Chapter 10
ten
Vincenzo
My private gym sits in the west wing below the terrace level—all black bats, mirrored walls, free weights, and enough steel to flatter a man’s violence back at him. I came down here because I couldn’t focus on work and whiskey would’ve been too easy.
After the last few days, my body either needs exhaustion or destruction, and the bag is the only thing in this house that can take a hit without asking how I’m feeling afterward.
Sweat drips down my spine beneath a black compression shirt, and my wraps are already soaked through at the knuckles.
I’m halfway through the third round on the heavy bag when I feel him.
Not hear…feel. That’s the first humiliation. My body knows him before thought catches up, and every muscle in me tightens at once.
Not in fear, but that old, dangerous instinct that used to take over at Vintermoor whenever Nikolaj entered a room. My blood used to sing with the need to fight him, fuck him, or break my own jaw pretending the difference still mattered.
I stop the bag with one hand and turn. Nikolaj is standing just inside the doorway, and for one stupid, treacherous second, my heart forgets how to beat properly.
He’s dressed in black—dark trousers, a black shirt open at the throat, no tie. His hair is not quite as neat as he wears it in boardrooms and, therefore, infinitely more dangerous to my sanity.
I haven’t seen him in over a month.
He doesn’t say anything at first; he just stands there looking at me with those frostbitten eyes. I start unwrapping my fists and have enough time to take in the fact that he came here unannounced and got past my guards—again—before he starts undoing the buttons of his shirt.
I can’t fucking move as I watch him. His eyes stay on mine while his fingers work, and I know exactly what he’s doing to me, because I used to do the same thing to him. Weaponized calm and controlled exposure.
I throw my wraps aside, and because I’m only human, my gaze drops when his shirt parts. I get the full, devastating reality of what time has made of him outside of a suit. I had thought he was massive while clothed, but I was completely underselling the disaster.
He shrugs off his shirt entirely, throws it on the floor, and my mind fucking blanks. I am not proud of the amount of staring I do in the next few seconds.
His shoulders are broader than they used to be, chest heavier, arms thick with the kind of power that doesn’t come from vanity or pretty-boy discipline. It’s from years of using his body like a weapon and making sure it never fails under the weight of what he asks from it.
His waist is still trim, but heavier through the torso than before, abs cut hard beneath skin I know too well and don’t know at all anymore.
He doesn’t have the nipple piercings anymore, and it looks like he finally got his stars.
Tattoos crawl all the way up from his fingertips, licking over the top of his chest and climbing to the sides of his neck in dark, elegant violence.
And because the universe is a vicious cunt with a terrible sense of timing, my gaze catches on the old scar over his heart—duty. The word looks even more cruel on grown muscle than it did while it was still healing.
My ogling lasts exactly long enough to disgrace me before he moves with no warning, no speech, and no preamble. Nikolaj rushes at me with all the force of a man who has finally run out of reasons to stand still. Instinct takes over before thought can catch its breath.
I pivot just as he reaches me, his fist already coming in hot and fast toward my jaw. It clips the side of my face hard enough to ring my head anyway. I answer with a hook to his ribs that lands solid and earns a sharp grunt.
Then we’re in it, and it’s not graceful—it never was with us.
He comes at me like he always used to: full commitment, no half-measures, every strike built to either connect or create an opening for the next one. I’ve forgotten how fast he is at this range, even with his mass.
Or maybe I haven’t forgotten. Maybe my body remembers before my dignity can pretend otherwise, because I slip one of his punches and counter low to the kidney without needing to think about it. He takes it, grins despite himself, and drives forward harder.
“Your guards are fucking useless, Your Highness,” he says as he swings again.
I block, absorb, and return a shot straight to his mouth. “And yet you still had to take off your shirt to distract me before starting.”
He laughs through the hit and kicks for the back of my knee, but I sidestep, catch his wrist, and slam him shoulder-first into the nearest padded wall. It barely slows him down. He twists out of my grip and drives a fist into my abdomen hard enough to force the breath out of me in one ugly burst.
