Chapter 24
twenty-four
Nikolaj
When I get back to my room at Saint Helena, I smell like gunpowder, blood, and the kind of long night that leaves a bad taste in your mouth even after the bodies are gone.
The monastery is quiet above me, all old stone and false sanctity, the halls dressed in shadow and silence the way only rich, guilty places know how to wear them.
Down here, under it—under the chapel and the polished lies and the expensive restoration—the walls still remember what men like me do when shipments get hit and traitors think distance will save them.
I’ve been dealing with this since dusk. One compromised route, then another. A truck intercepted outside Ryazan, a warehouse lock tampered with, two men missing, one found with his mouth full of his own teeth because he thought saying nothing would somehow make him harder to kill.
By the time the pattern takes shape, I’m already in the car and halfway to the first location with Kai and Maksim beside me, all three of us knowing from the smell of it that this wasn’t random greed or some opportunistic little local crew trying to make a name for itself.
This was organized. Directed. And every ugly line of it points in a direction I do not fucking enjoy.
Vieri.
Not cleanly, not with a signed note and a family seal—nothing that stupid.
But the route timing, the way the pressure came from the west side of the corridor, the rumor chain wrapped around the ports we know the Vieri network has had an interest in for years, the names that keep surfacing when we drag men in and open them up with the right incentives.
It has that taste. That shape. That old political rot in it. Enough to piss me off and make my head hurt and drag half my old instincts back to the surface before the newer, more rational part of me can stop them.
The problem is that I know Vincenzo wouldn’t do this.
I know it with the kind of certainty that only comes from loving someone in the exact places they’re most likely to lie to the rest of the world and seeing for yourself where they draw the line in private.
He wouldn’t hit one of my shipments this way while we’re still trying to figure out how to exist in the same world without setting fire to half of it, and he wouldn’t be this sloppy.
He wouldn’t take a shot at me through back channels and deniable filth like some petty bastard with too much pride and not enough spine to look me in the eye afterward.
But knowing that and feeling it are two different things. Because when men start dying, and the evidence smells of his family, some older, uglier piece of me still wants to pace in circles around the possibility until it can either kill it or drag it by the throat into the light.
I’ve had enough lies around him to last a lifetime. I don’t enjoy fresh ones.
The blood on me isn’t all mine. Hardly any of it is. A smear across my jaw from one idiot who got too close with a knife before I opened his throat.
More down the front of my shirt from the second man who tried to run after telling me, through broken teeth and a mouthful of panic, that he only knew a payment route had changed hands and a name tied loosely to an Italian contact had been whispered in the right ear.
There’s more on my cuffs, dried darker now. A splash near my collar where someone coughed their last bad decision onto me while I held him up by the front of his coat and asked the same question three different ways.
It’s enough that the shower runs pink for a while when I step under it.
The hot water should help; usually, it does. Wash it off, wash the voices down the drain with the blood, let the steam settle the fight still stuck in my muscles.
Instead, I stand under it with one hand braced to the tile and my head lowered while water streams down my spine.
All I can think about is the possibility of Vincenzo’s family being stupid enough to move without him—or worse, behind his back—while I’m standing here with his mouth still somewhere in my memory.
By the time I kill the water, my mood has only soured.
I towel off hard, drag on dark lounge pants, and leave the shirt somewhere on the floor because the thought of another layer touching my skin right now feels offensive.
The room beyond the bathroom is dim, lit only by the bedside lamp I’d forgotten to turn off and the knife-thin spill of city light beyond the curtains. Steam follows me out in a low drift.
I look up and stop dead.
Vincenzo is in my bed.
For one stupid second, I genuinely think I’m still half in the shower, and my head has finally gone soft from too much blood loss and too little sleep, because the sight is too fucking good to be real. I haven’t seen him in three days.
He’s stretched across the dark sheets in black trousers and an open white shirt like the universe built him specifically to test my ability to remain coherent, one arm behind his head, one ankle crossed over the other, dark hair a little disordered as if he’s been waiting long enough to get comfortable and arrogant about it.
He looks up from whatever thought he’d been entertaining and smiles automatically when he sees me—
Then he sees my face, and the smile fades.
Not fully. Just enough for me to know he’s read the room in one glance and found all the sharp edges before I’ve had time to put them away. That’s one of the things I love most and hate most about him. Nothing important ever gets past him twice.
“Well,” he says carefully, sitting up a little. “That is not the expression of a man thrilled to see me in his bed.”
I should say something reassuring or simple. I’ve wanted him here badly enough, often enough, that logic says the first sight of him should burn off anything else.
But I just stand there, damp from the shower, still carrying too much death in my body, and look at him with whatever the night left in my face.
He reads that too.
Vincenzo gets off the bed without any visible hurry, but there’s tension in the way he moves closer, quiet and alert now, all that lazy confidence shifting into something softer and more serious because he knows me well enough to understand when the mood in me isn’t annoyance or lust or one of our usual bad habits.
