Chapter 7
seven
Nikolaj
Morning in Bucharest feels too bright for the kind of night I had.
I don’t remember falling asleep after I left his room, but I remember walking back to my own suite, stripping off my shirt, heading to the bathroom, and bracing my hands on the marble counter.
I remember staring at my own reflection while trying to convince myself that nothing about that conversation mattered.
It didn’t work.
My skull still feels bruised from the inside this morning, that ugly pressure sitting behind my right eye like a threat that hasn’t decided whether to bloom into pain or stay there and remind me it can.
I shaved, showered, changed, and put on another black suit because armor is armor, no matter how many forms it takes.
But none of it fixed the fact that I spent half the night in Vincenzo Vieri’s suite with a blade at his throat and left with less certainty than I brought in.
I step out of the suite without looking back, knowing Kai and Maksim will fall into step on my right and left. We don’t speak until we reach the private elevator, and even then, the silence is thick enough to have a pulse.
The doors close, and the car begins to descend. Kai glances at me once. “You didn’t sleep.”
It isn’t a question. He knows the answer before he even says it. I keep my eyes on the mirrored doors, watching my reflection as it stares back in hard lines.
“Neither did you,” I say.
“Occupation hazard of being one of the Pakhan’s right-hand men,” he replies.
Maksim snorts softly. “That’s a very elegant way of saying you’re nosy.”
“I’m thorough,” Kai says without missing a beat.
Under any other circumstances, that might have pulled a real reaction out of me. Today, it barely brushes the surface because my mind is replaying the question I can’t quite believe I asked Vincenzo last night.
Did I love you?
I hadn’t planned to ask that question. How could I?
Nothing had pointed to us being anything other than enemies before.
I went to his room for answers, and maybe for violence if he pushed wrong.
It should have made things easier and confirmed what I’ve told myself since I woke up in his bed at Vintermoor and looked at him with nothing but revulsion.
Instead, he couldn’t even answer me. I don’t understand why that matters so much. It doesn’t make sense—nothing about this makes sense.
The elevator doors slide open into the private lobby, and we move as a unit toward the exit where the cars are waiting. It’s colder than I expected when we step outside. The smell of exhaust mixes with expensive cologne, wet pavement, and cigarette smoke curling from the valet line.
The convoy is already positioned, engines idling as they wait for Maksim to give the command. Kai is beside me, saying something about the revised schedules.
“If we leave now, we’ll clear the city before the traffic thickens. From there, it’s forty minutes to the private terminal. We’ve rotated the route twice already, and our people checked the—”
I stop listening the second I see him.
Vincenzo stands near the valet podium, one hand in his trouser pocket and a cigarette between two fingers of the other.
He exudes old-money elegance in a charcoal suit underneath a black overcoat, slicked-back hair, and appears calm and composed.
Completely different from the drunken wreck I pinned beneath me last night.
Capo de Capi. King of the Five Families. The man I should want dead on principle.
Smoke drifts from his mouth as he turns his head, and his eyes meet mine. It lasts less than a second; maybe not even that long. Just one clean line of sight between us across polished stone and valet attendants. But it’s enough.
Something low in my gut pulls so hard it feels like want sharpened into violence. Not abstract attraction or the kind of admiration a man feels when he sees another man built well, dressed well, and carrying himself with the kind of lethal ease that reads across any room.
This is visceral.
The kind of attraction that pisses me off because it arrives with recognition attached, with that same old sick certainty that I know him in places my conscious mind cannot access.
Did I love you?
The answer is already under my skin, and I fucking hate him for that. His expression hits me harder now in daylight than it did in the dark. It’s a look so stripped down and broken that I want to look away—but I can’t.
Why? Why the hell does it do that to me?
He flicks the ash off his cigarette with the barest movement of his fingers. I catch the line of the cut at his throat even from here. He didn’t even bother to cover it. The mark of my impatience, and proof that some part of me still wanted to see if he would bleed the same as everyone else.
The spell breaks when Lucien steps up next to him and whispers something in his ear. I don’t bother to stay and watch, already moving to the main car by the time Kai realizes I’ve stopped listening.
