Chapter III
thirty
Vincenzo
The villa is quieter than it should be for a place that’s supposed to belong to us.
That’s my first thought once the explanations are over and the shock settles enough to leave behind its harder, stranger cousin. Not peace. I don’t think I’d recognize peace if it sat across from me at dinner and asked me to pass the salt.
This is something else. A lull. A stillness stretched over water and stone and old grief, as though the whole island is holding its breath while four men with too much history try to pretend the ground under them isn’t shifting.
Ruslan and Salvatore have the cottage, a place that looks like something built for old wounds, stiff joints, and quiet tea gone cold while two stubborn bastards learn how to sit in the same room without making every sentence a war crime.
The villa, on the other hand, is ours.
That should thrill me more simply than it does.
Nikolaj walked me through it after the terrace conversation dissolved and the older generation, with surprising dignity, realized there are only so many family revelations one evening can take before someone either starts drinking too hard or throwing furniture.
The villa sits higher on the rise than the cottage, with white stone, windows, and deep balconies facing the sea. It isn’t vulgar, that surprises me. I expected more overt excess from a man who solved long-distance romance by buying an island. But it is elegant in a way that hurts.
Open rooms. Pale wood. Old-world bones with modern lines threaded through them so carefully the two seem to have agreed on a truce. Every space looks built for breathing.
And I, apparently, do not know how to do that here.
Nikolaj is somewhere behind me now, moving around the kitchen with the easy purpose of a man who already occupies places physically before he’s earned them emotionally.
He opened windows, found whiskey, and said something in Russian to one of the men from the staff team he brought over from the mainland.
There are footsteps, then a door closing somewhere farther down the hall. I stand in the center of the sitting room with my hands in my pockets and look out at the sea like it might explain why my chest suddenly feels too tight for a house this large.
The problem is not the island.
The problem is that we don’t have to sneak around here.
I know how to hide with Nikolaj.
What I do not know—what I realize with a kind of slow, devastating clarity while standing in the center of this sunlit, impossible villa—is how to just be with him where no one is coming.
Here, we could be free… and I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know how to be calm with him.
I know how to fight him. I know how to want him.
I know how to push, retreat, provoke, seduce, and survive.
I know how to kiss him in doorways and taste him with all the desperation of men too used to losing time.
I know how to make room for him in my body, in my grief, in the ruined little sanctuary of my private thoughts.
But this—this open possibility of simply existing beside Nikolaj without someone else’s shadow at our backs—feels so heartbreakingly new that my entire body has decided suspicion is the safest response.
If this is what freedom looks like—sunlight, silence, his hand still warm where it left mine, a house that belongs to both of us—then I have to admit how little practice I have in anything except survival.
I hear him before I turn.
The sound is small: ice in a glass, bare feet, or maybe just light steps over the stone floor. Nikolaj does not announce himself when he doesn’t have to. He moves through rooms as if he belongs in them and lets everyone else catch up to the fact.
“You’ve gone very quiet,” he says.
I don’t answer immediately. He knows me well enough to hear that for what it is.
When I glance over my shoulder, he is leaning one hip against the kitchen doorway in linen trousers and a black shirt with the top few buttons left open. There’s a glass in his hand, and he’s barefoot.
His face is calmer than usual, his edges softened by sea air, island light, and the simple fact that he is not in Moscow, and no one here expects the Pakhan unless he chooses to wear the title.
He studies me for one second, then comes closer.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
I smile automatically. “That’s an unfair question.”
“Why?”
“Because if I knew precisely, I’d already be lying to you about it.”
His mouth curves faintly at that. I look back out the window because that smile will make this harder if I let it.
The sea below is taking on a golden hue now, late sun spilling over the surface in long, torn strips that look almost liquid enough to touch.
It is absurdly beautiful here, which only makes the ache under my ribs more offensive.
Nikolaj stops beside me rather than in front of me. Smart. He’s not forcing eye contact or making this into a confrontation when what I need is probably the opposite of being cornered, even by him.
“You hate the island,” he says after a beat.
I let out a soft laugh despite myself. “No.”
“You hate that I bought it.”
