Chapter 9 #2
Younger me does not hesitate. One hand goes to his throat, the other grips his shirt hard enough that, even on the footage, I see fabric pull and tear. Books spill above us in a scattered black-and-white blur, hitting the floor around our shoes like debris after an explosion.
The file’s sound is compressed, voices muffled by distance, yet every broken syllable hits like a hammer—Vincenzo gasping “merda” while I slam him hard enough to rattle an entire fucking aisle.
My own voice is low and surgical, promising to put a Beretta down his throat, threats spat in a Russian-lilted growl I barely believe belongs to me.
The man I am now keeps his violence clean, efficient, and never mixes it with sex or sentiment.
But on-screen I’m vicious and intimate and all over him, hand locked around his windpipe the way a lover might wear a ring, mouth hovering like I can’t decide whether to bite or bless.
Watching it feels obscene, like I’m spying on a version of myself no one warned me existed.
My younger self crashes his mouth into Vincenzo’s with enough violence to be punishment, and Vincenzo does not shove me away. He bites back, grips harder, and pulls me closer.
I press two fingers to my temple and keep watching anyway because stopping now feels like cowardice, and I am done being protected from myself.
The camera catches my face full-on, eyes bright with something hotter than hate, and fuck, I look feral—hair longer, mouth bloody, pupils blown wide like a junkie hooked on vengeance.
I watch my past self grind a thigh between Vincenzo’s legs until his breath shatters, watch him retaliate with teeth and claws, see the way our hips find an ugly, desperate rhythm.
A pulse of heat sparks low in my balls, and it makes me want to punch the nearest wall because arousal is the last reaction I should have to a memory I don’t fucking own.
For several seconds, I stare.
This is what I keep remembering—this library scene. What the fuck. It feels invasive watching my own body know something my mind is still locked away from.
At some point, weapons appear.
My heart gives one hard, brutal thud when I see it—a shift so sudden and yet so practiced that it makes my skin go cold. There’s a heartbeat stare-down that ends with both of us dropping steel as if bullets are nothing compared to whatever charge flares when our mouths crash again.
We’re on each other like starving animals, rutting through clothes, swearing and bleeding and chasing orgasms like it’s a goddamn religion.
I should be repulsed that I ever let an enemy get that close, that I rubbed against him like a fucking dog in heat right there in a public library.
Yet every brutal kiss on the footage looks like inevitability, every threat like a promise we both knew would get broken a hundred times over before we figured out how to survive each other.
“We were always a slow-motion bullet,” I whisper, and the words come out before I know where they came from.
I close that video and sit in absolute silence for a full minute, hearing nothing but my own pulse and the whisper of the ventilation system.
The next video is tagged CHARITY BALL / MASKED EVENT / RESTRICTED CAMERAS.
The ballroom appears first—masks, formalwear, candlelight. The camera catches the edge of the crowd and part of a drinks station. Vincenzo is in black, wearing a mask, shoulders squared, talking to a woman next to him.
Then I see my younger self cutting through the crowd toward him and knocking the glass out of his hand before he can lift it to his mouth.
Poison—the file notes confirm it. Attempted poisoning intercepted by Dragovich heir. Suspected source undetermined. Internal inquiry buried by mutual family request.
The next clip finds us on the balcony outside, but the footage is too grainy for me to see what’s going on. We’re arguing, but I can’t really tell what about, so I stop the clip.
The next folder on my desk contains almost nothing about our supposed feud, just that it stopped abruptly after the masked ball—but there are stills and hallway reports that prove otherwise.
That’s what finally destroys any lingering illusion I might have had that whatever happened between us was brief or accidental. It’s not one or two incidents or an isolated lapse in judgment.
It was weeks.
Repeated unauthorized entry by both subjects.
No security challenge issued per senior orders.
Pattern suggests covert meetings.
Staff are instructed not to interfere unless violence is audible.
One handwritten annotation states: Nothing audible. Usually leave separately before dawn. Once, not at all.
We were sneaking into each other’s rooms for weeks, and everyone knew.
I reach for the last folder, already knowing what it is. It’s darker than the rest, marked after the ambush with a red internal flag.
The first few pages are medical. Dragna assault. Severe physical trauma. Multiple cranial impacts. Possible memory destabilization. Subject semi-conscious upon retrieval. Family extraction requested. Restricted handling only.
Then I see the attached stills, and I stop.
I’m on the ground, half-curled and bloodied, barely even recognizable. But even still, the image captures how bad it was: one side of my face is ruined with blood, my clothes are torn, and there’s too much blood on the floor.
The next few stills are Vincenzo running into the frame—no hesitation, no backups, no armed detail or theatrical caution.
Just him arriving at speed, dropping down hard to his knees beside me, hands on me, immediately checking my pulse.
