Chapter 13
thirteen
Nikolaj
Five months is a long time to be haunted by a man who obeyed you.
It is also long enough to learn exactly how badly a promise can rot you from the inside. Especially when the promise is one you made to the only person who has ever had the power to ruin your peace with a look.
I asked Vincenzo to stay away, and he did. That’s the part that keeps pissing me off. Not because I wanted him to ignore me; I didn’t.
At least that’s what I keep telling myself when the nights get too quiet and my temper starts prowling the edges of the house because there is no dark-haired Italian bastard in my kitchen drinking my coffee.
I needed the space. I know that. I needed time with the truth before I did something stupid with it. Time to let the memories come back however they wanted, instead of forcing them through a wound that still wasn’t done bleeding.
I asked for distance because I knew that if he kept showing up, I would’ve folded.
I couldn’t afford that. So yes, I asked him to stay away. And because Vincenzo is still the kind of man who can gut you with obedience as efficiently as he ever did with a blade, he listened.
At first, I was relieved.
Then I was irritated.
Then quietly furious at him for being decent enough to give me what I demanded, when I wanted him to ignore my request and come anyway.
He respected the line, and that’s somehow been harder to live with than if he’d trampled it.
I stood in that kitchen like a fucking martyr when every brutal, selfish part of me wanted to drag him back, bend him over the counter, and prove we still knew how to ruin each other with our eyes open.
I hated having enough control to do the right thing.
I have never been fond of control when it costs me something I want.
And I do want him.
That is the truth I have spent five months carving into something I can look at without flinching.
I want Vincenzo Vieri. I wanted him then, and I want him now. Memory loss, war, title, blood, political union, family history, and every old rule written by dead men can go fuck themselves in whichever order seems most convenient.
The wanting returned first through the body, because the body is a traitor and remembered him long before my mind stopped being stubborn. His mouth, his throat, and the weight of him under me. The exact pitch of his voice when he says my name.
Then the wanting started finding roots in memory. A library, a chapel, his bed, and mine. Terraces. His hand in my hair. My own laughter against his neck, shocked and young and too alive.
Some mornings I wake hard, angry, and aching with his taste still in my mouth. That makes no sense because he hasn’t been near me in five months, but my body still hasn’t accepted that fact.
The bullet came back in two separate memories: when I carved it, and when he found it in my drawer.
I had to sit down after that one.
Maksim found me ten minutes later in the lower armory with the lights off and a pistol half disassembled in front of me, staring at nothing.
He took one look, turned around, and told the men outside that anyone who came in for the next hour would leave missing something useful.
Then he came back, sat on a crate across from me, and said, “Memory kicking your ass again?”
I told him to fuck off.
He did not fuck off.
That’s loyalty, apparently. Annoying and difficult to kill.
The feelings have come back, too, which is worse than memory in every meaningful way.
Memory at least has structure. Feelings are treason dressed in heat.
They don’t care that I’m Pakhan or that he’s Capo dei Capi.
They don’t care that my family name and his were raised across from each other like loaded guns.
They return without permission, sliding under the doors I closed and making themselves comfortable in the rooms I thought I’d burned out years ago.
I can now say without flinching that I loved him—that part is done. Fact. History. Evidence.
The harder part is that I still do.
Not in the simplistic, sentimental way weaker men mean it when they speak of old lovers with softened eyes and selective memory.
What I feel for Vincenzo is not soft; it never was.
It is violent, possessive, furious, inconvenient, and alive with teeth.
It comes with grief attached, with the ugly ache of every year I spent walking through the world with a missing organ and mistaking the emptiness for ambition.
It comes with rage, too, because he remembered. He remembered every second I lost. He built his life around absence, while I built mine around a lie other people called survival.
Sometimes that thought makes me want to go to him. Sometimes it makes me want to kill every man who decided silence was a mercy.
Which brings me back to my father.
Ruslan Dragovich is not easy to hate. That’s the fucking problem.
If he’d simply been cruel, if he’d decided the son he made had no right to his own history because power mattered more than personhood, then hating him would be clean.
But it isn’t clean. I know the shape of his damage and what Salvatore did to him. I know what losing him did, what being exiled and gutted by love did to the man who raised me.
Ruslan knew what it meant to love a Vieri and barely survive it. He saw his own disaster wearing my face and didn’t want to watch his son become a mirror. So no, I cannot hate him as much as I want. That might be the most annoying part.
Understanding is not forgiveness; I have learned that much.
Understanding why a man places a hand over your mouth does not change the fact that you suffocated.
Understanding why your father buried the past does not give you back the years spent walking over the grave without knowing what was beneath your feet.
I can understand Ruslan’s fear and can’t really hate him for wanting to spare me his pain. I can, however, be furious that he thought he had the right to do so. That is the distinction I’ve been living inside for months.
The irony is that Ruslan has become my confidant.
For most of my life, my father was not a man I confided in. He was authority, disappointment, strategy, tradition, and old Bratva cruelty dressed in the expensive coat of discipline.
Then I became Pakhan, he retired to Kolomna, to the modest villa he had kept since before the family’s exile from the Five Families. It’s a small, stubborn place that did not fit the scale of his name.
