Chapter 28
twenty-eight
Nikolaj
Arseniy moves to the bench by the far wall and sits, elbows on his knees, one hand hanging loose between them, blood at the corner of his mouth where I split it.
The overhead lights are too harsh for this kind of conversation.
They flatten everything, make the bruises look uglier, the shadows under his eyes deeper, the years on his face harder to ignore.
I stay where I am on the mat for a moment longer, breath finally slowing, every muscle in me pulsing with the aftermath of the fight.
Neither of us says anything.
I grab a towel, and sit on the edge of the mat with my forearms braced on my thighs, facing him from a few feet away. Arseniy looks only slightly better, which annoys me because I hit him hard enough that he should look worse.
“All right,” I say again, rougher now. “Talk.”
His gaze flicks up to mine, then away, then back. “I didn’t come here to ask for forgiveness.”
“That’s good,” I say. “Because I’m fresh out.”
His mouth twitches once, humorless. “I wasn’t expecting any.”
“Then why are you here?”
He exhales slowly through his nose, and when he speaks again, there’s no softness in it. No brotherly overture. No attempt to make the truth easier to take. Just the same blunt Dragovich instinct that raised us both and wrecked us in different ways.
“There’s a bounty on your head,” he says.
For one ridiculous second, I almost laugh.
Of all the things I expected to come out of his mouth after five years, a fistfight, and a confession that he was wrong, that wasn’t one of them.
“There’s always a bounty on my head,” I say. “That’s what happens when people fear me more than they respect themselves.”
“This one is formal,” he replies.
That wipes the humor right off me.
I straighten fully, towel still in one hand, and watch his face. “Explain.”
“It went out quiet.” He folds his arms over his chest. “Not public enough to shake the structure. Not loud enough to look like a declaration of war. A whisper network first. Then money—enough money that ambitious men are starting to look at your pulse like a career move.”
The gym suddenly feels smaller.
“From who?”
Arseniy’s mouth flattens. “Someone inside the Five Families.”
My jaw locks.
“And before you start,” he adds, because he knows me too well, “it isn’t Vieri.”
That lands harder than the rest of it, because some ugly, suspicious corner of me was already moving in that direction even while the rest of me rejected it. I hate that he sees that flicker cross my face. I hate it even more that he’s right to look for it.
“You’re sure,” I say.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Because if it were Vincenzo, the first thing I’d have done before walking in here was tell you to shoot me and go to war.” The corner of his mouth twitches, humorless and brief. “And because I know the shape of a Vieri hit. This isn’t it.”
I drag the towel across the back of my neck and throw it onto the bench harder than necessary. “So who?”
“I don’t have a name yet.”
“Then what the fuck good is this warning?”
His eyes flash. There. That old spark. He’s still in there under all the exile, grief, and whatever private hell he’s been carrying. Good. I was getting tired of talking to regret in a coat.
“The warning is that somebody with enough reach to move inside the Families has decided you’re worth more dead than alive.
The useful part is that they aren’t moving openly because they don’t have a consensus.
That means they’re testing the edges first. Small contracts.
Contractors with deniability. Men who can disappear if the attempt fails. ”
I pace once, because stillness is impossible all over again. My heartbeat has gone from fight to calculation now.
“Who knows?” I ask.
“Enough people that I’m hearing the shape of it from outside our lines,” he says. “Someone is testing whether your death would solve more problems than it creates.”
I let that sit for one beat, then say, “That still doesn’t tell me why you’re here.”
Arseniy leans back slightly on the bench and studies me with that same old unreadable focus that used to make younger men in our house feel twelve years old again. “Because people are talking.”
I don’t like the sound of that.
“Talking about what?”
He doesn’t answer right away, and in that hesitation, I already know I’m not going to enjoy the next sentence out of his mouth.
“You,” he says. “And Vincenzo.”
I look at my brother and think of a hundred things at once. The hotel. The gala. My kitchen. His bed. My bed. Every file. Every recovered second. Every stupid, dangerous look that passed between Vincenzo and me in rooms where we should have known better by now.
Then I think of the thing that matters most.
Who saw.