His mouth is moving, and his face in the still is the worst part.
It’s terror, fury, and grief all at once.
Stripped raw enough to be nearly unrecognizable as the composed king he later becomes.
I swallow and turn to the next page. Another still where he’s hauling me up and fucking carrying me bridal style, and the last still is Vincenzo going through what seems like a secret passage with me in his arms. There are notes attached to the images from the archive analyst.
Vieri heir retrieved subject before Dragna clean-up team returned to the scene.
Vieri heir transported subject to secured East Wing location.
Subject remained in Vieri heir’s room prior to family extraction.
I stare at the page until the words stop behaving like language.
Vincenzo found me after they were done with me, carried me to safety through a hidden passage, and put me in his own room until Arseniy arrived.
“Fuck,” I choke out again and get to my feet. I stand with one hand braced on the desk, and the other pressed hard against my head while the evidence of my own missing life lies open before me like an autopsy.
Pinned to walls. Kissing in libraries. Saving from poison. Sneaking into each other’s rooms. Failed reprogramming because I was already in too deep. But that reprogramming seemed to have kicked in after the Dragna ambush. My mind could only take so much trauma before it shattered.
The pain behind my eye detonates.
There’s no warning this time, no gentle pulse, no tightening at the temple before the blade drops.
It explodes white-hot through my skull so violently that the room tips beneath me.
My hand knocks the laptop as I fall, and it skids off the desk, crashing somewhere beside me with a crack that sounds far away and underwater.
I hit my knees hard enough to feel the jolt through bone, but it’s nothing compared to the agony ripping through my head.
This time, I cry out. I fucking hate that I do, but there is no pride inside pain like this.
It tears the sound out of me raw and involuntary, punches the breath from my lungs, and for one blind second, all I can do is clutch my head and try not to vomit from the force of it.
The world goes white at the edges, then black at the center, then floods with images that aren’t images so much as memories coming back with their hands around my throat.
The sound of boots on a chapel floor.
A blade in my hand.
A throat bared.
“It ends with your name in my mouth, or mine in yours.”
Vincenzo leaning against a balustrade while talking on the phone.
“Don’t make a sound—”
A bullet pressed into his hand. My fingers closing his around it because I needed him to understand, needed him to fucking understand what he had done to me.
“...was sent here to kill you and earn my stars—”
Hands in my hair.
“....me choose between loving you and surviving you.”
My chest being carved by Arseniy, the bite of the blade, rage, humiliation, and heartbreak twisting inside me until I can barely breathe through it—“You do not bleed for him. You bleed for us!”
There’s no putting memory back now that the first cracks have split all the way through. That’s what I understand as I fall onto my side and curl around the agony splitting my skull open from the inside.
You can bury a thing alive and call it mercy, but when it starts clawing its way out, it won’t come gently. It comes angry, and it comes starving. It comes covered in every year you stole from it.
The office door slams open, and I hear footsteps.
“Nikolaj!”
Kai’s voice.
I hear him, but I can’t see through the pain, and I can’t answer. I can’t do anything except clutch at my head with one hand and reach blindly for the desk with the other, like there might be something solid enough in the room to keep me anchored while the past floods through me.
He came for me.
After the Dragna were done with me, after whatever they did, after blood and betrayal and whatever damage cracked my mind open enough to lose him, Vincenzo came for me.
Not Arseniy, my father, or even my cousins.
Him. The enemy. The boy I was sent to kill.
The man who had carried me bleeding through hidden passages and put me somewhere safe.
The man who stood there after I opened my eyes with half my life missing and watched me become a stranger who knew only how to despise him.
Everything he said in that hotel was true: I did choose him before.
Not in some vague emotional drift that everyone later exaggerated into tragedy.
I chose him actively, repeatedly, in corridors and libraries and locked rooms and on a terrace with poison in the air.
I chose him enough that Arseniy tried to cut it out of me.
I loved him.
A terrible sound starts in my chest. For one wild second, I think I’m about to be sick. It turns into a laugh instead, broken and furious enough to border on grief.
“You all knew,” I growl, though I don’t know if Kai can hear me through the blood roaring in my ears. “All of you! You all fucking knew!”
Every bastard who stood around me while I bled and healed and tore whole families apart with a hole where he used to be.
Vincenzo knew, too, of course, but he carried it alone because I made him do it.
Because I looked at him in that bed and saw a name, a bloodline, an enemy, and none of the reasons my body must have once known to trust the shape of him.
Did I love you?
He loved me, and I left him there eight years ago with nothing but the memory of what we used to be.
As I hear Kai call for a medic, and my vision starts to fade, I understand at last why everyone was careful when his name came up.
Because this was never just a feud, it was a fucking love story.
And they buried it alive.