Chapter 6 #2
For a moment, it looks like he might cut me, if only to punish the honesty. Instead, he lowers his face closer to mine, close enough that I can see the darker ring around his iris. Close enough that my body betrays me by remembering the exact angle required to kiss him.
“This is a fucking game to you, isn’t it?” he says, his breathing getting heavier by degrees.
“No.” The word leaves me sharper than intended. “No, this is the furthest thing from a game. Look up your time at Vintermoor and ask yourself why those closest to you never answer you properly, and why the name Vieri doesn’t feel as simple as it should.”
“You’re very brave for a man with a knife to his throat.”
“I’m very tired,” I correct lazily. “And very drunk. And very done with being the only one in this equation who remembers what happened at that godforsaken academy.”
There’s open hostility in his eyes, and he shifts his weight slightly over my lap. My body registers every inch of it with humiliating clarity. Bourbon still sits heavy in my veins, but not enough to dull him. Nothing is ever enough to dull him.
“Now, do you mind leaving so I can sleep this off? I have a full schedule tomorrow,” I lie, needing him gone and wanting him closer in equal measure.
“Liar.”
The word should anger me, but it doesn’t. No, it warms some old, tragic corner of me instead, because he used to call me that in a dozen ways.
Liar when I said we’d never be more than a fuck.
Liar when I told him he was only useful on his knees.
Liar when I promised we were still enemies with his mouth on my neck, and his cock buried deep inside of me.
“Liar, Vincenzo. Always so fucking pretty when you lie.”
The memory stabs clean through the marrow of me. He sees it—of course he does. I’ve never been able to hide anything on my face when it comes to him.
“Why does it hurt you?” he asks.
I meet his eyes again. “Because I remember every second you can’t, and you didn’t choose to forget me.”
His face goes blank at that; a total shutdown that would terrify most people. But I’ve seen it before—it means he’s processing something he would rather not feel.
“You expect me to believe that we were… what?” he asks after a long moment. “Friends?’
The word is so off the mark that I have to bite back a laugh. It comes out more like a choked exhale. “No. We were never that harmless.”
“What then? Fucking say it, Vieri.”
“You say it,” I counter. “After you ask Arseniy why he carved duty into your chest.”
Horror crosses his expression, and his gaze automatically flicks down for a second before he clenches his jaw so hard that a vein stands out in his neck.
“How the fuck do you know about that?” he snarls, but it lacks bite.
“Because I was there in the aftermath. I saw what it did to you.”
“This is the price I pay for being yours, Vincenzo.”
He stares at me for a long time, and I let him look. I don’t bother to hide the exhaustion or the ache. He’s always been able to smell weakness in people; I’m not going to insult him by pretending I’m untouched by this.
“I swear to God, if this is another one of your games—”
“It isn’t,” I cut in. “We did the game eight years ago in a school that turned us into weapons. Whatever this is now, it’s not a game, Nikolaj.”
He shifts back at last and rises from the bed in one fluid motion, the dagger disappearing somewhere inside his coat. I slowly push myself up, one hand going to my throat, and my fingertips come away with a narrow smear of blood.
“Surface cut,” I say, then he lets out a huff of air that might almost be a laugh if it weren’t so bitter. He looks at me for a moment, then turns toward the door.
“Get some fucking sleep, Vieri,” he says, and the venom in his tone almost makes me smile. “You’re useless to me drunk.”
“I was asleep before you woke me with a knife to my throat,” I remind him.
“Then consider this a mercy.”
My laugh is quiet and fucking painful. “Goodnight, Nikolaj.”
He stands very still with his back to me, and the fact that he’s even taking that stance—as a Pakhan—says a lot. “You said I didn’t choose to forget you.”
My throat tightens again. “Yes,” I say hoarsely.
“Did I choose you before?”
It’s one thing to survive his blade; it’s another to survive that question in his voice. I grip the edge of the mattress because standing is beyond me, and lying is beneath what remains of us.
“Yes,” I say again.
He still doesn’t turn and simply stands there with one hand on the door, breathing heavily. “Did I love you?”
That breaks my heart so cleanly, but I don’t make a sound. My lungs forget what they’re for, and every defense I’ve spent the last eight years building crumbles beneath me.
He doesn’t turn to look at me, maybe because he knows he can’t. Maybe some part of him understands that if he faces me while asking, the answer might be written on my face.
Did I love you?
I see him at twenty, furious at what I was making him feel as he shoved me against a bookshelf.
I see him pressing a bullet into my hand with my name carved into it as he explained why falling for me already doomed him.
I see him above me, eyes soft and filled with so much horror at how much he felt for me, and knowing he would choose me over his bloodline.
I see him after the ambush, wild with pain and empty of me, looking at me as if my love had never touched him.
I see eight years of silence, eight years of whiskey, eight years of my wife’s polite distance, and eight years of standing at the top of an empire and feeling the absence beside me more than the throne beneath me.
Did I love you?
Yes, you loved me like violence learning how to kneel. Yes, you loved me terribly, beautifully, and with every doomed piece of yourself they tried to turn into a weapon.
Yes, you loved me enough to hate yourself for it.
Yes, you loved me in the chapel, in the library, in my bed, in every stolen corridor, in every bloody lesson, and in every breathless argument we pretended was still only war.
However, the silence reveals my true feelings more effectively than words ever could.
“Fuck,” he whispers, and pulls the door open, slamming it shut as he leaves.
The room feels bigger without him, and somehow smaller at the same time. I sit there for a moment, listening to the echo of his fading footsteps. My throat throbs in time with my pulse as my heart is doing its own unpleasant drum solo.
“Look it up,” I murmur into the empty room. “Please, see what they took from us.”
Did I choose you before?
I close my eyes, and the answer rises inside me with the full weight of eight years.
Yes, beloved. You chose me so completely that it destroyed us both.