Chapter 9
nine
Nikolaj
Kai comes into my office carrying my missing life in his hands.
That’s the first thought I have when the door opens without ceremony, and he steps inside, carrying a stack of folders and one encrypted drive on top in a little anti-static case.
I don’t stand or offer him a seat. I stay behind my desk with my hands folded in front of me and watch as he lays the folders out one by one on the dark wood. The sound of paper hitting the desk should be ordinary—it isn’t. Every thud lands somewhere under my ribs.
When he’s done, he straightens up and looks at me. “So, you found them,” I say.
He looks down at the folders. “I always knew where they were.”
That answer would piss me off under any other circumstances. Right now, it barely registers because anger has already moved past hot and into something colder and more dangerous.
“And you still waited,” I say.
His gaze finally lifts to mine. “Yes.”
There’s no apology in his tone; it almost makes me respect him more. Which is irritating enough to make the ache behind my eye pulse harder. “Talk.”
Kai exhales slowly. “When the reports were first buried, Ruslan gave explicit orders that nothing from that period was to be shown to you unless he approved it personally. Arseniy reinforced the order after…” He stops himself, jaw tightening for half a second before he smooths it away. “After you returned.”
“After I came back with holes in my head and everyone suddenly decided silence was mercy,” I say.
He doesn’t deny it. “That was the logic, yes. It was for your own good.”
I laugh once, and it sounds as ugly as it feels. “For my own good.”
“That’s what they said.”
“And what do you think, Kai? Not as my second-in-command, but as family. What do you think about this whole fucking thing?”
Kai inclines his head and sighs as his shoulders drop slightly.
“Later, it stopped being about obedience and started being about uncertainty. You had nothing—no memory of him, or what happened between you two. Every time something surfaced, it caused pain severe enough to drop you. You were unstable after the ambush, even when you pretended otherwise. We were told that giving you the truth too quickly could shatter what had held.”
“What had held,” I say again, hating the sentence. “You make it sound clinical.”
“I’m trying not to make it sentimental.”
“How noble of you.”
Kai’s mouth tightens. “If you want honesty, then take the useful version: we were told silence would keep you functional.”
I tilt my head. “You believed that?”
Another pause before he nods. “I believed we were choosing between two kinds of damage.”
I lean back in the chair and look at my cousin properly—at the man who has stood at my side through blood, coups, executions, bad nights and worse mornings, and the slow evolution of me turning into something Russia’s underground feared more than God.
Then I nod toward the door. “Get out.”
Kai blanches but doesn’t move. “Nikolaj—”
“Now.”
His gaze lingers on me for one beat longer, reading the hollow emotion on my face that I don’t bother to hide because there’s no point anymore. Then he nods once. “If you need—”
“I won’t,” I cut him off.
Resigned acknowledgment flickers in his eyes then, knowing this is a line I’ll hold even if it kills me. Then he turns and leaves without another word, closing the door softly behind him.
The second I’m alone, the room changes. This is important, so I do not reach for alcohol to help numb me. Instead, I sit very still and look at the files until the urge to throw them into the fireplace passes.
The instinct for destruction over understanding almost surprises me—to burn it all, and whatever it would reveal stays unmade. But that’s the old cowardice everyone around me has been practicing for eight years while calling it protection. I am done being protected from my own fucking past.
I reach for the first folder, knowing Kai placed them this way for a reason.
The cover is stamped INTERNAL INCIDENT REVIEW–RESTRICTED ACCESS. Beneath that, in smaller print, VINTERMOOR ACADEMY / EAST-NORTH TENSION SUMMARY / TERM 1 more notably, a cousin of Vincenzo whom I attacked after they tried to ambush me.
The language is sterile and institutional, trying to reduce blood, ego, and obsession into bullet points and timestamps.
Then I hit the first picture titled BATTLE SIMULATION ARC.
We’re both in tactical gear, but I’m straddling Vincenzo in the middle of what looks like a bunker. It’s just the two of us—bloodied and covered in dust, but my face is so close to his that from this angle, we appear to be kissing.
I know that grin on my face, or I knew it once. I’ve seen echoes of it in flashes, in dreams, in those tiny moments where instinct outran memory. Seeing it on my own face in a still image is like being slapped by a ghost.
“What the fuck,” I whisper, and the sound of my own voice startles me.
I grit my teeth and move on to the next report.
East-North Feud. That’s the word they use every time. Feud, conflict, hostility, and retaliatory patterns. Weeks of it. Reports of us lunging across tables, baiting each other in classes, forcing protocol breaches just to get near enough to start something.
I breathe out slowly and reach for the second folder.
This one is thinner, with a black tab featuring the Dragovich crest in the middle and my name—Arseniy’s script—underneath. I know his handwriting the way soldiers know the sound of an incoming shell. I open it, and every muscle in my body goes rigid.
REPROGRAMMING PROTOCOL.
The words sit there in clean block letters, and for a second, the room changes around me. The office disappears, and all I can hear is the rush of blood in my ears and some half-memory of fluorescent lights and a room that smelled like bleach and sweat.
There are pages upon pages in clipped language of strategic damage control. Concern over ideological drift, mission compromise, and emotional entanglement with the Vieri heir. Recommendations for corrective isolation, psychological pressure, pain conditioning, and family intervention.
Arseniy signed off on all of it.
Below that are the typed-out observation records from the North Wing dungeons, with my name being reduced to a subject.
Subject resistant.
Subject displays hostility when prompted with Vieri trigger.
Subject refuses to reassert mission priority.
Subject exhibits destabilized emotional response under deprivation.
Subject appears to be taking to reprogramming protocol and will be released.
But underneath that in red pen, in Arseniy’s handwriting, is the notation: SUBJECT REMAINS COMPROMISED.
My grip tightens hard enough on the page that it nearly tears. Compromised—that’s what they called it.
A memory hits quick and fucking incomplete.
Cold stone under my knees. Arseniy’s voice somewhere above me, furious and fraying at the edges in a way I’ve never heard from him before.
Hands on my face, forcing my attention up.
The taste of blood. It vanishes before I can hold it, leaving behind a tremor in my hand and pressure building behind my eye again.
I turn the page and nearly laugh at what it says in Arseniy’s script—PROTOCOL INEFFECTIVE. FAILED. SUBJECT IS TOO DEEPLY ATTACHED.
Attached—not suspected but confirmed. They knew enough to try to carve it out of me. Knew enough to drag me into whatever version of torture my brother could justify as duty, and still failed because by that point, I was already too far gone.
I sit back in the chair and laugh once under my breath because if I don’t, I might put my fist through the desk.
“You arrogant bastard,” I murmur, and I don’t even know if I’m talking to Arseniy, to myself, to the boy in the files, or to the man in Bucharest who looked at me like he’d rather bleed than lie.
There are no details in this folder about what “too deep” means. They didn’t need to define it for the men reading. They already knew.
I set the report aside carefully, because if I don’t handle it with deliberate control, I’m going to tear the thing in half. The pain behind my eye pulses twice, but it isn’t enough to stop me.
I connect the encrypted drive to my laptop, and a folder appears. Inside are video files, dates, and archive markers.
I click the one labeled “LIbrARY—INTERNAL CAM.”
The timestamp says it’s just after four in the morning. The angle is high and slightly tilted, the view partially obscured by rows of shelves, but it catches enough.
It catches Vincenzo walking into the frame, me turning into the aisle like I came there to hunt him, then I slam him into the shelves.