Chapter 10 #2
We move through time without leaving the mat. Our beds at Vintermoor, the supply closet in the locker room, sneaking through corridors we knew would be empty. The shape of his mouth is older now, and less reckless on the surface, but underneath it is the same certainty.
Every second of the past eight years shrinks into nothing. I remember this, my body remembers this… and worse, so does his.
He makes a sound against my mouth, then kisses me deeper and rougher, as if he’s furious with the relief of it. My fingers tighten in his hair, and his grip of my throat briefly turns possessive instead of controlling.
When he pulls back, it’s only far enough for breath. His forehead rests briefly against mine, chest heaving. “We were always a slow-motion bullet, weren’t we?” he whispers.
The tears hit me so fast, it’s humiliating.
I don’t sob or make a sound, but a tear slips down the side of my face because he said that before.
He said that exact fucking thing once, and I had consciously forgotten it.
My body did not. Hearing it now, older and rougher, slices me open so cleanly I can barely breathe around it.
The shock on his own face is clear; he hadn’t expected the words any more than I expected to hear them. They came out of him from somewhere older than thought, from the same place that made his mouth remember mine and his hands remember how to hold my throat without hurting me.
I swallow hard and answer before I lose my nerve. “Poison in a shared glass.”
He stares down at me like I’ve just reached into his skull and turned the key. “Fuck,” he whispers.
I wipe the tears running down the side of my face. “What did you find out?” I ask because if I don’t anchor us to language right now, I’m going to drag his lips back to mine.
We’re both still breathing hard, and it’s not because of the fistfight we just had.
“I found out what I needed to know,” he says.
I stare at him. “Which is?”
“That I wasn’t losing my fucking mind.”
A laugh breaks out of me before I can stop it, but it’s shaky and bordering on hysteria. “That narrows it down very little.”
His mouth twitches despite everything. “It narrows it down enough.”
He sits back slightly, but he doesn’t get off me, and I’m not about to point that out. Not while the heat of him still pins me to the mat with all the old consequences humming under my skin.
“I went through the files as you suggested,” he says. “There were a lot that they buried. Reports, footage, notes. I saw enough.”
Cold slips through me under the remaining heat. “How much is enough, exactly?”
“Enough to know that we were the problem, and it wasn’t some fucking passing scandal everyone dramatized after the fact.
Enough to know Arseniy tried to pull you out of me and failed because I kept coming back to you,” he says, then his right eye twitches.
“Enough to know you were the one who came for me after Lorenz and Fischer were done with me.”
He says it while looking straight at me, and there’s no accusation in his eyes like there was when he woke up in my bed. “So, you found all that, and came here to confirm a few things?”
“Yes,” he says, and his hand leaves my throat then. He pushes up enough to sit fully over my hips, and it almost makes me curse because our cocks are literally lining up. “I went to see your father last night.”
For a few seconds, I just stare at him as my brain briefly abandons all language. “You did what?”
His expression is unreadable before a little smugness curls in. “I went to see your father at his villa last night.”
I shove at his shoulder, more outraged than effective from underneath him. “Are you out of your fucking mind? What the hell possessed you to do that?”
He chuckles. “You, apparently.”
That should not make me want to kiss him again, but it absolutely does. He must see the shape of the thought across my face, because he looks irritatingly satisfied with himself. “Relax.”
“Don’t tell me to relax after just admitting you broke into my father’s house!”
“Low security standards clearly run in the family.”
I glare up at him. “Is my father still alive?”
Nikolaj chuckles again, far too entertained by my horror. “Yes. The old king is still alive.”
A relieved breath slips out of me, but it’s laced with irritation, which is safer to admit the spike of fear that first hit. My father and I are only just mending our relationship—I cannot lose him now.
“You absolute fucking bastard,” I growl. “What did you say to him? Why did you go there?”
He tilts his head slightly. “That depends on what you mean.”
“Nikolaj.”
There it is again; the effect of his name coming out of my mouth.
It catches him for half a heartbeat, enough to soften his eyes.
“I asked him a few questions about him and my father,” he says casually, as if those words aren’t insane.
“I wanted to know what happened between them and if it’s the same as… ”
His sentence trails off, and it confuses me more. “What are you talking about?”
He closes his eyes and leans forward again, one hand braced by my head, the other splayed across my chest. “My memories are coming back.”
This time, the room really does seem to drop away beneath me, not all at once or even neatly. The sentence feels like standing in a church and hearing the first crack in a stained-glass window you’ve been praying beneath for years.
