Chapter 34 #2
“I know,” he says. “I heard it, and I still picked a fight because hearing you scared for me did something to my head. I don’t know how to be…
fuck.” He stops, jaw clenching, frustration flashing across his face because words have always been weapons for him until they become feelings, and then they start fighting back.
“I don’t know how to be loved safely when danger’s in the room. ”
That breaks something in me around the sight of him trying. Really trying. Tripping over words that do not sit naturally in his mouth, forcing himself to stay in the vulnerability instead of turning it into a knife.
He continues before I can answer.
“When people loved me growing up, it came with orders, corrections, and someone deciding where I belonged and what I had to cut out to stay there. My father loved me and hid half my fucking soul from me. Arseniy loved me and carved duty into my chest because I loved wrong. The family loved me, turned me into a blade, and then acted shocked when I learned to cut. So, when you called scared, some fucked-up part of me heard it like a hand on my leash instead of what it was.”
He looks disgusted with himself, and I am no longer angry in the clean way I want to be. That irritates me almost as much as it relieves me.
“That isn’t an excuse,” he says quickly, as if he sees the shift in me and fears I’ll mistake explanation for evasion.
“I’m not giving you a tragic little history lesson so you’ll pat my head and tell me I did my best. I didn’t.
I fucked up. I hurt you. I made you feel shut out after you spent eight years being shut out of my life by everyone else. That is on me.”
My heart feels like it’s being slowly pulled apart, and the anger inside me takes a knee. Not surrendering or forgiving everything before it’s been fully addressed. Just bowing under the weight of his fear because I know exactly what it is to stand where he stands.
I stood there for eight years. Loving someone with both hands open, terrified every silence was another version of goodbye.
“Nikolaj,” I say.
He shakes his head once. “No, please let me finish before I lose the nerve.”
That silences me more effectively than any command would have.
He looks almost startled by his own honesty, then pushes forward because apparently, now that the wound is open, he has decided to bleed with purpose.
“I came here because when you hung up, I realized I’d rather walk into this house and have you shoot me than sit in Saint Helena pretending I could wait for you to cool down,” Nikolaj says. “And yes, I know how fucking dramatic that sounds. I hear myself. I sound like a lunatic.”
He moves closer again, one careful step at a time, until there are only a few feet between us. He still doesn’t touch me, and that restraint is its own apology.
The Nikolaj I knew at twenty would’ve grabbed first and spoken after, if speaking was required at all. The Nikolaj in front of me now looks like he wants to put his hands on me so badly it hurts him and is choosing not to because my anger deserves space.
God, I hate how much I love him.
“I don’t know how to do this, Vincenzo,” he says, and there it is, raw as bone.
“I don’t know how to love you now without trying to control every threat around us until there’s nothing left standing.
I don’t know how to tell you things before I’ve already decided how to fix them.
I don’t know how to trust that if I hand you the ugly parts before I’ve made them useful, you won’t look at me one day and decide I’m more danger than I’m worth. ”
He laughs once, wrecked and furious with himself. “And that’s not fair to you. I know it isn’t. You waited eight years with nothing but my ghost and my fucking hatred in your hands, and I’m standing here afraid you’ll leave because I mishandled one truth. It’s pathetic.”
“No,” I say. “It’s not pathetic.”
His mouth twists. “Don’t comfort me if you’re still angry.”
“I’m very capable of doing both.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It is.”
For the first time all night, something almost like a laugh moves through him, but it dies before it fully forms.
“I’m sorry for not telling you. For making you hear it from someone else, and acting like protecting you meant keeping you outside the door.”
I pick up my discarded cufflink and set it down again, uselessly. “I called for a summit,” I say.
The silence tells me he heard what I didn’t say. That I moved pieces without him. That I have spent the day doing to him a version of what I’m angry he did to me.
I glance up at him. “Helena will be there. Reyes will not have the luxury of pretending he doesn’t know why he’s been summoned. I’ve frozen three accounts, pulled two intermediaries, and I have men working through what remains of Lucien’s channels. I did all of that without telling you.”
“That’s different,” Nikolaj says carefully.
I raise a brow. “Is it?”
He holds my gaze for a second, then grimaces. “No. Maybe. Fuck.”
Despite myself, a laugh nearly escapes me. It comes out as a breath instead.
Nikolaj drags another hand through his hair.
“It is different because the Five Families are your house, and if someone inside them is moving against me, then it’s your right to start cutting rot before you brief me on every fucking incision.
But it’s not different in the way that matters to you, is it? ”
“No,” I say.
He nods once. “Because you shut me out because you were angry.”
“Yes.”
“And because I hurt you.”
“Yes.”
He absorbs that with visible difficulty. Then he nods again. “Alright.”
That answer catches me off guard. “Alright?”
“Yes,” Nikolaj says. “You’re allowed.”
I stare at him.
His mouth pulls tight. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’ve grown a second head because I’m not yelling.”
“You’re making it very difficult not to.”
His laugh is brief and rough, but it dies quickly.
