Chapter 29 #2
He kisses me with the same shameless certainty he seems to have applied to the purchase of landmass and naming rights. Like I should have known all along he’d do this. Like there was never any real possibility that he’d invite me to a neutral location and then not turn it into a declaration.
When he pulls back, my heartbeat has gone thoroughly to hell.
“Come on,” he says, and starts walking before I decide whether to protest.
The path cuts inland through low stone landscaping and wild olive trees that shouldn’t be here and yet thrive anyway. The irony of that almost makes me smile again.
The larger structure I saw from the plane rises through the greenery as we move, and I instinctively assume it’s where we’re going.
But Nikolaj doesn’t lead me there; he takes me past it.
I gesture toward the villa. “We’re not going there?”
“No.”
He keeps walking.
“Nikolaj.”
“You’ll see.”
I hate that phrase from him because it usually means the explanation is either more emotional or more insane than I’m prepared for.
The path curves again, this time down toward the coast of the island, where the trees thin out and the air grows saltier and brighter. Ahead, partly hidden by low cypress and a white stone wall, is the cottage I saw.
Beautiful, actually, in a clean, old-world way, all pale stone, deep porch, dark shutters, climbing green over one side, and enough seclusion to feel intimate rather than strategic.
It sits above the water with a view wide enough to break a weaker man open. It is the sort of place built for stolen mornings and impossible conversations.
And on the porch, wrapped up in each other like I’ve stepped into a fever dream constructed from family ghosts and too much whiskey, are our fathers.
I stop so hard that Nikolaj nearly has to turn back to keep from pulling me off balance.
My father looks older than the last time I saw him, which should not be possible because time is rude enough without becoming theatrical.
Ruslan, beside him, looks older too, harder in some ways, softer in others. A contradiction I do not know how to process because it implies things I have not been briefed on and am not enjoying discovering through visual shock.
There’s a cane leaning against the chair beside Salvatore, and two glasses on the table between them. One of Ruslan’s hands is wrapped over Salvatore’s wrist as if he forgot the world was still watching and no longer cared enough to fix it.
Nikolaj sees my face, and the bastard actually has the decency to look slightly less smug for once. “Well,” he says cautiously, “that’s one reaction.”
I yank my hand free from his. “What the fuck is this?”
The words come out sharper than I intended, but honestly, given the circumstances, they’re remarkably restrained.
Both men on the porch look up.
Ruslan’s expression shifts first from mild irritation at being interrupted to something almost unreadable when he realizes who’s standing at the foot of the steps.
Salvatore stills in a way that hits me somewhere old and defensive, one hand tightening once on the arm of the chair before he schools it away. Neither man looks remotely guilty, which only offends me further.
I turn fully to Nikolaj. “You need to explain.”
“I was planning to,” he says.
“Planning implies time and context. I’d settle for immediate honesty.”
His mouth twitches like he’s trying not to enjoy me like this. “You always did hate surprises.”
I take one step toward him. “Nikolaj.”
He lifts both hands slightly. “All right. Fuck. Don’t look at me like that.”
“Then start talking.”
Behind us on the porch, Salvatore lets out the smallest sound that might be a laugh and is definitely not helping. I turn toward him immediately.
“You,” I say, pointing at him.
Salvatore lifts one dark brow, as if this is a reasonable way to greet your father after finding him draped around the old love of his life on a secret island named after his sister. “Vincenzo.”
The sheer composure of it is enough to make me want to throw one of Nikolaj’s carefully curated tropical rocks through a window.
“What are you doing here?”
Salvatore glances once toward Ruslan before looking back at me. “Sitting down.”
I stare at him in disbelief.
Ruslan, who at least has the decency to look a little grim about the whole thing, mutters, “He’s always been an insufferable bastard in moments like this.”
“You do not get to be dry with me right now,” I snap at both of them. “Either of you.”
That earns me a low, undeniably amused sound from Nikolaj at my shoulder, and I shoot him a murderous look. He doesn’t even try to hide the grin this time.
“My King,” he says, which is already enough to infuriate me before the rest arrives, “you have to admit this is funny.”
“No, actually, I don’t.”
He leans close enough that I feel his breath at my ear when he says, very quietly, “A little.”
I elbow him in the ribs without looking. He laughs and catches my wrist before I can do it again, the traitor.
On the porch, Salvatore is watching us with an expression I don’t have the emotional range to decode right now.
Ruslan’s arm remains around his waist, solid and unconscious.
It should be surreal. Instead, it feels like I’ve accidentally walked into a chapter of history someone hid from me and then had the audacity to furnish.
I look between them, between the cane, the hand on the wrist, the years in both their faces, and some part of me finally catches up enough to understand one thing at least.
This is not casual. This is not a reunion for politeness. Whatever sits between them has too much age and damage in it to be anything but real.
That does not mean I’m done being furious.
“You named the island after Lucia,” I say to Nikolaj, because my brain latches onto the detail again like it might be the one part of this I can still make sense of. “Then brought me here to find our fathers behaving like a very old, very inconvenient love story on your porch.”
“That’s one way to phrase it,” he says.
“It’s the correct way.”
Ruslan finally rises from the chair with the slow care of a man who knows exactly how much his body resents unnecessary theatrics. Salvatore reaches for the cane, but Ruslan is already steady and offering his hand to help him up as well.
The ease of the movement guts me more than I’d like to admit. They’ve done that before—more than once. Enough that they don’t need to think about who moves first.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I mutter.
This time Nikolaj laughs outright.
I turn to face him again. “Stop enjoying this.”
He brings my knuckles to his mouth and kisses them once, as if that will somehow soften the fact that he has sprung parental emotional warfare on me without warning. It almost does, which is deeply humiliating.
“Come inside,” he says.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t agreed to—”
“You’re already here.”
“That is not the same thing as consent to whatever deranged family summit this is.”
His eyes spark. “You’ll thank me later.”
“I absolutely will not.”
He smiles like a man who knows I’m lying. On the porch, Salvatore says my name again, and I turn despite myself because some habits still sit too deep to ignore even when I’m furious with the man who shaped them.
There’s something fragile in his face now that wasn’t there a moment ago—honesty too old to be handled neatly. Ruslan remains at his side, close enough to touch and not pretending otherwise.
“Vincenzo,” my father says more quietly, “please.”
That one word does what force couldn’t, because my father is not a man who says please unless the world has already shifted under him enough to count as a small disaster.
I look at Nikolaj. He watches me with impossible patience by his standards, sunglasses forgotten in his hand, face open in a way that says he understands exactly how violent this feels and is asking me to step into it anyway.
“Tell me that you had a good reason for this.”
His expression turns gentle. “I did.”
“Better be spectacular.”
His mouth curves. “My island. My rules.”
I stare at him for one beat too long and then, because apparently this is my life now, I let him take my hand again.
He leads me the rest of the way up the steps toward the porch, toward the cottage, toward the two men standing in the doorway of a history I was never supposed to inherit like this.
My heart is still beating too fast, though for entirely different reasons than it was on the plane. Somewhere under the fury and confusion and disbelief sits something else, too. Dread, maybe. Or hope. I’m not ready to identify which.
As we reach the porch, Ruslan shifts just enough to make room. Salvatore’s gaze catches on me and stays there, carrying thirty years, apologies, and an entire vanished world in it. I don’t know what to do with that yet, so I do the only thing I can.
I look at all three of them and say, with complete, furious sincerity, “One of you is about thirty seconds from explaining everything before I start setting fire to expensive property.”
Nikolaj squeezes my hand once like a warning, then once more like reassurance.
Then he opens the cottage door and guides me inside.