Chapter 22
twenty-two
Nikolaj
The shower should’ve calmed me down.
That’s what showers are supposed to do, aren’t they? Wash the sweat off, steam the ache out of your bones, put enough distance between skin and feeling that a man can start pretending he’s made of something sturdier than want.
It just gave me another place to memorize him. The way Vincenzo’s head tipped back under the hot water when he’s trying not to look too pleased with himself. The way his dark hair slicked off his forehead and left his face open, younger and sharper all at once.
The marks I put on him, dark against tanned skin, all over his throat and collarbones and the dip of his shoulders. Evidence of my hands, my mouth, and my absolute inability to stop once he’s in reach.
Now we’re getting dressed in the low, gold light of the suite, and I’m no calmer than I was with him under me.
Probably worse.
Earlier, he had one of his drivers collect a clean set of armor from his closet back home. Now, he’s buttoning his shirt slowly, hair still damp, mouth still swollen from me in a way that keeps dragging my eyes back to it.
He glances up once and catches me watching. A smile threatens at the corner of his mouth, gentler than the filthy ones from earlier, and that somehow makes this harder.
My chest tightens so fast and so hard that I have to look away and focus on buttoning my own cuffs, because there are only so many times in one morning I’m willing to let my heart act like a fucking teenager before I start finding it insulting.
The room smells like clean soap, coffee, and sex that’s still lingering in the sheets behind us. I pulled on clean black trousers and a shirt of my own because, at some point, reality has to reassert itself, and I’m trying to convince my body of that now with methodical, controlled movements.
Button.
Cuff.
Belt.
Watch.
Silver signet ring on my pinky finger.
King’s clothes. Armor. Something to stand between me and the part of myself that wants to drag him right back into bed and pretend the world can be kept on the other side of a locked door indefinitely.
He glances over at me while fastening his cuff links, and whatever he sees on my face is enough to make his expression shift.
“What is it?” he says.
I shake my head once. “Nothing.”
He gives me a look that says I’m transparent, and he hates it. Then again, he always did know me too well for comfort.
I turn toward the window and pretend I’m studying the skyline, because if I look at him while I ask this, I might not like what I hear. My hands settle on the edge of the console beneath the glass, marble cool under my palms.
“What happens now?” I ask.
The silence behind me isn’t long, but it’s long enough to hurt.
When I turn back, Vincenzo is standing with one cuff still unfastened, his face unreadable in that polished Vieri way that has always meant whatever sits underneath is real enough to need hiding. He sets the cuff link down on the table beside him and looks at me properly.
“That’s the first thing you’re asking.”
“Yes.”
His mouth softens around the edges. “You sound terrified.”
I laugh once, but it’s short and ugly. “That’s because I am.”
There. Fine. Honest. Let him do what he wants with it.
His eyes go darker immediately, some part of him recognizing the cost of that admission. He steps in closer.
“Of what?” he asks quietly.
That this will fade, I think. That now you’ve had a taste of me again, now you’ve gotten back one impossible night, and one stupidly peaceful morning, it’ll start slipping through your fingers.
That what we were will feel larger than what we are, because memory always edits pain better than reality does.
That you’ll go back to being a king and a husband, a son, and a liar in all the ways that matter, and I’ll go back to being Pakhan with blood up to my elbows, and this will turn into one more beautiful thing that couldn’t survive contact with the daylight.
I don’t say all of that. Even now, I have some pride left.
So, I cross my arms over my chest and look at him and say, “That it’ll fizzle out.”
He blinks once. “What?”
I force myself to hold his stare. “This. Us. Whatever the fuck we’re calling it now.
Eight years is a long time to miss something.
Long enough to build it into something bigger in your head than real life can survive.
I’m asking what happens when this stops being a revelation and starts being inconvenient. ”
The words sound colder than they feel. Good. Better that than let him hear the rawer version, which is closer to: I don’t know how to lose you after getting you back.
His face changes by degrees while I’m speaking. Not offended or even hurt. More like he’s trying to decide whether to kiss me or shake me.
Then he lets out a breath through his nose and steps all the way in, close enough that I can smell his cologne faintly under the clean scent from the shower. “You think that’s what this is?”
“What else am I supposed to think?”
