Chapter 36
thirty-six
Nikolaj
I’ve paced a path into the carpet by the time the second hour passes.
The hotel room is too clean for the kind of thoughts in my head. Too neutral. Too expensive. Too fucking calm.
The room service tray Maksim bullied me into ordering sits under silver lids near the table, cooling into something useless because the idea of eating while Vincenzo is in a room full of men deciding whether I remain a problem or become an ally makes my stomach feel full of broken glass.
Since I’m not yet a permanent member of the Five Families, he didn’t call me to the summit.
Having me in that room while he exposes Lucien’s rot and forces Byrne and Reyes to answer for their side of the sabotage would give his enemies a way to turn the whole thing into a Moscow power grab.
If I’m there, it becomes personal. If I’m there, someone can point at me and say Vieri is compromised by the Dragovich Pakhan before Vincenzo gets the chance to prove his house was framed.
I know all of that.
It doesn’t stop me from wanting to put my fist through the wall.
Kai stands near the desk with a tablet in his hand, tracking whatever quiet updates his people can pull from the perimeter without breaching Vincenzo’s security outright.
Maksim is sprawled in the armchair by the window, one ankle crossed over the other, a knife turning slowly between his fingers because the bastard claims it helps him think.
He has been ‘thinking’ for two hours and fifteen minutes.
If he flips that blade one more time, I’m going to take it and put it through the lamp.
“Stop pacing,” Maksim says.
I keep pacing. “Stop breathing.”
Maksim looks at Kai. “He’s pleasant.”
Kai does not glance up from the tablet. “He’s in love and excluded from a room where people may be plotting his death. Pleasant would be concerning.”
“That sounds like sympathy,” Maksim says.
Kai’s mouth barely moves. “It’s an assessment.”
I turn at the window and start back across the room. The city looks wrong from up here—too distant from the place where everything important is happening.
Vincenzo is fifteen minutes away by car. Ten, if the roads are cleared. Six, if I let Maksim drive as he did in Warsaw, which I will if I have to, and damn the bodies left behind.
Fifteen minutes feels like an ocean. Fifteen minutes feels like every year I lost and every door I never reached in time.
My phone has been in my hand for so long that the edges have pressed marks into my palm. I have checked the screen so often that if Vincenzo doesn’t call soon, the fucking thing may light itself on fire out of pity.
“He said two hours,” I mutter, shoving the phone into my pocket.
Kai looks up at last. “He said it might take two hours.”
“He said two.”
“He said might.”
“I heard what I heard.”
Maksim makes the mistake of saying, “You heard what your panic decided was more convenient.”
I turn my head slowly, and he lifts both hands, knife still pinched between two fingers. “Withdrawn.”
“Good choice,” Kai says.
I stop near the window and stare out at the street below. Everything looks too normal from up here.
The last message from Vincenzo was still short and irritatingly composed.
My King: Going in. Stay put. I mean it, Nikolaj.
I hated that message when it came in. I hate it more now. Stay put. Like I’m a dog. Like I’m not the man who would put a bullet through the sun if it looked at him wrong. Like I haven’t spent months learning how not to grip so tightly that I crush what I love.
He knows what those two words do to me. He wrote them anyway because he also knows I’ll obey him if the ask is tied to strategy and survival.
The phone rings, and the room cuts silent so fast it feels like someone put a blade through the air.
I pull it out before the first ring finishes.
Vincenzo’s name glows on the screen, and my hand closes around the phone hard enough that the case creaks.
I answer and press it to my ear, already walking away from the others because my body has decided privacy exists even when the room is full of people who would die before using what they hear.
“Tell me you’re alive,” I say.
There’s half a second of breath on the other end. Then Vincenzo’s voice comes through, low and tired and so beautifully steady that something in my chest loosens for the first time in two hours.
“I’m alive,” Vincenzo says.
I shut my eyes for one second. “Good. I was five minutes from becoming a diplomatic incident.”
Vincenzo exhales something that might almost be a laugh. “You are always five minutes from becoming a diplomatic incident.”
“Don’t flirt with me when I’m pissed off.”
“I would never.”
“Liar,” I say.
There’s a pause. A shift. Papers maybe. Footsteps. His voice returns sharper, business sliding back over whatever small softness he allowed himself for that first breath.
“Byrne and Reyes are finished,” Vincenzo says.
Every muscle in me stills. “Define finished.”
“Exiled,” Vincenzo says. “Marked by me. Their assets inside my jurisdictions are frozen pending seizure. Byrne argued until she realized King was not taking her side. Reyes tried to be clever, which was unfortunate for him.”
