Chapter 34
thirty-four
Vincenzo
By the next night, I am still angry enough that every room feels too small for me.
Not loudly. I stopped being loud about anger before I was old enough to understand what that kind of control would cost later.
So, I spent the day calm. Terrifyingly calm, according to the way three men at the council table suddenly forget how to breathe when I ask one simple question about offshore movement tied to Reyes.
I speak softly. I listen carefully. I let men think they are explaining things to me while they hand me the rope I’ll eventually use to hang them with. It is one of my few reliable talents.
But beneath it, I am furious.
Nikolaj knew. That is the part I keep returning to, no matter how much work I throw at the day.
Not the bounty itself, although the idea of someone putting a price on his head still makes me violent.
Not Helena Byrne’s channel being used as smoke, or Reyes’s name beginning to appear in the uglier parts of the financial trail, or the nauseating certainty that someone inside the Five Families is stupid enough to believe killing Nikolaj Dragovich will make the world simpler.
No, the part that has its teeth in me is that Nikolaj knew and chose not to tell me.
A month, give or take, he said.
A fucking month.
That means he knew before Isle Lucia.
I have survived eight years of silence once already. I have lived inside the damage other people caused when they decided what truth he could survive, what love he could remember, what pain should be buried for his own good.
I watched the man I love walk out of my life because everyone around him folded secrecy over him and called it mercy. I know exactly how ugly protection looks when it’s really control wearing a better suit.
And then he did it to me.
Not with the same intent, I know that. I am not being deliberately unfair, despite how badly I want the luxury.
Nikolaj did not withhold the threat because he wanted to erase me from my own life or because he thought I was weak in the obvious sense.
He did it because men have wanted him dead since before we knew each other.
Because I told him Lucien was tearing rot through my house and decided, in some arrogant, protective corner of his skull, that he would handle his own problem until it was clean enough to bring to me.
That might be understandable.
It is also unforgivable at the moment.
So, I called for a summit. Not the grand, public kind with formal invitations and seating charts designed to insult three heads at once while appearing neutral. This is smaller. Emergency sessions. Private calls. Pressure applied in the right places.
Helena Byrne is summoned under the pretense of clarification, not accusation. Stefano Reyes receives nothing so polite. The men tied to his routes start losing access before he knows which doors have closed.
I ordered a freeze on two accounts Lucien used to move deniable funds and arranged for three of his intermediaries to be picked up before dawn.
I sent Marie and Arabella to Monaco for the night and placed both women under additional protection without telling Arabella why. Her face has only just begun to look human again, and I refuse to give this mess another woman to chew through for sport.
And yes, while I make these plans and more I will not mention, while I build a net around the threat to Nikolaj and call it strategy, I am fully aware of the hypocrisy.
I do not call him.
I do not text.
I do not tell him I’ve moved pieces in three territories.
I do not tell him everything I discovered because I am still angry, and I want him to feel the silence he chose.
Because I am petty and wounded and much less noble than anyone who bows their head when I walk into a room would ever suspect.
And because some part of me is afraid that if I call him and hear his voice again while that fear is still raw in me, I will forgive him before I’m done being furious.
I step out before the driver circles around. My body aches with the day in small, annoying ways. Shoulders are tight from sitting too long. My head is beginning to throb behind my eyes because I’ve had too much coffee and not enough food.
Inside, the villa is quieter than usual without Arabella here. I loosen my tie as I walk, dragging the knot down with one hand, then unbutton my cuffs in the corridor because I can already feel the phantom heat of the shower waiting.
The bedroom door is open a few inches, which is wrong. I know it instantly. Not wrong enough for danger, perhaps, but wrong enough to sharpen the edges of me.
My security doesn’t leave doors like that. Staff don’t enter this room without explicit permission.
I push the door open and find Nikolaj sitting on my bed.
The sight of him hits so violently that for one second, I forget to be angry.
He sits on the edge of the mattress like he’s been there long enough to hate every minute of it, elbows braced on his knees, hands clasped loosely between them.
