Chapter 36 #2
“Stay on the line,” I say again, and my voice sounds strange even to me. Too calm on the surface. Cracking underneath.
“I’m here,” Vincenzo says.
Another shot is fired through the phone. His or theirs, I can’t tell through my panic. Then he breathes hard and whispers something in Italian I don’t catch.
Kai leans toward me. “We have four cars moving to the east exit. Local police channels are jammed, but someone tripped the fire response,” Kai says, his voice fast and controlled. “Medical is five out.”
“Make it two,” I snap.
“I’m making it two,” Kai says.
Maksim throws the car into a turn hard enough that my shoulder slams against the door. I barely feel it. Streetlights smear across the windows. Horns blare.
The city folds into streaks and noise while my entire life hangs from a phone line and the sound of the man I love trying not to breathe like he’s bleeding.
“Nikolaj,” Vincenzo says.
The way he says my name changes everything.
Not sharp or teasing. Not even furious. Slow.
Too slow.
“No,” I say immediately.
He lets out something that could be a laugh if it weren’t so thin. “You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”
“I know that voice.”
There is a pause, then another distant burst of gunfire. Vincenzo doesn’t fire back this time. That terrifies me more than the shots.
“Nikolaj,” Vincenzo says, and I hear him shift, hear fabric drag against something hard, hear the strain he tries to flatten. “I need you to listen.”
“No,” I say again, louder now. “You can tell me when I see you.”
Kai puts a hand on my arm, and I nearly break his wrist before I realize it’s him. “Nikolaj,” he says carefully, “breathe.”
I look at him, and whatever he sees in my face makes his own go still. I know I’m losing it. I can feel it happening.
The edges of me are coming apart, and I am trying to hold them together with rage because if I let fear have even one inch more, it will take the whole fucking room.
“I love you,” Vincenzo says, and his voice is still calm in that awful, kingly way, but underneath it, I hear the pain.
I hear the blood. I hear the goodbye he is trying to smuggle into a confession.
“I loved you at Vintermoor when I should’ve hated you.
I loved you when you forgot me. I loved you when I had to stand there and let you look at me like I was a stranger.
I loved you every year after, even when it made no sense to keep carrying it. ”
My vision blurs so suddenly, I almost can’t see the windshield ahead.
“No,” I say, and this time the word is broken. “Stop talking like that.”
“I need you to know,” Vincenzo says. A gunshot cracks somewhere distant, then another, but he sounds farther from them now, or maybe I’m just losing track of space.
“These last few months… Nikolaj, I didn’t think I’d get this.
I didn’t think I’d ever have you look at me that way again.
I didn’t think I’d wake up with you, or hear you laugh, or hear you call me My King and know you meant it. ”
I press the heel of my hand hard against my eye like I can hold myself together physically. “You’re going to have that again. Do you hear me? You’re going to have it tomorrow and the day after that and every fucking day I can steal from the world. Just stay on the line.”
“I’ve never been happier,” Vincenzo says. “And Isle Lucia. It was perf…ect. It was perfect, Nikolaj.”
The sentence destroys me because of how quietly he says the words. Like a man looking at a finished room and accepting it might be enough if it has to be.
“I mean that,” he continues, and he coughs harder this time. The sound turns my stomach. “I spent eight years surviving. These last few months, I lived. You gave me that back.”
I slam my fist into the back of the front seat hard enough that Maksim flinches despite himself. “Drive faster,” I snarl.
“I am driving faster,” Maksim says, voice tight. “Any faster and we fly.”
“Then fucking fly.”
Kai keeps one hand near my arm but does not touch me this time. “Three minutes,” Kai says. “Nikolaj, we’re three minutes out.”
Three minutes is a lifetime. Three minutes is Vintermoor burning. Three minutes is a corridor I didn’t reach. Three minutes is every stolen second we ever had gathered up and weighed against blood loss on the other end of a phone.
“Vincenzo,” I say, forcing my voice down because hysteria will not keep him alive. “Listen to me. Put pressure on the wound.”
“I am.”