I don’t ask that immediately because the answer is already obvious. Enough—not everything, not certainty. But enough that the wrong people are starting to connect things they were previously content to call coincidence.
“What are they saying?” I ask.
Arseniy’s mouth twists. “That the old Vintermoor animosity doesn’t explain the way he watches you.
Or the way you watch him when you forget to hide it.
That too many shipments got hit in ways that should have started a war, and somehow didn’t.
That the summit in Bucharest changed something neither side has publicly acknowledged. ”
He pauses, studying my face. “That if the Pakhan isn’t moving against the Vieri King when he has reason, there must be another reason.”
There it is.
The problem with powerful men is that they’re stupid in every normal way and brilliant in exactly the ones that make them dangerous. Give them an odd silence where blood should be, and they’ll start sniffing around for motive.
I laugh once. “So, they’ve all suddenly become fucking poets.”
“No, they’ve become suspicious. Which is worse.” He gives me a flat look. “You think you’re being subtle.”
“I’m usually better than this.”
“Not with him.”
That irritates me because it’s true.
Arseniy keeps going before I can bite anything back at him.
“I don’t think they see the complete picture, but they know enough to wonder whether old loyalties have started breathing again.
Enough to ask whether the summit did more than reopen trade discussions.
Enough to decide a quiet solution might be worth exploring before you and Vieri turn personal weakness into political fallout. ”
My laugh is short and ugly. “Personal weakness.”
“That’s what they’ll call it.”
“What do you call it?”
That surprises him. I can tell because his face stills for half a second. Then he says, “A threat.”
I bare my teeth. “Careful.”
He doesn’t flinch. “Not to me, to them. To the structures of men who built their lives on the assumption that family lines, enemy lines, and blood debts stay where they’re fucking put. Men like us don’t get to love cleanly, Nikolaj. We never did.”
The line scrapes through me because it sounds too much like a truth spoken by a man who had five years to drown on his own understanding of it.
I look at him more carefully now. Not just at the bruises I gave him or the old damage he’s carried in with him, but him sitting in my gym with his coat still on, face harder than I remember and somehow more honest for it.
He didn’t come here to posture or to pick another fight. He came with a warning and information. Which means, for whatever reason, he decided I needed it enough to put himself in this room with me despite everything between us.
That matters.
“Why?” I ask again.
This time, when I say it, there is no challenge in it. Just the question that’s been sitting under every other one since he appeared in the doorway.
“Why warn me?”
Arseniy looks away for a second, toward nothing I can see. When he speaks, his voice is lower. Less polished. Older.
“Because I had five years,” he says. “Five years to sit with my own sins and watch them come back around to take what I thought was a life I wanted.”
He laughs once under his breath, but there’s no humor in it. “I didn’t love my wife.”
I’d always suspected it without ever naming it. Arseniy did many things well, but tenderness with her had never looked natural on him. Dutiful. Respectful. Careful, maybe. But never alive.
“She was chosen for me,” he continues. “Good blood. Good family. Good politics. A wife who fit what was expected on paper and in public. I did my duty. I married her. I gave her respect and protection. Everything a Dragovich husband is supposed to give, but it still wasn’t love.”
He rubs a hand over his mouth, and I see, for the first time in years, the crack underneath the controlled face. Not weakness, but honesty too long buried to come out clean.
“But I loved the child,” he says.
The words hit like a punch I don’t defend against.
I knew that already, maybe, in the abstract. Knew it the way one knows all fathers or near-fathers carry some claim to what hasn’t even arrived yet. But hearing him say it aloud is different. It takes the old choice I made and strips away every strategic layer until the body is visible underneath.
I killed what he loved.
Necessary. Treasonous. Structurally justified. All the clean words still exist, and none of them protect me from the shape of that truth in his mouth.
Arseniy’s eyes lift back to mine. “I may never forgive you for that.”
There it is.
Not shouted or dramatic. Just laid down in the center of the room where both of us can look at it and stop pretending time softened anything important.
I hold his gaze and nod once because there is nothing else to do with a truth like that.
Then he says, “But I understand.”
For one second, I genuinely don’t know what to do with my face.