He’s dressed in black, of course, because apparently, the man would rather die than approach emotional vulnerability in a color. A long coat lies discarded beside him. His hair is a little disordered, not from carelessness but from fingers dragged through it too many times.
There is a bruise along his cheekbone that wasn’t there when I last saw him, or maybe it was only beginning then. His knuckles are split. His mouth is set hard, but his eyes—
God.
His eyes are what stop me.
Nikolaj looks worried.
Not irritated, impatient, or even angry, though I know that lives in him as naturally as breath. Worried. It sits naked in his face before he has time to kill it, and the sight of it drags guilt through me so sharply I nearly step back from the room.
I have seen Nikolaj feral. I have seen him aroused, furious, amused, possessive, bloodied, half mad with jealousy, and wrecked by returned memory. I have seen the boy he was, the man he became, and the terrifying blur between the two when his control thins. But this is different.
This is fear.
Actual fear.
And I realize, with a sick twist under my ribs, that it is fear of losing me.
He stands too fast and starts toward me but stops after two steps. His hands flex once at his sides.
“Nikolaj,” I say, shutting the door behind me with deliberate care. “You’re developing a habit of appearing in places you weren’t invited.”
Normally, that would get me something: a smirk, a filthy comment, or a threat dressed as flirtation. Tonight, his mouth barely moves.
“I know,” he says.
The simplicity of it makes me pause.
“How did you get in?”
“Your guards are still shit.”
There it is, almost. A shadow of him. But the line lands flat.
I look at him more closely. “That’s usually where you grin.”
His jaw flexes, then he says, “I’m not here to be funny.”
“Then why are you here?” I ask, keeping my voice controlled because if I let anything sharper into it too soon, I don’t know where this lands.
“Because if you’ve come to discuss our phone call, I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours discovering half my house has been eating itself from the inside, so you’re going to need to be clear. ”
He flinches.
Nikolaj Dragovich flinches.
Not physically much. Just a small jerk in his expression, a blink too hard, a breath caught and swallowed. But I see it, and it sends my anger off balance because I know him well enough now to understand this isn’t guilt over being caught.
“I fucked up,” he starts. “I knew there was movement on a hit, and I didn’t tell you. I can dress that up in all kinds of practical bullshit if I want to sound less like an arrogant cunt, but the truth is simple. I knew enough to warn you, and I didn’t.”
There is no deflection in it, and that matters. I hate that it matters so quickly.
I set my cufflink on the dresser rather than throw it, then remove the other with the slow precision of a man doing something with his hands so he doesn’t do something worse with his mouth. I do not interrupt him.
Nikolaj watches the movement, then keeps speaking.
“I told myself it wasn’t confirmed. I told myself I needed a name first. I told myself your house was already bleeding from Lucien, and I wasn’t going to drop another problem on you until I had something solid enough to make useful.
And all of that is true enough to sound reasonable if you ignore the ugly part under it.
” His throat works once. “The ugly part is that I decided for you.”
I feel that line land in me with surgical precision. He takes one step closer, then stops again. The idea of Nikolaj being careful around me like that hurts more than it should.
“I’ve spent months wanting to put my fist through walls over my father and Arseniy and half the fucking world deciding what I could survive.
Then I turned around and did a version of it to you because I was scared and stupid and too used to handling threats alone to remember that alone isn’t what this is anymore. ”
I look away first because the last sentence hits too close to the part of me still bleeding.
Alone isn’t what this is anymore.
No. It is not. That is exactly why it hurt so much.
Nikolaj drags a hand through his hair, leaving it more disordered. “And then I made it worse,” he says. “On the phone. I said I wasn’t one of your men, like that was the fucking point. Like you called because you were trying to command me and not because you were afraid.”
“Yes,” I say.
The word is simple. Cold, maybe. But honest.
His eyes close for half a second as if the answer physically hurts. When he opens them again, that fear is back, larger now because I have named mine and left him no room to pretend this is merely pride.