Chapter 17
seventeen
Vincenzo
I’m still not fully back in my body by the time I get Arabella into the car.
The gala continues behind us in waves of music, polite applause, and expensive laughter, but it all sounds far away now, like it’s happening underwater or in another century.
My pulse hasn’t settled since Nikolaj was on his knees in front of me with his mouth on me and that look in his eyes that I thought I would die without ever seeing again.
Eight long, ugly, whiskey-soaked years of carrying us alone, and the love of my life looked at me tonight like he remembered exactly why we were doomed, and he still wanted me anyway.
Arabella notices none of this, or if she does, she mistakes it for the usual fatigue that follows events like these. She is flushed with social triumph, diamonds, and donor promises, her mood fully restored by the time the car turns through our gates.
She leans over to kiss my cheek and thank me for the necklace, the evening, the apology, the smoothness of our performance before the room.
I murmur something appropriate in return and let the ritual run its course. She deserves consistency, if not love. She deserves the version of me I’ve always promised her publicly, even if, privately, I have never once belonged here in the way a husband should.
When I drop her at home and watch her disappear up the front steps with her security detail and all that cold, glittering grace, I feel no guilt for what I’m about to do.
That realization should disturb me more than it does. Instead, it lands with the same brutal clarity as everything else has tonight.
Guilt requires uncertainty. I have none left where Nikolaj is concerned.
My King.
He used to call me Prince when we were younger, always with that little curl of mockery that never fully hid the affection under it.
Easy, Prince.
You sleep like one, too.
Say my fucking name, Prince.
There was always an edge to it, a challenge, a tease, something that made me want to bare my teeth and kiss him in the same breath.
Tonight, he said My King, and something inside me gave way.
My hand strays once, involuntarily, to the inside pocket of my jacket where the white-and-gold keycard sits. I can still feel its shape against the fabric. I can still feel the press of his knuckles grazing my heart when he slid it there.
Suite 2103.
Hotel Aurelia.
I go to my dressing room first, close the door, and just stand there for a second with my palms braced on the edge of the long walnut dresser while I breathe like a man trying not to start running before he’s sure he’s meant to.
There’s a mirror in front of me. I look like the same controlled, polished king who left this house earlier tonight to smile for cameras, donors, and rival powers.
My eyes give me away.
There’s too much in them—too much life, too much panic, hope, and the kind of stupid, impossible anticipation I haven’t felt since I was twenty-two and learning the timing of patrol routes in the North Wing so I could slip through the corridors unnoticed.
The comparison hits hard enough to make me smile at my own reflection.
That is what this feels like.
Young. Dangerous. Absolutely not permitted.
My heart is beating the same way it used to back then, all hard knocks and reckless momentum. As if it knows I’m about to go somewhere I shouldn’t. Like it knows the risk and wants the reward anyway.
I change quickly. Dark trousers, black shirt, softer than the starched one from the gala, sleeves that can be rolled if needed.
No jacket and no cufflinks. I leave the first two buttons open because I know he likes it when I stop pretending to armor myself completely.
The thought makes heat flash through me so hard it’s almost humiliating.
“Get a grip,” I mutter to myself, and then laugh under my breath because if I had any grip where Nikolaj is concerned, none of this would exist.
The driver doesn’t ask where I’m going when I hand him the address; he just nods.
Good man. Good enough not to comment when I tell him to wait in the underground garage unless I text otherwise.
Better enough not to look at me too closely when I get out two blocks east of the Aurelia instead and choose to walk the rest of the way alone.
The night air cuts coolly across my face and throat. I’m grateful for it. It gives me something external to blame for the tightness in my skin.
Hotel Aurelia rises ahead of me in pale stone and gold-lit windows, the kind of discreet luxury that pretends not to know exactly what kind of secrets its rented rooms have held over the years.
The lobby staff barely look up when I pass through.
Men like me move in and out of places like this every day, anonymous in the way only wealth and power can afford.
The keycard works after midnight exactly as promised.