He looks almost angry for a second. “Goddamn you.”
Vincenzo reaches out and catches my wrist. “Listen to me,” he says, voice gone low and precise now, the one he uses when he wants me to actually hear him.
“I know we can’t be seen together in public.
Not like this. Not now. Not while everything around us is still made of dry wood and open flames. I know that.”
I nod once. Because yes. Obviously. Even in the middle of all this, even with his mouth on me and his name on my tongue and eight years of grief dissolving under my hands, I know that. The world outside this room is still the world.
“So, we don’t do it in public,” he says. “We do it privately.”
My brows pull together. “Meaning?”
“Meaning we find somewhere neutral. Somewhere between Moscow and Italy. Not yours and not mine. Somewhere no one would think to attach to either of us.”
I look at him. “Somewhere else.”
He nods once and starts fastening his cufflinks with the kind of careful concentration he uses when he’s trying to sound calm through something that matters too much.
I lean back against the dresser behind me, arms loose at my sides, and try not to let the relief show too obviously on my face. It probably does anyway.
“There’s an island,” I say.
The words come out almost lazily, but my mind is already moving.
His hands stop on the cufflink. “An… island.”
“I’ve been looking at buying one for a while.”
That gets a real laugh out of him, bright and startled and so familiar it almost knocks me sideways. “Of course you have.”
I ignore the tone because I’m already picturing it again.
I saw it months ago in a private portfolio Kai put on my desk with other possible acquisition sites.
Small enough not to attract attention, isolated enough to mean privacy, close enough to the right flight paths to be practical, far enough from the usual routes to keep the curious and the ambitious away.
It lodged in the back of my head and never fully left. At the time, I told myself it would make a useful bolt hole. A neutral meeting ground. A place to disappear when Moscow got too loud. Now the idea blooms into something more dangerous.
“It’s in the Adriatic,” I continue. “Far enough south to avoid the usual press traffic, far enough north that no one assumes it belongs to some tech billionaire or politician with taste problems. A villa and small cottage on the cliff, restricted airspace.”
Vincenzo stares at me for a second, then he laughs with that genuine disbelief he only ever gives me when I’ve said something so appallingly Nikolaj that even he needs a second to process the scale of it.
“You cannot buy a whole island,” he says.
I look at him flatly. “Why not?”
That only makes him laugh harder, which is a dangerous sound because it makes me want to cross the room and shut his mouth with mine instead of continuing what should probably count as an important discussion.
“Because,” he says, still smiling, “that’s not how normal men solve logistical problems.”
“I’m not a normal man.”
“That is painfully obvious.”
“Also,” I add, because now I’m already thinking, and once I start, I don’t stop, “it would be easier to secure. Private dock. Airstrip, if we wanted one. Enough distance from anything useful that no one would come sniffing without being invited.”
His eyes widen slightly. “You’re actually serious.”
“Yes.”
“Nikolaj.”
“What?”
He sputters for half a second, actually sputters, which I’m going to hold against him forever because it’s adorable and he knows it. “Because that’s— because people don’t just—Nikolaj, you can’t solve every problem by purchasing a landmass.”
“Again,” I say, completely serious, “why not? I have the money, the means, and the reason.”
He stares at me, then laughs harder, one hand coming up to cover his mouth for a second because, apparently, the idea of me shopping for islands has finally broken him. I’d be offended if his laugh didn’t go through me like sunlight.
He shakes his head and steps away, pacing once because that’s what he does when he’s trying not to grin too much at me.
“We’ll work something out,” he says, still laughing under his breath.
I don’t answer immediately because I’m already doing it. Working it out. Distances. Flight paths. Ownership structures. Shell companies. Supply lines. Security. Climate. Staff.
I’m halfway through deciding which legal name to bury the purchase under and whether a Mediterranean route would be too obvious before I realize he’s watching me with a very particular expression.
“You’re actually making plans,” he says.
“Yes,” I say, my voice flat.
His smile softens, but something more serious settles under it. “Nikolaj. You’re doing the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The one where your face goes blank because you’re building an empire in your head.”
“It wouldn’t be an empire,” I say automatically. “One island.”
That makes him laugh again. “That is not the part of that sentence I’m objecting to.”