Chapter 25 #2
The same dark eyes. The same impossible, unbearable mouth. The same stillness that always made a room feel like it had become a church or a crime scene, depending on the day.
For one stupid second, I think the vodka’s finally done something useful and killed me kindly. Then he shifts his weight with a small, pained correction, cane scraping stone, and the sound is too human, too ugly, too real.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I hear myself say.
Salvatore doesn’t smile. “You’ve said harsher things to me.”
Shock curdles instantly into anger because if I don’t get angry, I’m going to collapse to my knees in front of a ghost. “What the fuck are you doing here?” I bark.
He looks at the revolver on the terrace floor, then at the shattered glass, then back to me. “Interrupting your terrible timing.”
That does it.
I take two steps toward him and stop so hard my bad eye throbs with it. “You arrogant, miserable bastard.” The words shake coming out. “You do not get to walk back into my house looking like that and make jokes.”
His face changes then. “I know,” he says quietly.
“Oh, you know.” I laugh, vicious and half out of my mind. “That’s good. I’m glad one of us knows something because I’ve been out here deciding whether I’m pathetic enough to put a bullet through my own fucking skull, and now you appear on my terrace looking like a goddamned resurrection.”
His throat works once. I hate that I notice. Hate that even now, with fury chewing through me and grief, disbelief, and old love all climbing over each other like starving animals, I still see every tiny change in him as if no time has passed at all.
He takes one step out onto the terrace. The rain has stopped, but the stones are still wet and slick, the air bitter with the kind of cold that gets under clothes and into bone. He shouldn’t be standing out here with that leg. He shouldn’t be here at all, yet he is.
I drag both hands through my hair and pace once, unable to stand still in front of him because standing still feels too much like surrender. “Say it,” I snap.
His brows draw together faintly. “Say what?”
“Why you’re here,” I grind out.
Salvatore looks at me the way he used to look at loaded rooms before choosing exactly where to put the knife. Only tonight, there’s no knife in him. Just age, exhaustion, and something so nakedly miserable it makes me want to hurt him and hold him in equal measure.
“Nikolaj came to see me,” he says.
That makes some ugly sort of sense instantly. My son, with his father’s old face and none of my remaining patience, walked into a Vieri house to shake the dead until they answered. Of course.
I say nothing, and Salvatore takes another step toward me, and then, before I can understand what he’s doing, he lowers himself.
At first, I think his leg has given out.
The cane slips sideways, catches on the stone, and his whole body stutters with the effort of controlling the descent.
It is not graceful, and it is not dignified.
He’s sixty and injured and too proud for anything about this to look natural.
His jaw tightens visibly with the pain of it.
One hand braces against the wet stone, the other keeps hold of the cane until the last second, then sets it aside.
He kneels, and I forget how to breathe all over again.
This is an old King on his knees in the cold on my terrace, because he doesn’t know how else to tell the truth.
He lifts his face to me. Rainwater on the stone has already soaked the knees of his trousers. His mouth trembles once before he masters it.
There’s no performance left—no father, no Don, and no Vieri. Just the man I lost thirty years ago, with all the wreckage still clinging to him.
“I was wrong,” he says, and the words hit harder than a gunshot.
Because this man does not kneel. This man does not admit fault, not cleanly, not like this, not without wrapping it in strategy or bitterness or enough elegance to keep the room from seeing the throat underneath.
And yet, here he is.
“I was wrong,” he says again, voice rougher now. “About all of it. About what silence bought, what duty justified, and what I could survive after.” His eyes do not leave mine. “I have spent over thirty years regretting my choices, Ruslan. Every one of them. Every single day.”
The cold seems to disappear. Or maybe I stop feeling it because all I can feel is the violence of my own heartbeat and the unbearable, horrible sincerity on his face.
I should make him get up. I should spit at him. I should tell him regret is cheap and thirty years too late, and I’m not some young fool on a terrace waiting for scraps of honesty from the man who cut me open and calls it love.
But all I can do is stand there like the world has ended properly at last.