Maksim opens the rear door of the SUV, and I slide in first, with Kai following me into the back seat. Then he circles around to the driver’s side, and the engine hums deeper when he puts it into gear, pulling away from the curb with smooth precision.
Kai picks up right where he left off, because of course he does.
“—secondary route to the airfield in case there’s media spillover from the summit, though I doubt anyone’s stupid enough to leak before the next round.
Reyes wants another call this evening. Byrne asked for updated numbers on the port access, and King—”
“What happened between Vincenzo and me at Vintermoor?”
Maksim’s hands jerk on the wheel, and the SUV swerves for a second before he corrects it instantly, muttering a curse in Russian under his breath. The silence drops so heavily, it feels manufactured.
Kai turns his head slowly to look at me, and for the first time in a very long time, I see him genuinely caught off guard.
Dumbfounded isn’t a word I’d ever use for Kai casually.
He’s too disciplined with his own responses, too practiced at swallowing a reaction before it reaches the surface.
But right now, something in his face has gone unguarded by a fraction, and that fraction might as well be a confession.
There it is.
There’s the fucking corpse under the floorboards.
That is how I know I’m right. Not about the specifics; I still don’t have those.
I have dreams and complicated emotions about a man I should hate, who, for all intents and purposes, is my enemy.
But I’m right about the fact that something did happen between Vincenzo and me.
Something far bigger than carefully scrubbed reports and clipped phrases Ruslan throws at me.
The fact that Maksim swerved is one thing—he’s always more emotional than his brother could ever be. But the way Kai is looking at me tells me more than any files ever could.
I hold his stare, but he recovers quickly. The shock drains from his face, replaced by caution so immediate it would be impressive if it didn’t make me want to put my fist through the window.
“Where is this coming from?” he asks, and that’s his mistake. Not denial or ‘nothing happened,’ just an attempt to move the conversation elsewhere.
I smile without humor. “That’s what you’ve got?”
“You’re asking the wrong questions in the wrong environment,” he responds, and my gaze flicks to Maksim, where he watches me in the rearview mirror.
His shoulders are tight, but he knows something, which makes my temper go from simmering to dangerous in the space of a breath.
“Answer me,” I say.
Kai’s voice stays level when he says, “Not in the car.” And it only makes me angrier.
“I swear to fucking god, if you don’t speak right fucking now,” I say through gritted teeth before closing my eyes and trying to rein in my anger. It won’t be helpful right now. I lean back against the leather seat, drumming my fingers against my knee once. “What did Arseniy tell you not to say?”
Kai doesn’t blink. “This has nothing to do with Arseniy.”
“That’s the first lie you’ve ever told me badly,” I say with a scoff.
“You all do it. Him, you, Arseniy, when I asked him, Ruslan. I say ‘Vintermoor,’ and suddenly everyone gets selective amnesia. I ask about the lockdown, and I get reports with half the pages stripped. I ask why I remember West Hall A, but not why I ended up in the East Wing fucking recovering, and people act like the question itself is dangerous.”
Kai shakes his head. “Nikolaj—”
“Then I sit across from Vincenzo Vieri for the first time in eight years, and I realize the voice in my dreams is actually his, and even he refuses to tell me why.”
His expression doesn’t change, but his pulse jumps once in his throat. “You went to his room,” he says, and it isn’t a question, either.
I ignore him. “So, I’ll ask again: what happened between us at Vintermoor?”
Kai looks away first. “A great deal happened at Vintermoor.”
I bark out a laugh. “You really want to die being clever?”
“Nikolaj—”
“No. You do not get to use that tone with me right now,” I say, shaking my head. “That’s how bad it is, huh? I thought you both looked surprised at the question, but now that I look at you properly, I can tell you’re both terrified of the answer.”
Kai inhales once through his nose, quietly and in control. “You and Vieri—”
He stops, and that’s worse than silence.
The pressure behind my right eye spikes, but I ignore it out of spite. “Finish the sentence.”
A flash hits me so hard I nearly miss the next turn of the car. Not a full memory, nothing that generous. Just sensation. My own hand knotted in black fabric. A rough wall at my back. Someone breathing hard against my mouth.