“Harder.”
“Bossy,” Vincenzo says, and the faint ghost of humor in it makes my chest crack wide open.
“You love that.”
“I do,” Vincenzo says. “God help me, I do.”
Another impact sounds in the background, not a gunshot. He goes silent for one second too long.
“Vincenzo,” I shout.
“I’m here,” Vincenzo says, but his voice is thinner now. “Still here.”
“Tell me where you are now.”
“Service hall,” Vincenzo says. “Near the loading entrance. I think I got three. Maybe four. I don’t know.”
“You did enough. Stay down.”
“I hate taking orders from you.”
“You can punish me later.”
He laughs weakly. “That’s a terrible incentive when I’d rather kiss you.”
“You can do both.”
“I can,” Vincenzo says, almost wonderingly. Then, softer, he adds, “And I did, didn’t I?”
“Stop,” I say, because I can’t survive the tenderness right now.
“No matter what happens,” Vincenzo says, ignoring me in the way he always has when it matters most, “we’ll always have Isle Lucia.”
The car becomes silent around me.
Even the engine seems to vanish.
All I hear is him.
“We’ll go back,” I say, and I am not speaking calmly anymore. I am pleading, and I don’t care who hears it. “You hear me? We’ll go back, and you can complain about the island like the ungrateful bastard you are, and I’ll buy another one just to annoy you.”
Vincenzo makes a soft sound. “Don’t you dare.”
“I’ll name it after myself. So, you stay alive and argue with me about it later.”
“I do love arguing with you,” Vincenzo says.
“Then keep breathing.”
“I love your temper,” he says, voice even slower now. “I love the way you say my name when you’re trying not to beg. I love that you look at me like I’m the only part of the world that ever made sense and the worst mistake you’d make again. I love—”
A deafening roar cracks the line wide open, so loud I rip the phone away from my ear on instinct. The speaker distorts into static, screaming metal, and the sound of something collapsing, and for half a second, the entire car freezes around the sound.
Then silence.
“Vincenzo!” I shout.
Nothing.
The call goes dead, and for half a second, I cannot move. My mouth is open around his name, but no sound comes out. The world narrows to the blank screen, the sudden silence, the absence where his breathing was one moment ago.
Then something in me snaps so violently I feel it in my bones.
“No…” I say.
Kai reaches for me. “Nikolaj—”
“No!”
I hit redial with shaking fingers. It rings twice, then fails. I try again. Fail. Again. Fail. My hands are shaking so hard the phone nearly slips out of my grip.
Then I make a sound I have never heard from myself before, something gutted and furious and hysterical, and slam my fist into the back of the front seat.
“Drive!” I roar.
“Nikolaj,” Kai says, voice urgent, “listen to me. We don’t know—”
“I heard an explosion!”
“I know.”
“I heard it, Kai!”
“I know,” he says again, sharper now, trying to cut through the panic before it consumes the whole vehicle. “The line dropped. That does not confirm he’s dead.”
“Don’t say that word.”
“Nikolaj—”
“Don’t you fucking say that word in this car.”
Kai’s jaw tightens. He shifts closer, not touching now because he’s smart enough to know I might break his wrist if he does. “Then stay useful.”
The words hit like a slap.
I turn on him, vision blurred with rage and something worse. “What?”
“Stay useful,” he repeats, eyes locked on mine, calm in that brutal way he gets when emotion will kill faster than bullets.
“If Vieri is alive, he needs you useful. Not hysterical. Not blind. Not tearing through our own men before we arrive because your head has gone somewhere it can’t help him.
Breathe. Think. Command. Be the Pakhan.”
I want to hit him. For one long, vicious second, I actually consider it. Then Vincenzo’s voice echoes in my head, the same line I told him.
No matter what happens, we’ll always have Isle Lucia.
I drag in a breath that feels like swallowing glass.
It doesn’t work, so I take another.
My hands are still shaking. My heart is still trying to beat its way out of my chest. The phone is still dead in my lap. But a thin, vicious thread of control starts to wrap around the panic because Kai is right, and I hate him for it.
