Chapter 33 #2
My chest tightens at the words despite the absolute disaster of their timing. Vincenzo said it like a fact. Then the rest of what he said catches up, and guilt—that unwelcome little bastard—sharpens under my ribs.
“I was handling it,” I say.
Vincenzo laughs once, and there is nothing amused in it. “Were you.”
“Yes.”
“By not telling me.”
“I didn’t have enough to tell you.”
“That’s bullshit,” Vincenzo snaps.
I close my eyes briefly. “Careful.”
“No,” Vincenzo says, his voice rising now, still controlled but only barely. “Do not ‘careful’ me from whatever room you’re standing in while acting as if this is some minor inconvenience. Someone inside the Five Families has put a bounty on your head, and you have known for weeks.”
“I knew there was movement.”
“You knew there was a threat.”
“I always have threats.”
“That is not an answer, Nikolaj,” Vincenzo says.
“It is the only answer that makes sense.”
“No, it is the answer of a man who has spent too long being surrounded by people who treat danger as weather,” Vincenzo says. “This is not weather. This is a direct move against you, and potentially against the two of us.”
The word us hits harder than it should.
I look down at my bloodied knuckles and flex my hand once. The split skin pulls. “I didn’t want to bring you into it until I knew where it was coming from.”
Vincenzo goes quiet for one dangerous second. “Bring me into it.”
I know immediately that I’ve fucked up.
Not because the words are untrue. Because they are precisely the kind of words that make a man like Vincenzo hear separation where I meant protection.
I can kill a room full of traitors without blinking, but apparently, one sentence to the man I love can still step on a hidden mine before I see the wire.
“Nikolaj,” Vincenzo says. “This is already mine.”
I rub the bridge of my nose. “That is not what I meant.”
“It is what you said.”
“Then let me say it better.”
“You should have done that weeks ago.”
My temper flares because his fear on my behalf does that to me. I don’t know what to do with being cared about when I’m in the middle of blood and threat and responsibility, and the easiest response is still to bare my teeth like an idiot.
“You do not get to order me. I’m not one of your men,” I say.
The second it leaves my mouth, I want to kill the sentence myself.
Vincenzo’s silence goes absolute.
Tatiana winces visibly in the corner.
Maksim mutters, almost inaudibly, “Oh, fuck.”
Kai does not look up, which is wise.
When Vincenzo speaks again, his voice is very calm. Too calm. “No,” he says. “You are not one of my men.”
“Vincenzo—”
“No, let’s be clear,” Vincenzo says. “You are not one of my men. You are not under my command. You are not a subject in my house or an ally I acquired through a treaty. You are the man I waited eight years to get back, and I am apparently expected to learn about a bounty on your head through my fucking intelligence channels because you decided I didn’t need to know yet. ”
The room is quiet enough that even Piotr looks emotionally invested now, which is not ideal.
My jaw tightens. “I was going to tell you.”
“When?” Vincenzo asks. “After someone took a shot? After you traced enough names to satisfy whatever impossible standard you set for involving me? After you decided the danger was respectable enough to stop treating it like a private nuisance?”
“That’s not fair.”
“No,” Vincenzo says. “Do not speak to me about fair.”
That shuts me up, and it should. He has earned that line. Eight years of being the only one who remembered. Five months of silence because I asked for space.
All the patience he has handed me in pieces I did not deserve, and now I am standing in a cellar with blood drying on my hands, acting as if withholding a threat from him was practical instead of arrogant.
But I am still angry. At Helena. At whoever is using her name.
At the bastard tied to the chair. At Arseniy for being right.
At myself for not calling Vincenzo the second the bounty stopped being a rumor.
At the sound of worry in his voice, because it makes me feel like there is something soft in my body exposed to a room full of knives.
So, naturally, I make it worse.
“I didn’t call because I didn’t want you doing something reckless,” I say.
Vincenzo inhales on the other end—slow, measured, and lethal, and his voice turns silk-thin. “You bought an island because we needed privacy, Nikolaj.”
I grit my teeth. “That was different.”
“You rerouted my private jet without telling me.”
“That was romantic.”
“That was kidnapping with paperwork,” Vincenzo says. “And you are warning me about recklessness?”
Piotr makes a small, strangled noise that might be the worst-timed laugh in the history of men tied to chairs.
I turn my head slowly and look at him. He goes silent instantly.
Vincenzo hears the movement. “Are you interrogating someone right now?” he asks.
I pause.
“Nikolaj,” Vincenzo says. “Are you in the middle of an interrogation?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“Whether you’re going to yell at me more if I say yes.”
Vincenzo lets out a sound that’s half disbelief, half fury. “Unbelievable.”
“I answered your call.”
“You should have made the call,” Vincenzo says. “That is the point.”
I drag a hand over the back of my neck and turn farther away from the room, staring at the stone wall as if it might offer advice. It does not. “I know.”
Vincenzo hears the apology trying to form and doesn’t let it save me. “No, you don’t. If you knew, I wouldn’t be standing here feeling like I had to chase down the safety of the man I love through spies and bank trails.”
There it is again. The man I love.
It hits differently the second time. Worse. Better. I don’t know. The whole room feels too small for those words, for blood, for the fact that Vincenzo is angry because he is afraid, and I am angry because being loved this openly still catches in me like a blade.
