Chapter 27
twenty-seven
Nikolaj
Sleep can go fuck itself.
That’s the first coherent thought I have sometime after three in the morning when I give up pretending the bed is going to do anything but trap me inside my own head.
Saint Helena is quiet above me, too quiet, full of old stone and old ghosts and the kind of expensive silence that only makes a restless mind louder.
I lie there for too long, staring into the dark with Vincenzo’s scent still faint in the sheets from the last time he was here.
The memory of his body in my arms is warm enough to be a cruelty, and every single thing I don’t know yet is pacing circles in my skull until I feel like I’m going to climb out of my skin.
So, I get up.
No shirt, sweatpants, bare feet on cold stone. The corridors are empty when I cut through them and head below. Down into the private gym in the cellar, where the walls are thick enough to swallow impact, and the air always smells faintly of metal and rubber.
The lights come on in strips overhead as I enter, and the heavy bag hanging in the center of the mat looks like the only honest thing in the room.
I don’t stretch or bother with wraps. I just hit it.
The first punch lands hard enough to make the chain creak overhead.
The second swings the bag sideways. By the fourth, I’m breathing through my teeth, and by the tenth, I’m no longer thinking in full sentences.
Just heat, pressure, and all the jagged pieces of the last few months crashing into each other without enough room in me to settle properly.
Vieri.
That’s where my head always circles back first, because of course it does. The shipments hit near Ryazan with fingerprints that smelled of his family, even though I know with certainty that he didn’t order it.
Vincenzo telling me about Lucien and the quiet, ice-cold fury in his voice when he said his cousin and second had been feeding rot through the Vieri structure for five years.
And love—that’s the ugliest piece. I loved my enemy. I loved him enough to choose him over blood, over duty, over the whole goddamn machine I was born into. And I do now, too, which would almost be romantic if it would not get us both killed if the wrong people ever saw it clearly enough.
I hit the bag harder.
My shoulders burn, and my knuckles split somewhere along the way because I didn’t wrap them, but I don’t care.
Sweat runs down my spine and into the waistband of my sweats.
The heavy bag thuds and swings and absorbs every vicious thing I’ve got, but it isn’t enough because none of this is neat enough to punch out clean.
Left. Right. Hook. Cross. Knee. Elbow. Again.
The bag takes it and comes back for more, dumb and durable and exactly useful enough not to lie.
I imagine names while I hit.
Lucien.
The traitors from the warehouse.
The nameless bastard who thought shouting Vieri while dying would distract me from what mattered.
Ruslan.
Myself.
Every man who stood around my broken head and decided what parts of me I was allowed to have back.
Every stupid, patient, necessary part of Vincenzo that makes this harder, not easier.
The bag swings wildly, and I follow it, half stalking, half attacking, because stillness feels impossible and rest feels like cowardice.
The bag snaps sideways under a hook hard enough to make the ceiling mount squeal. I reset my feet and go at it with less rhythm now, less craft, more pure fucking force.
My breath tears through my chest and sweat runs into my eyes. The fluorescent hum overhead sharpens until it sounds almost like another voice in the room.
I don’t stop. If anything, the rage gets cleaner when the body breaks down around it—no room for performance after that, no prince’s posture, no King’s control. Just muscle and impact, and everything ugly in me trying to find a shape.
I drive my fist into the centerline of the bag hard enough that the chain jerks violently.
The next hit lands half a second after the previous one—full weight behind it, shoulder rolling through with enough force that something overhead gives with a metallic crack.
The bag tears free of the hook and goes flying sideways, crashing into the wall and then down to the floor with a heavy, dead sound.
I stand there bent over with my hands on my thighs, sweat dripping off my jaw and onto the rubber floor, lungs dragging air in hard enough to hurt.
For a few seconds, all I hear is my own breathing and the faint rattle of the chain still swinging overhead.
Then a voice behind me says, “You always did break things instead of thinking.”
Everything in me goes still, then I straighten slowly and turn.
Arseniy stands in the doorway.
He’s older than the last time I saw him close enough to matter—older in the real ways, not just the calendar kind. Harder through the face, but leaner.