Then it’s gone.
Pain follows right after, stabbing through the same eye as always. I curl one hand into a fist against my thigh before either of them can see how hard it lands. The fact that it’s happening now, here, and from one fucking unfinished sentence tells me more than anything else could have.
Kai’s voice stays maddeningly even. “There are things you don’t know because you woke up missing them; that wasn’t your fault.
But the version you woke with wasn’t neutral either.
You came back with very particular pieces intact and others gone.
Everyone around you had to decide what telling you the rest would actually do. ”
“And you decided I should stay ignorant.”
“We decided not to weaponize your amnesia.”
“Against whom?”
They still don’t answer me. I drag a hand over my face, and it settles against my mouth as I laugh softly.
“No wonder he looked utterly fucking broken when I asked him, and it…” I trail off because I can’t finish that without sounding deranged.
It crushed me. It made something in my chest turn over so hard that I felt sick.
It made me want to put the knife down and pull him into my arms, and— “...none of it fucking made sense.”
“No,” Kai says quietly. “It probably wouldn’t.”
“Then explain it.”
He looks caught between loyalty and conscience, and I fucking hate it. “I can’t.”
Wrong fucking answer.
“What do you mean, you can’t?” I ask, my voice dangerously calm now. “Can’t, because Arseniy told you not to? Can’t, because Ruslan would put a bullet in your head? Or can’t, because if you say it out loud, then I’ll know exactly how badly all of you have lied to me?”
Kai’s jaw clenches. “All three.”
Maksim curses quietly again, and that answer rots in the air between us.
All three.
Vindication unfurls inside of me, because if it were small, if it were just another academy rivalry blown out of proportion by trauma, they would have laughed it off years ago.
They would have handed me the files and told me I fought, bled, and nearly died.
End of story. Instead, I have one of my closest men telling me—to my face—that my brother, father, and the people all around me have hidden something so explosive that even years later, saying it could get them killed.
I look at Kai, and all I can think about is how many times he stood right beside me while I asked the wrong questions and let me keep asking them because he decided silence was kindness. Maybe it was.
I don’t care.
I keep going because stopping now would feel like mercy, and I’m fresh out. “When we land, you’re going to bring me every file, report, snapshot, transcript, disciplinary note, medical record, camera pull, and erased scrap of data connected to my time at Vintermoor.”
“Nikolaj, wait—”
I turn my head slowly and look at him, shutting him up. He knows I don’t need to raise my voice. Men pay closer attention when I get quiet.
“When we enter Saint Helena and one page is missing or redacted,” I warn, “if one timestamp has been scrubbed, if one line is blacked out or conveniently corrupted, blood won’t mean a fucking thing to me.”
Maksim’s eyes flash up to the mirror, and Kai goes completely still.
Good. Let them understand exactly what I am saying.
I’m not threatening strangers or some outer circle idiot who skimmed a percentage off my routes.
I’m talking about blood and brotherhood, men who built my empire beside me.
Men who think family buys them forgiveness.
Men who think history, loyalty, and old wounds mean I spare them if they keep choosing for me.
They’re wrong.
“Do you understand me?” I ask.
Kai’s throat works once. “Yes.”
“Then say it.”
He nods. “Yes, I understand, Pakhan.”
The title lands with the weight it should, and I know he’s choosing it deliberately now. Putting rank between us because he knows this conversation has gone past old trust, family, and friendship.
I nod once, and silence fills the SUV once more. Kai doesn’t try to talk again, and we drive in silence.
Last night keeps flashing in my mind, and I press the heel of my hand briefly against my eye.
Why does every instinct in me say there is something sacred and terrible buried under that silence? Why does hearing him say my name sound less like a provocation and more like coming home to a place I can’t remember building?
Yesterday, I walked into Bucharest as the man I’ve been for eight years.
Blade. Pakhan. Weapon turned wildfire. Today, I leave it with a question carved straight through the center of me, a face I can’t stop seeing, and the certainty that everyone who ever claimed to protect me has been standing on the truth with both feet and calling it love.
Fine.
Let’s see how much love survives the excavation.