“No.”
“Still think the island idea is insane.”
“Yes,” I say. “But that’s not the same thing.”
His glass taps lightly against the windowsill as he sets it down. He folds his arms and leans one shoulder beside mine, both of us facing the same view now. “Then say it.”
I close my eyes for one second because he is very good at this when he wants to be, and I wish that surprised me more than it does.
The younger Nikolaj only ever learned how to coax by accident, usually halfway through a threat, and then furious at himself for caring enough to notice a wound. This older version knows exactly what he’s doing and has the patience to let silence open on its own.
“It feels wrong,” I say finally.
The words sound pathetic once they’re out, and I hate that immediately.
“What does?” he asks.
“This.” I gesture vaguely to the room, the sea, him, the whole impossible arrangement spread around us like a miracle I don’t trust. “All of it. Not wrong morally. Wrong in the sense that my body keeps expecting someone to walk in and remind me this can’t possibly be ours.”
I keep my eyes on the horizon because looking at him while saying this would be intolerably earnest, and I’d rather die dramatically at sea than let him enjoy that too much.
“We’ve never had…” I stop and try again because the sentence matters enough to deserve accuracy. “We’ve never had space.”
The words settle between us.
I continue before I can decide against it.
“We’ve had moments. Rooms. Stolen hours.
We’ve had urgency, secrecy, and all the things that make people stupid enough to confuse survival with romance.
We’ve had hotel beds, gyms, kitchens, and mornings that came too fast. But we’ve never had…
” Again, I gesture helplessly. “This. A place where no one is watching and no one expects us to be anything else.”
Nikolaj is quiet. I can feel him listening with his whole body, which is somehow more unnerving than an interruption would have been.
“And I don’t know how to be calm with you here,” I say, and there it is, the humiliating center of it finally exposed.
“I don’t know what that means. On this island, we can be free, and I don’t know what free even looks like in practice because we’ve only ever been sneaking around or losing each other. ”
The last line leaves me softer than I intended. There is no retrieving it.
I finally look at him.
Something in his face changes the second my eyes meet his.
Not pity, thank Christ. Nikolaj would know better than to insult me with pity.
It’s something steadier than that. Something almost fierce in its tenderness because he understands exactly what I’ve handed him and how much it cost to say it aloud without a joke wrapped around it.
He reaches up and smooths two fingers over the line of my jaw, a gesture so simple I nearly close my eyes with it on instinct. “Vincenzo.”
“Don’t be kind,” I say immediately.
His brows lift. “Why not?”
“Because I’m already making enough of a fool of myself.”
He actually smiles then, small and dangerous and warm in a way that drags me straight back into all the reasons I’m doomed where he’s concerned. “You’re making a fool of yourself because you’re in love, not because you’re wrong.”
“That is not remotely reassuring.”
“It’s honest.”
“Which is even worse.”
He laughs softly and then steps in closer until there is no room left for pretending this is still just a conversation by a window.
One hand settles at my waist, broad and possessive without any of the urgency we’re both used to from each other. The absence of urgency is what gets me. He isn’t grabbing because he thinks I’ll vanish. He’s holding because he wants to.
“Look at me,” he says.
I do, and he studies my face for a long second. Under that attention, I feel all the old instinctive defenses trying to rise. Charm. Deflection. Precision. Anything but the simple, naked truth of being seen. He has always been too good at stripping that out of me.
“You’re grieving the version of us that only existed in stolen pieces,” he says quietly. “That’s what this is.”
I blink at him.
The sentence hits with the clean force of recognition. I didn’t have the language for it. Of course, he does. Of course, he can take the heartbreak out of my chest and hold it up in one blunt line until I can finally see the shape properly.
He goes on before I can answer. “You got used to us being built around edges. Around running out of time and having to leave before the room finished cooling. So now that there’s space, your body doesn’t know what the fuck to do with it.”
A rough, surprised laugh escapes me, because only Nikolaj would phrase emotional clarity like that and somehow make it more comforting rather than less. “That is a horrifyingly inelegant diagnosis.”
“I’m Russian. Lower your standards.”