Salvatore’s hands are open on his thighs. Empty. No weapons. Just old scars and fingers that used to unmake me with one touch. His cane lies abandoned to one side. His pride lies somewhere farther away.
“I loved you,” he says. “I love you still. And I chose wrong. I chose bloodline over you and lost everything anyway. Lucia. You. Myself. Every version of the life I told myself I was protecting.” He swallows hard enough to hurt. I can see it. “There is no day I have not woken up with that in me.”
I shut my eyes because hearing him say Lucia’s name nearly finishes me.
When I open them again, he’s still there.
Kneeling.
On my terrace.
Apologizing.
The shame of it hits me then, but not his. Mine. Because all these years, I’ve told myself he wouldn’t love me enough to come back here. Because legacy won and that’s the whole story, and if he truly regretted it, he’d have crossed the fucking sea on his knees years ago.
I take one step toward him, then another. By the third, I can see the dampness on his lashes he’d deny under torture. I’d help him lie if anyone else were here to see it, but they’re not.
“You stupid, cruel bastard,” I whisper.
His mouth twists, almost a smile, and nowhere near one. “Yes.”
“I hate you.”
“You should.”
“I should leave you there until your leg gives out entirely.”
“If that helps.”
It doesn’t, and that’s the problem. None of it helps.
I make a sound that is halfway to a laugh and nowhere near sane, then I drop to my knees in front of him so hard the impact jars up through bone. The cold stone bites instantly. My bad eye pulses, and my hands shake when they land on his face, and I don’t even try to hide it.
Salvatore inhales sharply. His own hands rise, hesitate an inch from my ribs, then stop as if he no longer assumes the right to touch me without invitation.
That undoes me worse than the apology.
“I’ve missed you,” I say, and my voice is gone completely now, wrecked and young and helpless in ways I haven’t been since exile. “Fuck, I’ve missed you.”
His face breaks. Not elegantly, or in some cinematic way worth respecting. It simply breaks the way old plaster does when it has carried too much dampness for too long and can no longer pretend to be a wall.
“Ruslan—”
I kiss him before he can say anything else.
The first contact is all grief. We’re sixty.
He’s kneeling with a cane beside him, my face is wet, and I don’t know if it’s rain or something more humiliating.
His mouth is cold from outside air and tastes faintly of whiskey.
But the second he kisses me back, all that old hunger, grief, and recognition tears wide open inside me so fast it feels like a wound finally admitting what it is.
He makes a sound into my mouth that I feel all the way down in the places that never stop belonging to him. When we break apart, neither of us goes far. Foreheads pressed together, breath shared, and knees freezing on wet stone.
“I didn’t know if you’d come,” I say.
His thumb brushes once under my eye, over the scar. “I didn’t know if I was allowed. But then I realized the only thing stopping me was my own fear.”
I close my eyes. “You stubborn man.”
He laughs softly then, and the sound of it after all this time is so achingly familiar, I have to grip him harder just to stay upright.
We don’t speak for a long moment. There is too much to say, too much history, blood, absence, and old mistakes stacked between us like bodies.
We cannot climb over all of it in one night. We cannot undo exile on a terrace just because two old fools still know how to kiss each other and mean it.
But silence between us has always done as much damage as any blade. So, eventually I speak because if I don’t, I know we’ll both start trying to bury this and skip the harder thing.
“I’m not forgiving you tonight,” I tell him quietly. “I may not forgive you at all.”
“I know that too.”
I frown at that. “Then why are you here?”
“Because you were alone with a gun.” His answer comes immediately. “And I heard my name was on the bullet.”
That. More than the apology, more than the kneeling, more than the confession of thirty years of regret. That is the sentence that finally makes something in me give way completely.
Of course, the bastard would still choose to cross every ocean of pride, grief, and shame between us because he can’t bear me dying with his name in the chamber.
“That boy needs to mind his own business,” I laugh, and then I’m crying in the same breath, because age strips men of dignity in exactly the ways youth promises it never will.
