Chapter 16
sixteen
Nikolaj
I’m shaking with fury watching Vincenzo across the ballroom.
Not visibly—I’m not a fucking amateur. From a distance, I probably still look composed enough to terrify waiters and bore diplomats. One hand in my pocket, the other curling too tightly around an untouched replacement glass I have no intention of drinking from.
But under the tuxedo, the polished posture and the cultivated stillness I’ve spent years refining into something other men mistake for control, I’m vibrating with it.
Every muscle in me is locked so hard it hurts.
My jaw aches, and my pulse feels like a live wire under my skin.
I can still see his hand on her waist every time I blink.
That’s the worst part.
Not that he touched her. He’s married—publicly and politically. I knew that long before the summit, and long before the files. Long before the gym, the kitchen, and the five-month silence I asked for like a man with any fucking business pretending distance could fix what we are.
I know who Arabella is and what she means in the structure of his life. I know how our world works. I know all of that with the kind of rational clarity I bring to every problem that should be simple.
This is not simple because knowing something and seeing it are two very different kinds of injury.
He wanted me to watch and see it. He wanted to drag his hand over someone else while looking straight at me and watch whether I bled.
The answer, apparently, is yes.
If that was a lesson in patience, I’m done learning.
Vincenzo lasts another eighteen minutes before he excuses himself from the cluster surrounding Arabella. He doesn’t look at me when he leaves; he doesn’t need to since he knows I’m watching.
He slips through the crowd with the smooth efficiency of a man leaving without drawing attention.
Toward the side corridor.
Toward the private restrooms and the quieter wing where donors go to make discreet calls, fix lipstick, or fuck people they shouldn’t.
I don’t go after him immediately; that would be too obvious. However badly I want to drag him out of the center of the room by his throat, I’m not stupid enough to do it in front of half the ruling rot of Europe.
So, I wait. I stand there with my glass, ignore Kai’s look, and watch the room the way men watch battlefields when they already know where the bodies are going to fall.
“Nikolaj.”
Kai’s voice cuts in hard, and I drag my gaze off the dance floor to look at him.
His expression is the exact opposite of helpful. Calm, dry, exasperated in a way that would be funny if my blood didn’t feel like it was trying to burn straight through my skin.
“Whatever you’re thinking,” he says quietly, “the answer is no.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You didn’t need to. Your face is practically a manifesto.”
“I’m going to kill him,” I say.
Kai glances at me. “No, you’re not.”
The certainty in his voice annoys me almost as much as the truth of it.
I set the fresh glass down untouched before I put it through a wall, too. “He wants to see how far he can push.”
“And?”
“And I’m going to teach him not to.”
Kai exhales slowly through his nose. “By doing what, exactly. Causing a diplomatic incident at a charity gala full of cameras and old money?”
“No,” I say. “By reminding him that he doesn’t get to wave my own history in my face and then pretend he’s shocked when I react.”
That earns me one of those long, suffering looks only Kai can manage without it turning theatrical. “Your issue is not that he’s pretending to be shocked.”
“No,” I say, too calm now. “It isn’t.”
My body moves before I consciously decide to.
The corridor is quieter than the ballroom by design, a spillover space dressed in soft gold lighting, framed mirrors, and rich carpet meant to absorb sound and scandal in equal measure. The bathrooms are farther down, but I don’t head there directly.
There’s a side salon halfway down the corridor used for private donor meetings and emergency storage when event staff need a place to hide flowers, gift baskets, or badly behaved board members.
Tonight it’s empty—I know because I checked on the way in.
Vincenzo slowly rounds the corner near the salon entrance, and I’m already there waiting. His eyes meet mine for one second, and he has just enough time to look pleased with himself before I catch him by the arm and haul him through the nearest door.
He doesn’t resist, and that nearly drives me through the fucking floor.
The room is dim compared to the corridor, lit by one low lamp and whatever light sneaks in from under the door to the hall. Small. Private. A sofa. Two chairs. A narrow drinks cart nobody has touched. Enough space for the kind of conversation respectable men deny ever having.
The second the door shuts behind us, Vincenzo turns in my grip. “You’re in a mood,” he says.
I let go of his arm only to shove him back against the closed door hard enough to make it rattle. “You think?”