Suite 2103 sits at the end of a private corridor thick with carpet and silence. I stand outside the door for half a second longer than necessary, staring at the polished brass numbers while my pulse climbs into my throat.
It’s been too long since the man I love looked at me and saw me whole.
I’ve imagined this a thousand times in worse ways. Not the room, not the hotel, but this feeling. The moment before him. The moment where I’m one knock away from either getting back the love of my life or finding out that memory returning and love surviving are not the same thing at all.
For the first time since I was twenty-two, I think with complete, irrational clarity: I have my heart back.
I raise my hand and knock.
The door opens almost immediately, as if he’s been standing right on the other side of it, which he probably has. Of course, he has. Nikolaj has never been patient when I’m involved. That should comfort me. Instead, it robs me of breath.
My ruin stands there barefoot in black trousers and nothing else, as if he shed the gala skin the second he got back and never bothered to replace it.
The lamplight from inside the suite turns his body into planes of shadow and muscle, catching on the tattoos, the scars, the carved word on his chest, the old X beneath his ear.
His hair falls loose around his face, and his eyes go straight to mine with a look that doesn’t let me breathe properly for the space of a heartbeat.
And there he is—not The Blade, not the Pakhan in his cold church of stone. Not the furious king in a ballroom with shattered glass at his feet. Just my Nikolaj, looking at me like I am the answer to a question he’s been bleeding out over for months.
He doesn’t say a word as his hand catches the front of my shirt, and he yanks me inside with enough force that I barely clear the threshold before the door is kicked shut behind me. Then his mouth is on mine, and every part of me not already ruined by him is lost beyond recovery.
I make a helpless sound into his mouth and feel it turn into a laugh against my lips. Not mocking. Relief. God, the relief of him.
He tastes cleaner than he did at the gala, soap and whiskey and the same dangerous male heat that belongs only to him.
But underneath it is the familiar thing, the one I knew young and should’ve forgotten and never did.
The thing my body has been starving for so long, it no longer knows the difference between hunger and pain.
It is the kind of kiss men trade when they have already lost too much time and know it.
His hand fists in my lapel while the other finds the side of my neck, thumb rough under my jaw, and I go into him like I’ve been dying of thirst since the last time he looked at me properly and only just now reached water.
My hands are in his hair before I consciously decide to put them there, dragging the loose strands completely free, needing to feel something real enough to anchor the force of this.
I make a sound into his mouth that I would be embarrassed by in any other context. He swallows it greedily, kissing me as if he’s punishing me for every day I stayed away and himself for every day he asked me to.
The world is suddenly narrowed to only hands and breath, and the brutal familiarity of his body fitted to mine like eight years was an accounting error we no longer have to honor.
“Nikolaj,” I breathe against his lips.
He answers by kissing me harder.
I let him. God, I let him. My head tips back against the door. His hand leaves my waist just long enough to catch my jaw and turn my face where he wants it, and the authority in the motion makes something bright and unbearable spark under my skin.
He is not gentle, but there’s a care buried deep in the violence of it, a desperation that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with finally being close enough to verify that I’m real, that he’s real, that memory can come back in kisses as well as blood.
When he finally tears his mouth from mine, both of us are breathing like we’ve been running. I can feel the rush of his pulse everywhere our bodies touch.
“You came,” he says, and the words are half statement, half disbelief.
I laugh softly because there are tears springing to the backs of my eyes already, and laughter is the only thing keeping them there.
“You gave me a room number and a keycard, Nikolaj. What exactly did you think was going to happen?”
His mouth brushes mine once, almost absentmindedly, like he can’t quite stop doing it now that I’m here. “I thought maybe you’d make me wait another five months out of spite.”
“I considered it.”
“Liar.”
I stare at him, and my chest aches so hard it feels almost sweet. “You know I’d have come to you anywhere.”
The look in his eyes shifts, darkening with something almost painful in its intensity.
“You look different,” he says.
“So do you.”
A ghost of the old grin pulls at one corner of his mouth. “I meant your eyes.”
Of all the things I expected tonight, that wasn’t one of them. But of course, the love of my life would notice the change in my eyes when no one else could.