My voice lowers despite myself. “You’re scared.”
“Of course I’m scared,” Vincenzo snaps. “Someone wants you dead.”
“People always want me dead.”
“I don’t care about always,” Vincenzo says. “I care about now.”
For one brief, stupid second, the whole argument could turn.
I feel it. The edge where I could step back, admit it, tell him I should have called, tell him Arseniy warned me, and I didn’t want to hand him another problem while Lucien was already eating holes through his house.
I could give him the part of me beneath the arrogance and let the fight become something else.
But Piotr picks that exact moment to cough blood onto the floor.
The sound jerks me back into the room. Back into the work. Back into Helena Byrne, the bounty, and the fact that whatever I feel for Vincenzo does not change the fact that there are bodies and names and decisions waiting on me right now.
“I have this under control,” I say.
Vincenzo goes silent, and I know, instantly, that I’ve chosen the wrong sentence again.
When he speaks, his voice is cold enough to frost the line. “Then by all means, Pakhan, handle it.”
“Vincenzo,” I say, but his name comes out sharper because I hear him stepping back behind title and distance, and I hate it.
“No,” Vincenzo says. “You wanted to keep this to yourself. Keep it.”
“That is not what I want.”
“It’s what you chose.”
My temper snaps fully then, hard enough to make my own voice dangerous. “I chose not to drag you into another war when your own house is still bleeding from Lucien.”
“You do not get to decide what I can survive,” Vincenzo says.
The line lands like a punch.
Because that, more than anything else, is the heart of it. Ruslan and Arseniy deciding what I could survive. And now here I am, dressed in the same fucking arrogance, deciding Vincenzo doesn’t need the weight of a threat until I’ve made it tidy enough to hand over.
Shame flickers hot under my anger.
I hate that too.
“I know,” I say, but this time the words are too late.
“No, Nikolaj,” Vincenzo says, and the hurt in his voice is finally visible beneath the fury. “You don’t.”
Then the line goes dead.
For one long second, I stand there with the phone still against my ear, listening to nothing.
No goodbye. No final insult. Only silence.
Slowly, I lower the phone.
The room does not move.
Tatiana is no longer pouting. Maksim looks deeply interested in the floor. Kai’s face is unreadable, but his eyes are on me now in the way men look at unstable explosives.
Piotr somehow has the survival instinct to stare at his own knees and pretend he did not just overhear the Pakhan get his ass handed to him emotionally by the King of the Five Families.
My mood, already bad, drops into something blacker. I stare at the blank phone screen until it goes dark.
Tatiana clears her throat delicately. “That went well,” she says, and I look at her. She lifts both hands. “Sorry. Terribly. I meant that went terribly.”
Maksim mutters, “Better.”
Kai says nothing because Kai enjoys being alive.
I slide the phone into my pocket with more control than I feel and turn back toward Piotr. The man in the chair seems to shrink by two inches when my eyes land on him. Smart. Very smart.
I walk back to him slowly.
Every step feels colder than the last. Vincenzo’s words keep moving under my skin, refusing to stay where I put them.
You do not get to decide what I can survive.
He is right. I know he is right. That makes it worse, not better.
Because now the anger has nowhere clean to go except back into the room.
To the man tied to the chair who has the misfortune of being present while my lover hangs up on me for being the exact kind of arrogant bastard I’ve spent months claiming I’m trying not to be.
I crouch in front of Piotr again. He starts trembling before I say a word.
I smile without warmth. “Where were we?”
Piotr swallows hard. “I was going to say the name.”
Tatiana perks up immediately. “Oh, now he remembers.”
I do not look away from Piotr. “Good.”
He licks blood from his split lip. “Byrne’s channel wasn’t direct,” Piotr whispers. “It came through a broker tied to one of her old councilmen. But the money—”
I lean closer. “Yes.”
Piotr’s voice shakes. “The money moved through Reyes.”
Stefano Reyes.
Five Families. Old blood. Old grudges. Quiet enough to be underestimated and arrogant enough to mistake quiet for invisibility.
I stare at Piotr for a long moment, then I stand.
Kai is already moving on the tablet, pulling threads, cross-checking. Maksim’s expression has sharpened fully now. Tatiana looks delighted in the way only my sister can when a room gets worse.
I should call Vincenzo back.
The thought arrives instantly.
I should call and tell him the name, tell him he was right to be angry, tell him I was wrong. I should do it now before pride has time to rot the apology in my mouth.
Instead, I stare at the man in the chair and feel the colder part of me take the wheel.
“Tanyusha,” I say.
My sister’s face lights up. “Yes?”
“You get five minutes.”
Piotr makes a broken sound of terror.
Tatiana pushes away from the wall with a smile sharp enough to cut bone. “Finally.”
I turn toward the door because if I stay, I will do the work myself, and right now, I need a different kind of violence.
The kind with maps, names, accounts, and men who thought putting a bounty on my head would go unanswered. Behind me, Piotr starts begging before Tatiana even touches him.
I walk out into the corridor with Vincenzo’s last words still ringing in my skull and my mood carved down to pure black decision.
When this night is over, someone is going to learn exactly what happens when they threaten what belongs to me and make me fight with the man I love in the middle of it.