His dark eyes move over my face, taking inventory. I’m close enough to smell the expensive cologne on him, mixed with champagne and the faint trace of Arabella’s perfume at his collar. That last part almost sets me off all over again.
“I think,” he says carefully, “that you’re in a mood.”
I bare my teeth. “A mood.”
“Mhm.”
I plant one hand beside his head against the door and lean in close enough that he loses a little of the smugness. “You’re enjoying this too much.”
“Watching you lose your composure because I touched my wife?” His brows lift. “It’s one of your most charming qualities.”
I let out a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. “You think this is funny.”
“I think you’re jealous.”
The bluntness of it catches in the air between us. “You don’t get to exploit my weakness and call it entertainment.”
His expression changes; the mockery eases at the edges, not gone, but sharpened by something more real underneath. “Exploit your weakness. Is that what I am now?”
I stare at him. “You know exactly what I mean.”
“No,” he says, and now there’s steel under the silk of his voice. “I know exactly what you think you mean.”
I drag my hand from his arm to the side of his throat and hold him there, not squeezing yet, just pinning him in place with the promise of it.
The contact changes his breathing immediately. He tries to hide it and fails. That knowledge gives me a dark little spike of satisfaction I don’t bother denying.
“Don’t play with me, Vincenzo.”
“You told me to stay away.”
“And that means you get to wave your wife in front of me like a challenge?”
A real crack appears in him then, quick and mean and deeply familiar. “You’ve had five months to decide what I am to you. Now you’re angry because I let you see what my life looks like when I’m not standing in your kitchen waiting for permission.”
I tighten my hand at his throat a fraction without thinking.
His lashes lower for one dangerous second before he schools his face again.
“You think this is about wounded pride? You think I watched you let another woman drape herself all over what’s mine and felt anything small enough to call it that? ”
His eyes darken immediately. “What’s yours?” he repeats, and now he’s angry too, beautiful and venomous and finally speaking in a language I understand. “That’s rich coming from the man who asked me to stay away and then took five months to decide whether what we had was worth the inconvenience.”
My jaw locks. “It wasn’t inconvenient.”
“No?” His smile is gone now, burned clean off by the heat under his words. “What was it then, a strategic pause? A diplomatic review? Because from where I was standing, it looked an awful lot like you telling me to leave and then acting surprised when I actually listened.”
“You think that was easy?”
He laughs then, and there’s nothing amused in it.
“You want to talk to me about easy? I’ve been the only one in constant agony for eight years.
Eight years, Nikolaj. You woke up in my bed, looked at me like I was filth, and then I got to spend almost a decade remembering enough love for two people while you looked at me and saw an enemy.
So no, I don’t particularly care how difficult five months of honesty were for you. ”
The words hit hard enough that, for a second, I stop breathing.
I know he’s right; I knew it abstractly. Files, footage, recovered memory, all of it painted the shape of his pain in evidence and implication.
But hearing him say it like that—flat, brutal, and unsentimental—strips the romance off the suffering and leaves only what it really was.
Agony.
Long, quiet, relentless agony. And I did that. Even without choosing it or remembering it, I did that.
I know he’s right, but knowing doesn’t stop the ugly possessive rage clawing under my skin when I picture him touching anyone else. It doesn’t make the sight of her in his arms feel less like a blade dragged slowly across my chest.
“I didn’t ask to forget,” I say.
“No. You didn’t.” He shifts against the door, not trying to escape, but it’s enough to force me to feel the whole length of him where our bodies almost meet. “And I didn’t ask to remember alone.”
That shuts me up because there is nothing clean to say back to that.
I take a good look at him: his tie is still perfect, his eyes are bright with anger and bitterness, hair only slightly mussed from my shove. Arabella’s lipstick didn’t transfer anywhere obvious, which, for some reason, feels like mercy.
He means what he said, every word of it. And I—selfish bastard that I am—want to answer his pain with my own, like that somehow balances the scale.
“You don’t get to use her like that just to see if I still bleed,” I say.
His face twists, shame there now under everything else. “Do you?”
“You know who my heart beats for, Vincenzo,” I answer. “You’ve already got me by the throat in every way that matters.”