“I don’t want to fight you about whether you had the right to be angry.
You did. You do. I just…” He stops, jaw flexing again.
“I don’t want us to start handling each other like problems. That’s all everyone else ever did with us.
Manage the risk. Manage the fallout. Manage the inconvenient fact that I loved you so much they had to carve me back into shape.
I don’t want to do that to you, and I don’t want you doing it to me, even when we’re pissed. ”
I turn fully toward him. The movement is small, but he notices. His shoulders loosen by less than an inch. Hope is a dangerous thing on Nikolaj Dragovich’s face because it looks too much like surrender.
“You should have called me,” I say.
“I know.”
“No,” I say, and now my voice cracks just enough for both of us to hear it. “You should have called me because I love you, and I am tired of finding out after the fact that someone has decided where I’m allowed to stand in your life.”
His face goes still with the kind of pain that does not need performance to be real.
“I know,” Nikolaj says again, softer.
“You do not get to protect me by putting me outside the room. You do not get to make yourself a target and then act surprised when I care where the gun is pointed.”
“I know.”
“And if you ever say you’re not one of my men to me again in that tone, I will shoot you in a place you deeply value.”
That finally pulls a real, crooked little smile from him, terrified relief and old filth breaking through the tension at once. “My heart?”
I stare at him. “Lower.”
His smile becomes almost helpless. “There’s my love.”
I should not soften. I am not done being angry. The anger is still there, bruised and pulsing, but it no longer knows how to stand upright against the sight of him in my bedroom, looking like he crossed half a continent because the idea of me not speaking to him scared him more than pride.
I hate that I ask the next question softly. “How did you get here so fast?”
“Jet,” Nikolaj says.
“Of course.”
“And a helicopter.”
I close my eyes briefly. “Of course.”
“And maybe two traffic violations.”
“Nikolaj.”
“Okay, three,” he admits.
The laugh gets out this time. It is small, tired, and entirely against my will, but it gets out. His whole face changes when he hears it, not with triumph, but relief so raw it almost makes me angry again on principle.
He really was afraid. Not annoyed or inconvenienced. Afraid that the silence between us could become something larger if he didn’t break it first.
The fear has not left his eyes. It has only learned to stand beside the apology. He does not move when I reach him. He lets me decide the contact. That alone finishes off the last clean edge of my anger.
I lift one hand and press my palm to his cheek, just below the bruise, and his eyes close instantly.
The response is so immediate, so stripped down, that my throat tightens around it. This man—this terrifying, impossible man—crossed borders to apologize and now stands in my bedroom with his eyes closed because I touched his face.
How am I meant to stay furious at that? How is anyone supposed to survive loving someone who can be both a weapon and a wound at the same time?
“You frightened me,” I say quietly.
His eyes open again, frost-bitten and glassy. “I know.”
“That is what I couldn’t forgive yesterday. You made me feel like I was outside again.”
His hand comes up slowly, wrapping around my wrist where I touch his face. “Never,” he says, and his voice breaks around the word enough to make my chest ache. “Never outside. Not anymore. I’m sorry, My King.”
My King.
The title hits the old place; it always does. I close my eyes for one second because I cannot look at him while that name moves through me and still maintain any useful shape of anger.
When I open them again, he’s watching me like his entire world is balanced on whether I step closer or away.
So, I step closer. “I’m still angry,” I say.
His mouth curves faintly. “I’d be disappointed if you weren’t.”
“I may yell later.”
“I deserve that.”
“You do.”
He nods seriously. “Fair.”
“And I am not apologizing for the summit.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“I’m going to handle Helena and Reyes.”
His eyes sharpen at the name. “The man I tortured yesterday mentioned he was involved.”
Of course, he did. “I believe so, too.”
The fear finally gives way, just slightly, to the lethal focus I know too well. “Then I want him.”
“No,” I say. “You get him after I know which of his hands touched this. Until then, you are not going in blind because your temper wants a throat.”
He looks at me for a long moment. The old Nikolaj would argue until the room caught fire. This one breathes through his nose once and forces himself to nod.
“Fine,” he says.
I narrow my eyes. “That was suspiciously reasonable.”
“I’m trying here.”
The bluntness of it almost hurts.
I touch the bruise on his cheek with my thumb. “I can see that.”
His face shifts at that, pride and vulnerability fighting in real time. “Don’t make it sound noble. I’m one bad look from you away from becoming completely fucking irrational.”
A helpless smile pulls at my mouth. “You mean more than usual?”
Nikolaj’s eyes drop to my mouth, and the air between us changes at once. Not enough to erase the argument, nothing that easy. Enough to remind us both of what waits under every fight now: not only heat, but relief. The knowledge that we are still here. Still choosing the room instead of the door.
He looks back up, expression sobering again. “I love you,” he says.
My anger takes another step back.
I hate it. I love it. Both are true.
“I love you too,” I say. “And you still owe me a better apology after I shower.”
He huffs a quiet laugh, and the sound settles something in me I did not realize was still shaking. “Yes, My King.”
That will do for now.