Nothing grand or marble enough to impress cowards. A villa with old walls, a garden he pretends not to care about, a terrace where he drinks vodka in winter, and four rooms. He went there after I took over, and slowly, insultingly, became easier to speak to once he no longer had a throne under him.
Maybe men become honest only after power stops needing them. Or maybe I only started listening once I had enough power not to fear what honesty could cost.
Either way, I find myself thinking of him more often now when the memories come back too sharply.
He knows what it is to love the wrong man.
He knows what it is to let politics turn a heart into a crime scene.
He knows what it is to lose and keep living in a way that looks like strength from far away and misery up close.
I need to see him. Not Ruslan Dragovich, the retired Pakhan. Not the old wolf who still makes men twice my size lower their voices when he enters a room. Not the architect of half my damage and the keeper of secrets that shaped my life without permission.
My father.
The decision comes while I’m sitting in my office at Saint Helena with a half-open folder on my desk and a memory of Vincenzo’s mouth making it impossible to read anything else.
The document in front of me is about border taxation and weapons movement through a minor corridor in the north, nothing urgent enough to justify the three times I’ve read the same line without absorbing it.
A fire burns low in the hearth because the old stone never really warms. My phone sits face down beside the folder. I know if I turn it over, there will be no message from Vincenzo.
Obedient bastard.
My hand tightens around the pen until it creaks, then I throw it across the office. It hits the opposite wall and drops behind the side table with a pathetic little clatter.
A knock lands on the door almost immediately, and I know it’s Kai. The man can hear a mood change through stone.
“Enter,” I say.
He steps in, gaze moving first to me, then to the folder, then toward where the pen lays. “Difficult contract?”
“Fuck off.” I stand and button my jacket. “I’m going to Kolomna.”
Kai doesn’t ask why. That’s one of the reasons he’s still alive and trusted despite the lies he once helped perpetuate. His gaze does sharpen, though, enough to tell me he understands this isn’t routine.
“Now?”
“No, Kai, next spring,” I say, watching his lips twitch. “Yes, now.”
He nods. “I’ll arrange the car.”
“No convoy.”
His expression turns flat. “No.”
I look at him, but he simply looks back. This is the problem with competent men. They form opinions and then stand by them.
“I’m not arriving at my father’s villa like I’m invading a small country,” I say.
“You are currently in a mood where invading a small country isn’t impossible,” he replies.
“I’m touched by your faith in my ambition.”
“Take two cars.”
“One.”
“Two.”
I stare at him for several seconds, then let out a hard breath. “Fine. But no visible show.”
Kai nods once, accepting the compromise because he knows better than to chase victory past the point of usefulness. “Maksim?”
“No. I need to talk to my father, not stage an intervention involving the entire circus.”
Kai’s expression softens by a fraction, which is how he displays concern when he doesn’t want his teeth kicked in for it. “Understood.”
An hour later, I’m in the back of an armored car heading toward Kolomna under a sky thick with low clouds and no stars.
The drive is long enough for regret to try several arguments and lose them all.
I watch the city thin into quieter roads and the heavy shape of estates giving way to darker stretches of land. Russia always looks more honest at night; less polished and less interested in pretending history has been kind to anyone.
The closer we get to Kolomna, the more the pressure in my chest changes. The restlessness of Saint Helena gives way to something heavier and older.
Childhood lives in these roads in ways I rarely invite. Memories of being driven to houses where adults discussed bloodline and duty over tea while children learned how to stand still and listen.
Arseniy beside me, already carrying himself like the shield he was bred to be. Tatiana, small and bright-eyed, watching everything. Me with fury in my bones before I had a name for it.
Arseniy. That thought cuts deeper than expected tonight.
My brother, my judge, and my executioner in all but title for most of our lives. The man who loved me in that Dragovich way. Which is to say brutally, strategically, half like a sibling and half like a commander assessing whether his blade is sharp enough to survive another campaign.
He walked away from the family after I killed his wife and unborn child. Even in my own head, the sentence sits wrong.
There are ways to spin the story that sound cleaner: treason, conspiracy, internal threat, and betrayal at a level that required immediate removal.
All of that is true. Arseniy’s wife was treasonous.
She and the child she carried had become leverage in a game that would have gutted the family from within if I’d let it breathe.
I made the call as Pakhan and did what I believed had to be done. No reluctance. No appeal. No room left for sentiment because sentiment gets people buried, and I had long since learned how ugly survival becomes once you stop pretending otherwise.
Arseniy never forgave me, and why would he?
For years, I treated that fracture like I treated everything else: filed it under necessary damage and kept moving. But now, with all this other shit clawing its way back into place, I can’t stop looking at that silence between us and hearing a different question beneath it.
Is this how he felt?
Is this what it was like to look at someone you loved and realize the person standing in front of you is also the thing that gutted your future?
Is this the shape of rage when it can’t quite survive contact with grief?
Is this what it is to lose your blood and still not be able to stop loving the bastard responsible?
I don’t know the answer, and I don’t have the luxury of asking him. Arseniy made sure of that when he walked away and never came back. There is only so much a man can think before he has to either break or move.