Salvatore cups the back of my head and lets me be ugly against him.
“Cuore mio,” he murmurs, and the old endearment in his mouth after all these years is too fucking much. “I’m here. I’m here now.”
I pull him into me and bury my face against his shoulder like I’m trying to climb back into a version of time where none of this has happened yet, and all we have to do is make it through the night. But the night has already taken thirty years.
Eventually, the cold forces movement back into us.
Salvatore’s leg is trembling under him, and my own knees feel half-dead.
I reach for the cane and hand it to him without a word, then help him up because I can’t bear to watch him struggle to his feet while pretending not to care.
He leans on me more than he wants to. I say nothing about it.
We’ve both earned the humiliation of being mortal in front of each other.
The revolver still lies on the terrace stones where I dropped it. Salvatore looks at it once, then at me.
“Give it to me,” he says. I stare at him as he holds out his hand—no command in the gesture, just quiet certainty. “Give it to me, Ruslan.”
Something old and instinctive in me wants to refuse just because I hate being handled. Then I look at his face and realize this is the line. The first real choice in front of us after everything.
Gun or him. Performance or surrender. Death or this.
So, I hand him the revolver, and his fingers close around it. He opens the cylinder, finds the engraved round, and for one second just looks at it. My name on his mouth for decades, his name on my bullet. The whole fucking pathetic thing.
Then he pockets the round and sets the empty gun on the table.
“No more Russian Roulette,” he says.
I bark out a laugh. “You really are late to start issuing orders.”
“Then consider it a request.”
“It sounds like an order.”
“It always did with me.”
That actually gets a real smile out of me, thin and wrecked though it is.
The villa smells exactly the same when we walk inside. Stone and old wood and whatever faint herbs the kitchen walls have been holding onto for thirty years. The sitting room is dim, lit only by the lamp near the sofa and the low fire I left banked in the grate.
Salvatore pauses in the doorway like the house itself has put a hand to his chest. I know the feeling. Every room in here still holds a version of us young enough to believe that wanting hard enough might build a future out of nothing.
I shrug out of my coat, take his, and hang both by the door. He watches my hands the whole time as if ordinary motions might be the most intimate thing he’s seen all night.
“Vodka?” I ask.
“Yes.”
I pour two and bring him one. Our fingers brush when he takes the glass, but he doesn’t flinch, and neither do I. Progress, maybe. Or maybe just age making cowards of us in new directions.
We sit next to each other, not touching but close enough that the option is there.
He drinks first, then he looks at me over the rim of the glass and says, “I didn’t come for absolution.”
“Good,” I say. “You’re not getting it.”
His mouth twitches. “I suspected as much.”
I lean back and study him in the firelight. “You’re limping worse.”
He glances down at his leg as if it belongs to someone else. “Bad weather.”
“Bullshit.”
“Yes,” he says. “Mostly.”
The honesty in that nearly makes me laugh again.
I drink, set my glass down, and look at him.
The silver in his hair. The hard mouth has gone softer at the edges because time has finally forced his face to admit what his posture still tries to hide.
The eyes are still the same—thank Christ for that.
If the eyes had changed, I might actually have believed I was talking to a ghost.
“What now?” I ask.
The question sits between us. Salvatore does not answer immediately. He looks into the fire for so long that I think he might refuse.
Then he says, “I don’t know.”
I let out a breath through my nose. “That’s almost comforting.”
“It shouldn’t be.”
“No,” I agree. “But after thirty years of pretending certainty while ruining both our lives, I’ll take honest confusion.”
That earns me a look; sharp, familiar, loved.
There it is—the unbearable truth of all of this. We are old, broken, full of ghosts, and we still know each other too well for comfort.
The betrayal remains. The exile remains. Lucia remains dead. Arseniy remains gone. Nikolaj remains a blade without a sheath. Nothing is repaired just because Salvatore knelt on my terrace and I kissed him for it.
But he is here, and tonight, for the first time in thirty years, when I say his name aloud, I do not have to imagine the answer.