Chapter 19
nineteen
Nikolaj
Ilie awake with Vincenzo in my arms and realize sleep was never going to touch me tonight.
The room is dark except for the city bleeding through the curtains in pale strips of silver and gold, enough light to make the edges of things feel real without forcing them into full shape.
The sheets are tangled around our legs. The air still smells like expensive soap, sex, and that faint, sharp cologne of his that always survives everything, even sleep, even the wreckage after.
My body feels used in the best and worst ways, heavy and loose, and still humming under the skin where his mouth, hands, and weight left their mark.
I should be exhausted; I am exhausted. But exhaustion means nothing when the man I’ve spent eight years loving without memory is finally here, finally back in my bed, and trusting me enough to sleep.
That’s the thing I can’t stop staring at.
Vincenzo is asleep.
Not pretending, not drifting with one eye on the door and one hand near a weapon like the king he became while I was busy becoming my own monster.
Actually asleep. Boneless with it. Warm and limp against me, cheek pressed near my shoulder.
He has one arm stretched over my chest as if even unconscious, some part of him still wants to make sure I’m fucking real.
His hair is a mess against the pillow, dark and soft where it falls over his forehead in a way he’d absolutely hate if he knew I was looking at him like this.
His mouth is parted slightly, lips swollen from everything we did to each other tonight, and there’s a bruise already forming low at the side of his throat where I lost patience and then found something much worse instead.
Beautiful doesn’t cover it.
I know that word gets thrown at men like him all the time by people with no imagination and too much distance, but it isn’t enough here. It was never enough with him. Even now, asleep, wrecked, and without that polished Vieri control holding every line of his body together, he looks almost unreal.
Tanned skin, warm even in the dark. Long, elegant lines everywhere that count.
The sort of face painters used to ruin themselves over, and priests would’ve called temptation with a straight face.
I know every inch of him better now than I did this morning, and still it feels impossible that I’m allowed to look.
My gaze drifts down the slope of his back, where he turned partly toward me after, too tired to fully choose a position and trusting me enough not to need one. His back is all cut lines and muscles and old scars, the broad planes of him shifting subtly with each slow breath.
Ink spreads over him in ways that make something possessive in me sit up a little straighter. I trace none of it with my hands because I don’t want to wake him, but my eyes drag over every familiar and new detail anyway.
There’s his own work, older pieces I remember from Vintermoor, and newer ones I don’t, all black and precise and chosen with the same ruthless eye he uses for everything else. And beneath all of it, under the memory of the evening and the wreckage in the sheets, I remember another piece.
My name.
Not Nikolaj in the language the world calls me by now. Not Dragovich. My name in Cyrillic, inked over his heart, as if he took the language of my blood and carved me there years ago while I was busy forgetting the shape of his mouth.
I still haven’t recovered from it. I don’t think I will. The sight of it nearly put me on my knees all over again, even after what already happened when I actually did end up there for him.
All this fucking time, this man loved me while I became Pakhan, while I tore my way through Moscow and Saint Helena and every other territory foolish enough to mistake my emptiness for mercy, while I sat at the head of tables and built an empire on a hole in my own life I couldn’t name.
All this time, he carried me under his skin and over his heart, while playing king beside a wife, a title, and an empire that called him whole because it didn’t know what had been taken.
The thought is enough to make my chest ache.
I slide one hand more securely over the line of his waist and hold him closer, just a fraction, enough to feel the full length of him settle deeper against me.
He makes a soft sound in his sleep, nothing more than a breath with feeling in it, and shifts until his hand spreads more fully over my chest. Right over my heart.
That nearly fucking ends me.
It’s such an unguarded move, so instinctive. No calculation and no performance. I look down at his hand, and that’s when I notice the bare ring finger.
I think back to the ballroom and realize I didn’t see one there either.
I saw the hand at Arabella’s waist, and how well he played his role because he knew I was watching and wanted to get under my skin.
I saw the forehead kiss, the careful body language, and all the expensive grace that made me want to put my fist through crystal. But I did not see a wedding ring.
I study his hand over my heart like the answer might be written there in the tendons and long fingers and the soft slackness of sleep.
My heart feels too full for one body. That’s the only way to put it. Full enough to hurt. Full enough to be terrifying. I am not a man built for this much feeling without consequence.
Love, I know. Obsession, I know even better. Want, grief, possession, rage, devotion sharpened into violence, all of those live within me comfortably enough.
But this quiet fullness, this almost disbelieving tenderness that comes from simply lying here with him breathing slowly against me, that part catches me wrong. Like I swallowed light and now don’t know what the fuck to do with my hands.
I think, not for the first time, about how this can possibly work.
Kings come with eyes on them. Expectations. Structures. Entire networks of men who live and die depending on how we move and what we choose and who we let too close.
Add to that the fact that we are both men, and suddenly the list of things that could get us killed starts reading like a schedule. Even though the Dragovich Bratva has men use their bodies as weapons when needed, no one would accept two kings as their leaders.
Our families might be more complicated now than they were then, our worlds more modern on the surface, but power is old in all the ways that matter. It does not like its lines crossed. It does not like weakness made visible.