Beautiful, terrifying, and so fucking dangerous.
“How much of it?” I whisper.
He doesn’t mock me for the way my voice breaks.
“Fragments,” he starts. “Some from the files I read, some from what you said, some from dreams because my head finally decided to stop being such a stubborn cunt once it had enough pieces to work with.” His mouth tightens.
“The library, the chapel, the ball, your room, and mine. The bullet. Not all of it, not even in order, but enough to know what it was.”
Pressure builds behind my eyes all over again, but it’s different from before. Not grief exactly, but not relief, either. I lift one hand to touch the side of his face, and he freezes.
I brush my thumb just beneath the scar over his eye, and he doesn’t pull away. “What did my father say?” I ask softly.
“Enough,” he says, and I decide then that I hate that word. “More than I expected, less than he knows.”
That sounds like Salvatore Vieri.
I close my eyes briefly and let my hand drop. “God help me.”
“Waste of a prayer,” Nikolaj mutters.
I laugh again, because there’s that filthy, impossible mouth again. That refusal to let anything too earnest sit between us without nicking it with sarcasm. My chest hurts so badly it borders on absurd.
“We’re really doing this again?” I say more to myself than to him.
His brows lift slightly. “Doing what?”
“Destroying my peace,” I answer.
That actually gets a grin out of him; the younger one, the one that still has too much boy in it for a man who terrifies sectors. “Your peace was shit, anyway.”
I hum. “My peace was functional.”
“Your peace involved copious amounts of alcohol.”
I consider that and incline my head. “Fair.”
His hand flexes on my chest once—not quite a touch, and not quite a restraint. “You knew I wouldn’t stay gone once I had enough to follow.”
The truth of that statement moves through me viciously. “Yes,” I answer.
He nods once like that answer hurts and satisfies him in equal measure. Then his gaze drops to my mouth, and for one dangerous second, I think he’s going to kiss me again. I’m not sure if either of us will survive that with our remaining common sense intact.
Instead, he leans close enough for his forehead to brush mine once, brief and devastating, and his eyes close for one second. He whispers something low in Russian, and the only word I catch is inevitable.
When they open, there is something in them I haven’t seen directed at me in eight years and had almost convinced myself I’d invented in the first place.
Not softness—Nikolaj was never simple enough for softness without teeth.
But love lived in his face this way once, furious, doomed, and inseparable from violence.
Seeing even the first flicker of it now almost stops my heart.
Then he pushes up and finally gets off me.
The loss of his weight is immediate and offensive.
I stay on the mat for a second longer than necessary, catching my breath, staring at the high black ceiling of the gym while my pulse takes inventory of all the ways my life has just changed without asking permission.
When I sit up, he’s already pulling his shirt back on, not buttoning it yet, tattoos, muscle, and scar still visible through the open front, in ways that should come with medical warnings.
“You break into my gym, assault me, and destabilize the entire foundation of my emotional life,” I tell him. “At minimum, you owe me a proper explanation next time.”
He snorts. “There’ll be a next time?”
I stand and look at him—at the man memory is returning to me piece by jagged piece, at the man who came back through violence, because apparently, we aren’t incapable of any other sort of entrance.
“There was always going to be a next time, Nikolaj,” I say.
He smiles, and the old and new versions of him line up so perfectly, I can barely breathe around seeing it. I watch as he buttons up his shirt because I am a sucker for punishment, then I watch him leave, with my heart sinking.
Nikolaj pauses at the door and looks back at me over his shoulder. “Your guards really are shit, by the way.”
I roll my eyes. “Get out.”
He grins. “Make me.”
That line strikes deep, and I feel the way my expression betrays me. Of course, that too survives the years. Of course we are still us in the worst, most beautiful ways.
“Next time,” I promise.
He nods at that, but I call him back before he can leave. My chest tightens around the next words, because I’m not sure I want to hear the answer. “Was this memory or instinct?”
He’s quiet long enough that I almost think he won’t answer when he turns his back on me and opens the door. “I’m starting to think there was never much of a difference.”
Then he leaves, and the gym feels emptier with his absence than it ever did before he came in.
I stand there in the quiet, breathing hard, lip split, throat still tingling from where his hand held it. Then I press the heel of my palm briefly against my eyes because the tears threaten again, and I have already sacrificed enough dignity for one afternoon.
His memories are coming back.
The sentence moves through me again and again, impossible and real.
And God help me, after everything, after all the ruin and silence and blood, I still want to be something he comes back for.