“What happened?” he asks.
He stops close enough to touch and doesn’t until I invite it. That tiny restraint nearly undoes me on the spot.
I drag a hand over the back of my neck, still damp. “Shipment got hit.”
His brows knit. “Yours.”
“Obviously.”
“That wasn’t sarcasm,” he says. “You smell like a slaughterhouse.”
I almost laugh, but the sound dies before it gets out. “Close enough.”
He studies my face, my shoulders, the set of me, and whatever he sees there drains the last of the playfulness from his expression. “Talk to me.”
That should not still have the power to hit me where it does. It does anyway. Maybe because so few people in my life have ever said it and meant anything except ‘Tell me so I can decide what to use.’
Vincenzo says it, and I hear the actual thing under it: ‘Let me in. Let me help. Let me stand close to the wound without making it worse.’
I turn away from him and pace once toward the window because standing still feels too much like giving in to the first gentle hand after a night like this.
“The shipment out near Ryazan got hit. Then, a warehouse point went bad. Two of mine died before I got there, three more after because one had already rolled over and the others thought I’d be generous about it.” My mouth twists. “I wasn’t.”
I keep going because now that I’ve started, the poison wants out. “The route work has your family’s fingerprints all over it. Ports, middlemen, pressure points. Someone’s using Vieri channels or trying very hard to make it look like they are.”
His face changes immediately; not defensive, but focused. That matters. I watch for the lie anyway because blood and business teach ugly habits and because tonight already has enough bodies attached to it that trust feels slightly theoretical.
“I never gave any go-ahead for an attack on that shipment,” he says.
The answer is immediate enough to satisfy the part of me that came into the room spoiling for a reason to turn this into a fight. I stare at him anyway. “I know.”
That catches him, and his eyes widen. “You know.”
“Yes.”
“Then why…” he says, then stops, reading the rest in my face before he needs the sentence completed. “You’re angry because it looks like me even when it isn’t.”
“That about covers it.”
He exhales slowly. “I wouldn’t.”
I nod once. “I know.”
And I do. That’s the problem. It would almost be easier if I didn’t.
Vincenzo crosses the remaining distance between us, then—close enough that his shirt brushes my bare chest when I shift—reaches up without asking to smooth the crease from between my brows with his thumb.
The gesture is so soft and so entirely him that my whole body nearly betrays me and folds on the spot.
“It’s not me,” he says quietly. “But I’ll look into it.”
There is steel under the promise now. Good. Let him put that Vieri elegance to use on his own people for once.
His mouth twists slightly. “Especially since I’ve recently discovered a few things about Lucien that make me less inclined to give anyone on my side the benefit of the doubt.”
That drags my attention sharply back to him. “A few things.”
His eyes flick to mine, then away, then back. “Enough to know he may have been moving in ways I didn’t authorize.”
I file that away instantly. “That’s a very polished way to say your second may be a disloyal cunt.”
“That,” Vincenzo says dryly, “is the less diplomatic version, yes.”
A rough laugh escapes me before I can stop it. It feels strange after the last few hours, but not unwelcome. His expression softens fractionally at the sound, and before I can brace for what he’s doing, he leans in and kisses the line between my brows.
Something in me melts.
There’s no better word for it. Not softens or eases—melts. The tension that’s been wound hard through my shoulders and jaw and ribs since the first body hit the concrete just loosens under that one stupid, perfect gesture.
He kisses me there like he’s smoothing out a wrinkle in silk instead of touching the worst parts of a man who just came back from killing too many people to feel clean.
“Don’t do that,” I murmur.
“Too late.”
I close my eyes and give up fighting it.
My arms come around him on instinct, pulling him in against me with more force than grace, and he comes willingly, fitting against my chest like he was built to calm exactly this part of me.
I bury my face against his shoulder for one breath and hate how much relief lives in the act.
He slides both hands up my back. “There you are, my love.”
“Shut up.”
His laugh is quiet and warm against my neck. “Never.”
I hold him tighter because if I let go too soon, I might remember the blood before the comfort fully settles. “I’m sorry,” I say after a beat, voice muffled against his skin.
“For what?”
“My mood.” I pull back to look at him. “I’ve had to kill too many tonight alone.”
The line changes something in his face. Not pity, he’s too good at respecting violence to insult me with pity. Just understanding, plain, painful, and older than either of us has any right to be.
“You don’t have to do that part alone anymore,” he says.
My chest tightens so hard I nearly look away. “That’s a dangerous thing to promise,” I tell him.
He lifts one hand to my face, thumb brushing the last damp from my temple that might be shower water or sweat or both. “I know.”
And because he does know, because he says it with eyes open to the whole ugly shape of me and not some prettier version he’s invented to make this easier, I let myself believe him for one impossible second.
Then I kiss him, because I’ve had enough death for one night and his mouth is the only thing in the room that still tastes like life.