I turn toward Kai and hold up one hand. His eyes sharpen immediately.
“Kieran King sided with you?” I ask.
“He did,” Vincenzo says. “Publicly enough to matter, privately enough not to look sentimental. Byrne’s people are already fractured. Reyes lost three loyalties before he left the room.”
My mouth curls despite the cold still sitting in me. “You sound pleased.”
“I’m furious,” Vincenzo says. “Pleased comes later.”
“There’s My King,” I murmur.
Vincenzo goes quiet for one beat, and even over the phone, even with the line carrying all the distance between us, I hear how it hits him.
Then he says, softer, “Nikolaj…”
“I’m on my way,” I say, already reaching for the coat I threw over a chair two hours ago.
“No,” Vincenzo says immediately. “Stay where you are.”
I laugh once, sharp and humorless. “Absolutely fucking not.”
“Nikolaj, the summit just ended, and the building is still locked down. I need you to stay—”
The first shot is distant but unmistakable. The second is closer. A third follows fast, then shouting, then the heavy, concussive sound of return fire that shifts the entire shape of the call.
Vincenzo swears in Italian, the sound sharp and breathless, and something crashes hard enough to distort the line.
“Nikolaj,” Kai says, already moving.
I’m at the door before I remember crossing the room. “Where are you?” I demand into the phone.
“East exit corridor,” Vincenzo says, and now his voice is different. Lower. Combat-focused. Too steady. “They moved through the service access.”
More gunfire cracks through the line, louder this time.
I hear Vincenzo fire back. I know the sound of his weapon now. How fucked is that? How intimate and terrible, that I can recognize the gun in his hand through a phone line across the city.
“Stay on the line,” I say as I rip the door open. “Do not hang up.”
“Nikolaj,” Vincenzo says, breathing harder now. “You’re not close enough.”
“I said stay on the fucking line.”
Maksim shoves past me toward the elevator, already calling for the car. Kai is on his phone in Russian, voice clipped and lethal, ordering the convoy, the secondary route, the medical team, the local cleanup crew—every moving part snapping awake around us.
I hear my own men in the hall, boots striking carpet, doors opening, weapons being checked. The hotel’s quiet luxury tears open around us in seconds. Vincenzo fires again. Someone screams in the background.
“Vincenzo,” I bark as we hit the elevator. “Talk to me.”
“I’m busy,” Vincenzo says, and the audacity of him nearly makes me laugh and choke at the same time.
“You can shoot and talk.”
“I forgot how romantic you are under pressure,” Vincenzo says, then there is another crack of gunfire and the sound of him grunting softly. “Merda.”
The elevator doors close too slowly. I nearly put my fist into them.
Kai says something to me, but I don’t hear it properly.
My entire world has narrowed to the phone against my ear and the sounds behind Vincenzo’s voice.
Running feet. Metal. Breaking glass. More gunshots.
His breathing, steady and then not, controlled and then catching on something he refuses to show me.
“Where are your guards?” I ask.
“Dead or engaged,” Vincenzo says. “The first wave came in with stolen credentials.”
“I’m going to kill everyone involved.”
“I assumed.”
The elevator drops. Too slow. Everything is too fucking slow.
Then Vincenzo coughs.
It is small. Almost covered by noise. He tries to turn away from the phone, tries to bury it under another breath, but I hear it. I hear the wet edge. I hear the way his next inhale is just a fraction thinner.
“You’re hit,” I say.
“I’m fine,” he answers immediately.
“Do not fucking lie to me.”
“I’m moving.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
His voice has gone sharp with warning now, but there’s strain under it—real strain. I know his pained voice. I know the difference between clipped irritation and a man forcing his lungs to work around damage. My vision tunnels.
“Where?” I demand.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Where the fuck are you hit?”
He doesn’t answer, and the silence lasts one second too long.
“Side,” Vincenzo says after half a second, like the word has been dragged out of him by force. “Maybe lower ribs. It’s nothing.”
I make a sound that doesn’t belong to me. Kai’s eyes snap toward me, and I see in his face that he heard enough to understand.
The elevator doors open, and we explode into the lobby. The hotel staff scatters before us. Maksim is shouting into his phone now, voice hard enough to crack bone. The convoy is already there, engines running, doors open, men armed and moving with the beautiful terror of disciplined panic.
I get into the back seat, with Kai on one side and Maksim in front. The car surges forward before the door is fully shut.