We’re matched blow for blow in the old, infuriating way, and that’s what gets me more than the sight of him half naked in my gym. It’s the rhythm of it; the familiarity. I know how he fights and what to expect from him.
The slight drop of his shoulder before he throws left, the way he’ll take a hit if it means getting closer to where he prefers to do damage.
And he knows me too, or enough of me to move like the old map is still in his muscles even if his conscious mind had to claw the route back from fractured memory.
He takes another shot to the jaw, and this time I see it properly—that grin.
Not the Pakhan’s cold, terrible version.
Not even the smug little baring of teeth he gave us at the summit.
This is the old thing—the boyish, infuriating, smug grin from youth.
The one that always used to show up in the middle of our worst fights, the one that always used to get my blood pumping for all the wrong reasons.
My heart trips over itself. “Oh, there’s my Bratva stray,” I say before I can stop myself.
His eyes flash dangerously at that. “Shut the fuck up.”
He lunges on the next breath, overcommits just enough, and I take the opening because I’m still me and some habits survive heartbreak out of sheer meanness.
I catch him around the waist, use his momentum, and send both of us crashing down onto the mats hard enough to jar my teeth. But I roll with it, come up on top, pin his wrist to the floor above his head, and get one knee between his thighs before he can buck me off.
He goes still beneath me for one terrible second. Sweat, heat, breath, and old memory slam together so violently that the gym might as well be my bedroom at Vintermoor.
I force a smirk. “You forget your place, Dragovich.”
The words leave my mouth out of pure instinct; old taunt, older pattern, and Nikolaj’s mouth curves up into that grin again.
“Pretty sure I’m exactly where I want to be.”
We both blanch. It happens at the same time as the recognition of it. Not just the line itself, though there’s something horribly familiar in the cadence. It’s the position of our bodies, my hands on his wrists, his hips under mine—the exact sickening coalescence of present into past.
My grip slackens for one fatal heartbeat, but that’s all he needs.
Nikolaj twists us violently, using my own surprise against me, and the world flips as my back hits the mat. He comes over me in one smooth movement, forearm across my throat, thighs bracketing my hips, and one hand planted beside my head while he catches his breath.
I stare up at him and know I should be more alarmed than I am, but the smell of clove cigarettes makes that fucking hard.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
His chest rises and falls hard above me. Up close like this, he looks even more devastating. Mouth bloodied from my fist, scar over his eye making him look feral and rugged, pupils blown wider than pure violence explains.
“To see something,” he asks.
“And how exactly did you get in?”
His mouth twitches. “Your guards are shit.”
I roll my eyes. “As you’ve mentioned.”
“I like consistency.”
“I’m glad one of us is enjoying the break-in.”
That earns me the smallest exhale of something that might have been laughter in another life. Then I remember the question. “What did you come to see?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, his gaze drags over my face in a way that makes the air between us thicken.
It’s not a casual look or a tactical check; it’s hungrier.
I feel the shift in him before I fully understand it.
The violence is still there, but it’s changed in temperature.
His ice-blue eyes go dark and molten in a way I haven’t seen in years and have never once survived intact.
“Nikolaj…?” I breathe when his arm lifts from my throat, only to be replaced by his hand.
He grips the side of my neck and under my jaw with enough force to make my pulse jump against his palm, then he uses it to drag me up toward him. The move is so sudden, so intimate, so violently familiar, that by the time I understand what’s happening, his mouth is already on mine.
The years collapse—not poetically, or even gently. They cave in all at once.
His kiss hits me like impact, memory, and grief with teeth. There’s nothing tentative about it; no testing or uncertain rediscovery. He kisses me like a man confirming the shape of a loaded gun he once held against his own heart and has finally found it after years of being told it never existed.
My body remembers before my mind can fail us, and I kiss him back with the same terrible fluency.
That’s the part that nearly unmakes me—the familiarity of it. Nothing about this feels rusty. His lower lip caught exactly where I always used to bite it. The angle of his head, the pressure he likes when he wants dominance, and the softer drag when he wants me to answer honestly.
My hand goes to the back of his neck on pure reflex, and his entire body jerks at the contact as if I’ve struck a live wire.