Chapter 26 #2
Then I reach forward and grab his hair at the back of his head, not yanking hard enough to tear, but hard enough to make the point. He makes a sound through his teeth, and his shoulders tighten. I angle his head back so he has to look up at the ceiling.
“No one is coming,” I tell him. “You and I both know this is the room where truth arrives, one way or another.”
His voice is strained. “Vincenzo—”
“Five years,” I say, and my calm finally cracks just enough to show steel. “Five years of you standing at my side while your hand was in my wife, and your fingers were in my empire. That means you didn’t just betray me in the bed, you betrayed me in the boardroom.”
He stays silent. I tighten my grip on his hair hard enough to make him inhale sharply.
“Tell me,” I say. “Or I’ll start guessing, and you won’t like what I guess.”
Lucien’s throat works once, then, finally, he speaks.
“I haven’t just been sleeping with Arabella for the last five years.
I’ve been working against you,” he says, and the words land with a kind of ugly satisfaction, like saying them out loud is his last remaining act of defiance.
“Since you married her and started disappearing into your office every night like a man already dead. Since you let the Five Families think you were unbreakable while the truth was you were just empty.”
I release his hair and step back into his line of sight, letting him see my face.
No reaction. No shock. No anger worth watching.
His mouth twitches. “That’s all you’ve got. That’s it? Nothing?”
“You want theatrics,” I say. “You should’ve betrayed someone more sentimental.”
His eyes flash. “You’re proving my point.”
“And you’re stalling.” I lean one hand on the back of his chair and look down at him. “You’re making it look like the Vieri family is going against the Five Families.”
His expression changes because I’ve landed exactly on it.
“You always loved the theatre of a war,” I continue. “A king besieged. A fractured alliance. The Five Families turning on each other from the inside. That’s the kind of mess that makes ambitious men think they can rise in the chaos.”
Lucien’s lips part slightly.
“That shipment,” I say, “the one hit near Ryazan, the one staged to smell like Vieri fingerprints, was your signature, not mine.”
For the first time, something like real fear flickers in him. He tries to cover it and fails.
“Say it,” I tell him softly.
Lucien’s jaw tightens. Then he spits it out like poison. “Yes.”
My pulse remains steady, and I nod once. “Good. Now tell me why.”
His eyes lift to mine with a kind of hatred that used to scare people when we were younger, because they mistook it for conviction rather than envy.
“Because you’re wasting the throne,” he says. “Because you don’t deserve the title you wear, and you’ve been walking around with half a heart missing and pretending no one could see it. Because I wanted to prove that the King of the Five Families can be bled like any other man.”
I study him. “So, you tried to start a war.”
“I tried to start a correction,” he snaps.
“That’s a romantic way to describe treason.”
Lucien’s breathing is hard now, shallow with adrenaline, as if confession has emboldened him rather than broke him.
“You’re not a capable leader,” he says again, clinging to the insult like a life raft.
“If you were, you would’ve noticed years ago.
You would’ve seen what everyone sees. You would’ve—”
I move fast enough that the rest of his sentence dies in his mouth.
One hand clamps around his jaw, forcing his face toward mine. The other grips the back of his chair, and I lean in close enough for him to feel exactly how calm I still am.
“Let’s be clear,” I say. “You didn’t get away with this because I’m incapable. You got away with it because you were family, and I allowed myself the luxury of trust with you. That was my mistake, and it will not happen again.”
His eyes dart, trapped and furious. I release his jaw and step back, letting him breathe.
“Now, we’re going to discuss names. Contacts. Payment routes. Every message you sent. Every lie you planted. Every person you used. And when we’re done, you’re going to tell me exactly how you thought this ended.”
Lucien’s laugh is breathy. “Or what?”
I straighten. “Or your family stops breathing along with you.”
He swallows. “You won’t kill family.”
I almost smile. “Try me, cousin.”
Lucien’s shoulders sag slightly, and now he finally looks less like a defiant traitor and more like a man who has realized the story he wrote ends the same way betrayal always ends.
“It wasn’t just me,” he says quietly. “Some of your council benefited. Some of the old men who smile at you and call you King and then go home and complain you’re too cold to be human.”
My jaw tightens. “Names.”
He gives them slowly, as if pulling teeth, except the teeth are his and the pulling is entirely his choice.
Two routes. Three port contacts. One compromised customs officer.
A banker. An intermediary in Milan who has been laundering payments through an art foundation.
A name in Bucharest tied to an old Byrne cousin with gambling debt.
He admits to feeding misinformation to make it look like the Vieri family is turning against the Five Families, creating fractures where none existed so rivals would press, so internal pressure would rise, so I’d have to spend time fighting smoke instead of strengthening structure.
He admits to shaping attacks to appear as though they had family involvement, not because he wanted to ruin the Vieris, but because he wanted to keep me paranoid enough that I trusted no one fully.
Isolation as leverage. A king alone is a king easier to steer.
And all the while he watched me stand at the head of rooms and pretend loneliness was the cost of power rather than a symptom of rot.
When he finishes, his voice is hoarse. “So,” he says bitterly. “Now you know.”
I stand across from him again, hands loose at my sides, and let the calm in the room grow teeth. “Yes, now I know.”
Lucien lifts his chin. “You’re going to kill me anyway.”
That’s the strangest part: he isn’t pleading, he’s almost relieved.
“No,” I say.
His expression flickers in surprise. “No?”
“I didn’t say you’d live well,” I reply.
A shudder runs through him, quick and involuntary.
“You were right about one thing, the part where you said the fact I only noticed now proves something.” I lean closer so that he can’t pretend my words aren’t meant to cut. “It proves I trusted you.”
His eyes flash with something like shame, gone too fast to name.
“That was your mistake,” he says.
“Yes,” I agree. “It was.”
I turn toward the door, knock twice, and the guards open it immediately. Behind me, Lucien says my name one last time. I pause at the door but don’t turn.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, voice rough and ugly and almost amused again because, apparently, he can’t help himself, “finding me in your wife’s bed really did speed things up.”
I look back then. “Lucien, for what it’s worth, that was the least interesting betrayal.”
Then I leave him in the cellar and head upstairs to start cleaning the rest of the rot out of my empire before dawn.
Five years of betrayal. Five years of being watched, steered, and tested. Five years of a man I trusted deciding my grief made me weak enough to be manipulated.
Lucien was wrong about one thing—I am a capable leader, and he’s about to learn exactly how capable.
I have no patience left for rot inside my house, and now that I’ve finally remembered what it feels like to love someone who makes me want to be better, I’m not letting my empire be hollowed out by a man who mistook my silence for blindness.
By the time I reach the stairs, I’m making lists.