And if what existed between us at Vintermoor was enough to set half the adults around us into panic and cover-up, what the fuck happens now if it resurfaces in the open while we’re both sitting on thrones built from other people’s fear?
They’ll kill us. One way or another, if we misstep badly enough, if we let the wrong people see too much too fast, something will come for us.
And here I am, lying in a hotel bed with his hand over my heart, thinking about none of that with the seriousness it deserves because I’m too busy being a fucking sap about the way he breathes in his sleep.
My phone buzzes once on the bedside table. The sound is soft enough not to wake him, but I go still immediately, eyes dropping to his face to make sure. Vincenzo only nestles slightly closer against me, lashes unmoving, mouth still parted in sleep.
Carefully, I reach past him and take the phone off the table. It’s Kai. The man has the timing of a priest at a brothel door.
I open the message one-handed, angling the brightness down so it doesn’t spill onto the bed. The text is blunt in the way Kai’s texts always are when he’s already decided the information matters too much for ceremony.
Kai: No one saw Vieri come in. Floor secure. Separate note—Vieri’s wife appears to be sleeping with Lucien.
I stare at the screen for a second, then I look down at Vincenzo again, then back at the screen. Lucien—his second, his cousin, and his best friend. The one who always looked at me like he knew far too much and preferred pretending not to.
A dark, humorless smile pulls at my mouth.
The irony is almost offensive.
Not that Vincenzo isn’t currently doing the same thing, because he is. He’s in my bed while his wife sleeps elsewhere, and his tongue is still on my skin in places neither of us will be able to ignore tomorrow.
Morally, none of us has the fucking high ground here, but there’s a difference in weight. Arabella’s betrayal has been running under the marriage while he’s spent eight years half dead over me.
And something in me, mean and territorial and still angry over seeing her under his hand tonight, wants him to know exactly what kind of arrangement she’s been building on her side while he’s been dutifully playing king beside her.
Also, I’m petty when it comes to him. That remains true no matter how full my heart feels right now. My thumb hovers over the screen for one second, then I type back with care not to jostle the mattress.
Me: Have him walk into evidence of Arabella’s betrayal.
I pause, but decide not to add anything else because Kai will understand the specifics well enough.
He always does. Not that evidence should be too hard to arrange if the affair is already active.
Lucien is reckless in polished ways, the kind of man who thinks discretion means choosing better hotels.
Arabella is probably no different. Rich people always think privacy is something bought by thread count and NDAs.
I set the phone face down on the nightstand again and look back at Vincenzo, at the line of his mouth softened by sleep, at the dark sweep of lashes on his cheek, at the complete vulnerability of a king who trusts exactly one person in the room enough to pass out half-draped over his body.
“Your wife’s unfaithful,” I murmur to the top of his head, voice too low to wake him. “Which is rich, considering where you are.”
A faint smile threatens at the corner of my mouth despite myself.
The difference, I think, is that what sits between us was there long before the ring, the gala, the wife, and the crowns.
That doesn’t make it clean. It doesn’t make it noble.
But it makes it real in a way that the rest of his marriage clearly isn’t.
I should feel guilty for that text, but I don’t. Maybe I will tomorrow, in the colder light of morning, after coffee and clarity and the long list of practical problems still waiting for us outside this bed. Maybe I’ll decide it was cruel. Maybe it was.
But cruelty has never bothered me much when it serves the truth, and if Vincenzo is going to keep standing beside a wife who calls him husband while sleeping with his second, then he deserves to know exactly how false the ground under his feet has become.
The whole mess makes me want to laugh and break things in equal measure.
Vincenzo shifts against me again, dragging me back out of thought immediately.
His lashes flutter once but do not open.
He exhales a little harder this time, as if he’s swimming near the surface of sleep and hasn’t decided whether the world is worth waking to yet.
His hand over my heart flexes once against my skin, fingers spreading almost unconsciously.
“Stay,” he murmurs.
The word is half asleep, barely formed, but it goes through me like a bullet all the same.
I lower my head and press a kiss to his hairline. “I’m never leaving.”
He settles again with a tiny sound of relief that is so soft no one else would hear it for what it is.
I close my eyes for one second and let the fullness in my chest hurt. Let it burn. Let it remind me that whatever disaster this becomes, whatever blood, scandal, and fury still wait down the road, this part is real.
I don’t know how this works. I don’t know how we survive being kings, men, enemies on paper, and this in truth. I don’t know what happens when he finds out Arabella is unfaithful, and I’m the bastard who arranged for him to walk in on it.
I don’t know whether our families will burn, bow, or do both as the truth of us becomes harder to hide. I don’t know whether we get a future or just a prettier version of the same catastrophe we always were.
Whatever happens next, I’m done letting other people decide what gets buried.
I bend and press my mouth lightly to his hairline once more. He doesn’t wake again, but his fingers curl once against my chest, the hand over my heart tightening in sleep as if even unconscious, he knows exactly where he belongs.
For tonight, that’s enough to keep me awake and grateful until dawn.