“Maksim,” I say, voice hoarse. “Status.”
Maksim has his phone pressed to one ear in the front, his other hand gripping the wheel as the car takes another turn.
“Multiple reports of an explosion at the summit venue, lower east service wing. Fire suppression activated. Local emergency response en route. Our first team is thirty seconds from breach.”
“Vieri extraction.”
“Signal lost with two of his inner team.”
My stomach turns. “Byrne’s people?”
“Unknown.”
“Kai,” I say, not looking away from the windshield. “Pull every camera in a three-block radius. Traffic, hotel, private, body cams if anyone’s stupid enough to have them live. I want thermal if we can get it.”
“Already working.”
“Get me a medical team at the east side, not the main entrance. If he’s in the service hall, they’ll try to funnel him wrong.”
Kai nods, already typing. “Done.”
“And if anyone from Byrne or Reyes tries to leave the city tonight—”
“They’re detained,” Kai says.
“No.” I turn my head slowly. “If they try to leave, they’re dead.”
Kai looks at me for half a second and then nods once. “Understood.”
The car barrels through another intersection. Someone screams from the sidewalk. The driver doesn’t slow down. Sirens grow louder now, lights flashing ahead, painting the windshield blue and red.
I lean back hard against the seat and stare at the ceiling of the car, breathing through my nose, because if I look at anyone, I’m going to tear the vehicle apart with my bare hands.
No matter what happens, we’ll always have Isle Lucia.
I look down at my phone again. The call log still shows his name, the dead call, the last connection between us severed by fire and concrete, and whatever bastard thought tonight was the night to make me relive every loss at once.
For a second, hysteria rises again, ugly and wet and impossible to contain. My throat locks around it. My eyes burn. I press the heel of my hand hard against my mouth because if the sound comes out, I don’t know what shape it’ll have.
Kai sees. Of course he does.
His voice lowers. “He is not dead until you see him dead.”
I squeeze my eyes shut.
“He is not dead until you see him dead,” Kai repeats, slower, harder, forcing the words into my skull like an order.
“And if he’s alive, every second you keep your head buys him another chance.
If he’s trapped, you get him out. If he’s bleeding, you hold pressure.
If someone took him, you track. But you do not bury him in your mind before we arrive. ”
My breath shudders in, then out. The panic doesn’t vanish; it becomes something else. Something I can hold. Hysteria turned into purpose is still ugly, but it moves better.
I open my eyes. “Get me armor,” I say.
Maksim reaches back without looking, tossing the vest from the front passenger footwell into Kai’s lap. Kai shoves it at me. I pull it on with jerky, furious movements, hands still not as steady as they should be, but functional enough.
Gun checked. Spare magazine. Knife. Phone. Another gun from the side compartment, because one gun feels insulting right now.
Kai watches me arm myself and says, very carefully, “When we get there, you do not run into fire without eyes.”
I look at him, but he doesn’t back down. Brave man. Irritating man.
“If Vincenzo is in that building,” I say, voice very quiet now, “I’m going through whatever stands between us.”
“I know,” Kai says. “I’m saying let us make sure you go through the right door.”
The car screeches around the final corner.
Smoke is already visible ahead, black and gray pushing into the sky behind the lights of emergency vehicles and security convoys.
The summit venue rises beyond them, elegant and burning at one end, windows blown dark where the lower east wing took the brunt of the blast. Men are running. Shouting. Sirens tear through the night. Red light moves over stone like blood under water.
My heart stops trying to be a heart and becomes a weapon instead. The car hasn’t fully stopped when I open the door.
Kai grabs my arm hard enough to hurt. “Nikolaj.”
I turn back, furious. He holds my gaze for half a breath, and for once, there is no calm mask, no dry patience, only the same fear reflected in a different shape.
“We find him,” he says.
I nod once, because if I speak, I might break again.
Then I tear free, step into smoke and sirens and chaos, and run toward the place where the line went dead.
“No, My King,” I say under my breath. “We’re not fucking done.”