”
I go very fucking still. “Like what?”
“You.” His mouth twists around the word. “Your voice, your face, and that fucking look. The way everyone gets careful when your name comes up, and how I can’t ask a simple question without half the room acting like I’ve pointed a gun at my own head.”
“Nikolaj—”
“I wake up with you in my skull, Vincenzo,” he growls out my name, and my heart does a traitorous leap at the sound of it.
“I hear you saying things I don’t remember hearing.
I see rooms I don’t remember entering. Books.
Smoke. A gun underneath my chin, and always the same fucking line echoing in my head when I wake.
Then the pain tears through my eye so hard that I nearly black out. So, don’t you fucking lie to me.”
My throat tightens around his words, and I know exactly which memory is trying to crawl its way back. He remembers enough to suffer, but not enough to know why. That might be worse than nothing.
“I can’t give you what you’re asking for,” I say.
He laughs, but it’s humorless. “Bullshit. You can tell me.”
I shake my head. “I can tell you my version. I can tell you what I remember and what happened from where I stood. I can tell you what you said and did, and I can tell you what it did to me when you forgot,” I tilt my head into the blade, and I can feel where blood starts to bead.
“But if I hand it to you like that, you’ll either reject it because it comes from me, or you’ll break something open too fast and never get the pieces aligned correctly.
You need records. Proof. Something that doesn’t come from my mouth. ”
His eyes search mine, desperate in a way he will never call desperate out loud. “What records?”
“Vintermoor,” I say. “Look up your time there.”
A muscle jumps in his jaw. “I know what happened at Vintermoor.”
“No, you know what they allowed you to keep,” I correct. “You know what was easier for them to explain away.”
“They…” he asks.
“Your family. Mine. Whoever benefitted from the silence without knowing what you would become.”
His face hardens with such speed that it might be mistaken for indifference, and his grip tightens on the knife. “Careful, Vieri,” he warns.
I scoff. “If you wanted me dead, I’d never have opened my eyes.”