His hair is darker than mine, grown longer than he used to wear it. There’s a scar on his jaw I don’t remember. His coat is still on, black and severe, boots damp with melted snow. He looks like a man who came straight here instead of hesitating anywhere sensible along the way.
For one stupid second, I think I’m still half in my head, and the gym finally decided to spit out one more ghost. Then I see his gaze drop to my split knuckles, the sweat, the bag on the floor, and he goes colder.
My heart does one hard, ugly kick—then the anger finds it.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I say.
His gaze drags over me once, taking in the sweat and the bag on the floor once more. The look he gives me after that is so familiar it makes my teeth hurt. Old contempt with a thread of reluctant understanding under it. His specialty.
“I heard,” he says. “About your memories.”
I wipe the back of my hand across my mouth and taste salt and copper. “Word travels.”
“With you, it always did,” he says, stepping farther into the room.
The years between us slam into the space, making the gym feel smaller.
I should say something sharper, but all I can do is look at him and feel too many things at once. Anger, yes; always that. Yet, underneath it is something more dangerous because now I know too much and not enough.
I know he knew about Vincenzo. I know he tried to reprogram me, isolate me, wrench me back into the family line when I’d already slipped too deep. I know he failed. I know I killed what mattered most to him later and called it necessity. I know his silence all these years was never simple.
He studies my face with the same mercilessness he always used when he wanted to know whether I was lying, weak, or about to do something catastrophic. “How much came back?”
“Enough to know that you carved duty into my chest because I loved the enemy, yet you couldn’t take it when I reminded you of the old family motto.”
The old challenge lands. The fact that even now, grown and blooded and sitting on separate ruined altars, we still know exactly how to bare our teeth at each other in the language that came before actual violence.
Arseniy takes another step. “I heard about the shipments, too.”
Of course he did.
“I’m flattered,” I say. “Did exile make you sentimental or just nosy?”
His eyes flash. “Watch your fucking mouth.”
I laugh once, short and ugly. “You’re no longer my handler, brother.”
That does it.
He comes at me with no warning beyond the shift of his shoulders, the old speed still there under the years.
I barely get my guard up before his fist catches me hard along the cheekbone and turns my head with the force of it.
Pain sparks bright. I answer with a hook to his ribs that lands solid enough to make him grunt, then he’s on me fully, and the gym becomes a blur of impact and old rage given back its body.
This isn’t a clean fight; it was never going to be.
We’re too full of history for clean.
Arseniy fights like he always did—efficient, brutal, no wasted motion, every strike chosen for damage rather than spectacle.
He never enjoyed the chaos of it the way I used to.
He treated fighting as a duty, which, in some ways, made him more terrifying because there was no play in him once he committed.
I’m better than I was at twenty. Stronger, meaner, less likely to get baited by emotion into stupid openings. But he is still Arseniy. He taught me half the things I know about putting men down fast and making sure they stay there.
Even now, five years into being Pakhan and bloodier than he ever wanted me to become, he still has that advantage.
I feel it every time he redirects my force instead of absorbing it, every time he makes me spend more energy than he does, every time he lets me think I’ve got ground before he takes it back with one clean, efficient movement.
We trade hits hard enough to shake the mirrors. My split knuckles open more against his jaw. His elbow digs into my sternum and forces the breath out of me.
I slam him into the wall by the weight rack, feel the impact through both of us, then catch a knee to the thigh hard enough to numb my leg for a second. He takes one to the stomach and answers by driving his forehead into mine in a move so filthy and familiar I almost laugh through the pain.
“Still fighting dirty,” I snarl.
He hits me again. “You were never worth clean, Kolya.”
That stokes something hot enough to blind. I rush him then, losing the little shape the fight still had, and for a few seconds it’s just fists and shoulders and old hate and older grief finally getting a room to itself.
I think of his wife, the child, and of his silence.
I think of him signing off on reprogramming because he thought Vincenzo was poison and me too stupid or too weak to know the difference between death and devotion.
I think of him, knowing all these years, saying nothing while I pieced my life back together from ghosts and security footage.
I drive him back two steps. Then he takes control of the whole thing the way he always could when he stopped pretending to leave room for my pride.
He catches my wrist, twists, uses my own momentum, and suddenly I’m on my back hard enough to rattle the mat. He has one of my arms trapped above my head, his forearm across my throat, while his knee pins my hip.
My free hand drives once into his side, and he absorbs it like weather. I buck hard and get nowhere useful. He is still heavier through the leverage, still more disciplined in the hold, still infuriatingly capable of overpowering me when he decides the lesson matters more than the fairness.
I lie there breathing hard, blood in my mouth, his face above me sharp with effort and all the anger neither of us knows how to bury properly.
“Done?” he asks.
“Fuck you.”
“Not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you deserve.”
That makes his jaw tighten, and for one absurd second, I feel eighteen again.
I laugh, but it comes out rough and wrecked and half feral.
Arseniy’s eyes narrow. “What’s funny?”
“That you’re still a controlling bastard.”
“And you’re still a reckless cunt.”
There’s comfort in the familiarity of it, which is disgusting and probably says something terrible about our upbringing.
I stop fighting because the hold is real, and if he wanted to break something, we’d be past this part already.
My chest rises hard under his weight, my face throbs where he caught me, and my right knuckles are definitely worse now. I look up at him and, for once, don’t bother coating the question with pride.
“Why are you here?”
Arseniy doesn’t answer immediately. I watch the question hit him, watch the fury in his face shift shape around something harder to name. He keeps me pinned, but the pressure at my throat eases by a fraction.
I ask again, voice lower this time. “Why the fuck are you here?”
His gaze searches mine like he’s looking for the version of me that left the monastery years ago with memory missing and blood still wet on half the truth. Whatever he finds there now keeps him quiet for another beat.
Then he says, “Because if your memories are back, then you need to hear something from me before the rest of them finish tearing you open.”
That knocks the breath out of me harder than the fight did.
He sees that, too, of course, he does. There was never much I could hide from him face-to-face; only time and distance ever made that possible.
“What?” I ask.
Arseniy shifts back just enough that I can breathe fully, though he doesn’t release my wrist. Not yet. Maybe not because he thinks I’ll swing. Maybe because some part of him still needs the contact to keep this from turning into smoke.
“What the fuck is it, Arseniy?” I say again, and this time there’s no bite in it at all. Just the question.
His jaw works once. “That I was wrong.”
Arseniy Dragovich is not a man who says that lightly. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him say it at all. He holds my gaze and continues, each word forced like it has to be dragged up through years of old damage to get out. “About him. About you. About all of it.”
I don’t know whether I want to hit him again or hold him there until he says everything.
Maybe both.
“What changed?” I ask.
His mouth twists in something close to self-disgust. “Five years.”
The answer hits harder than it should because I know exactly what he means.
Five years of exile. Five years of grief.
Five years of standing outside the family and carrying the weight of what I did to him with no structure left to hide behind.
Five years of understanding what love costs when someone carves it out of you and tells you survival was the point.
My throat tightens when he finally lets go of my wrist and sits back on his heels, still over me but no longer pinning me with full force. I don’t sit up right away, I just lie there on the mat, both of us breathing hard, both of us bloodied, the broken bag on the floor nearby.
He looks older from this angle, tired in the bones. For the first time since he walked in, I see not just the brother who left, the enforcer who failed to reprogram me, or the man I made my enemy by doing what I thought had to be done. I see the other thing too—the cost.
I drag one forearm over my eyes for a second and let out a breath. “You picked a shit way to start this conversation.”
Arseniy almost smiles. It’s ugly and brief and gone too fast to be called gentleness. “You were already hitting things.”
I tilt my head. “Fair.”
He stands first and offers me nothing. Also fair. I sit up slowly, every muscle in me objecting, and look at him through the blur of pain and old loyalty and the beginnings of something even more dangerous than reconciliation.
Truth.
Whatever he came here to say, it’s bigger than the fight. Bigger, maybe, than the last five years between us.
I spit blood onto the mat, wipe my mouth, and brace my forearms on my knees. “All right,” I say. “Then start talking.”