Chapter 37
thirty-seven
Nikolaj
Isit on the edge of my bed at Saint Helena with my elbows on my knees, and both hands clenched into fists.
The room is too quiet.
That’s the first thing I notice, which is stupid because this room has always been quiet. It’s built into old stone and old discipline. The walls are thick. The windows are tall. The curtains are drawn, not because it’s night anymore but because I haven’t opened them since I came back.
Two days.
I’ve held myself together for two days.
I asked questions. I listened to the answers. I corrected sloppy wording. I threatened three men and meant every syllable. I kept breathing because it was still useful, and Kai said “useful” was all I needed to stay.
Useful.
What a small, insulting word for a man whose entire chest has been ripped open and left to echo.
My fists hurt from holding on too tightly to the only thing left in my palm.
I open my right hand slowly, and the ring sits there. It looks too small in my hand. Too quiet. Too whole. It should be impossible that something this delicate survived what the body didn’t.
That’s the kind of thought that keeps trying to form and keeps getting strangled before it finishes, because if I think the word body too clearly, something inside me starts losing shape.
They found him where he said he was.
East lower service corridor. The part of the wing that collapsed after the explosion. Smoke, concrete, twisted metal, bodies damaged past immediate recognition.
The emergency crews pulled survivors first. Then the dead. Then what was left of the dead. There was no dignity in it. No poetry. No grand final tableau. Just heat and dust and men with gloves trying to separate the person from the ruin.
One body was found near the place where Vincenzo’s phone signal died. Burned too badly for a face. Unrecognizable in the ways a man’s lover should never have to imagine.
But the body had this ring.
The one I put on his finger the night before he walked into that summit. The one he smiled at through tears. The one he called me husband with. The one he wore into a room full of men who would have killed us both if they understood what it meant.
DNA tests confirmed it. That’s what they said.
Confirmed.
A clean word. A clinical word. A word that belongs in reports and laboratories and cold conversations between men who can afford not to understand that confirmation can be an execution all by itself.
Kai stood in front of me when he delivered it. He didn’t sit. He didn’t soften it with anything useless. His face was pale, though. I remember that. Kai, who can watch men die and critique their posture, looked pale when he said, “The results came back.”
Maksim was behind him, silent for once, and I remember staring at both of them, thinking this is the part where the world changes, this is the exact second, remember it, Nikolaj, because whatever happens after this won’t be the same life.
Kai said, “The remains are a match.”
I remember waiting for something dramatic from myself. I think they did, too.
I just nodded, that’s all.
I nodded once, like he was telling me a shipment was delayed, like he was informing me a man had missed a meeting, like the world hadn’t just put a gun in my mouth and pulled the trigger without the courtesy of letting me die.
I asked for the ring. Now I sit with it in my open palm, staring at the gold line until it blurs.
My throat moves around nothing. I haven’t cried. Panic isn’t grief. Panic is the body refusing information. Panic is motion. Panic is redialing a dead phone, shouting at men to drive faster, running toward smoke because as long as you’re moving, the story isn’t finished.
Grief is what happens when motion ends, and the dead remain dead anyway.
I close my fist around the ring again, and my knuckles go white.
“No,” I say.
The word barely makes a sound.
I stare at the carpet between my feet. I should shower again. I’ve showered twice since returning, and I still smell smoke when I breathe. Maybe it’s in my hair. Maybe it’s in my skin. Maybe it’s in my head now, and I’ll smell it until I die.
No matter what happens, we’ll always have Isle Lucia.
My hand spasms shut around the ring so hard the metal bites into my palm.
“Shut up,” I whisper.
His voice comes anyway.
Not like memory used to. Not those broken, fragmented flashes from before. This is clean and cruel. The phone pressed to my ear, his voice slowed by pain, trying to give me something beautiful while bleeding in a service corridor.
I love your temper. I love the way you say my name when you’re trying not to beg.
I spent eight years surviving. These last few months, I lived.
A sound breaks out of me.
It’s small at first. Ugly. Surprised. Like my body didn’t know it was coming either. I clamp my free hand over my mouth.
No.
No, not yet.
If I start, I won’t stop. If I let it happen, I don’t know what’s left on the other side. I have men waiting. Enemies circling. Byrne and Reyes are bleeding out influence wherever they’ve been cut from the structure.
I have a family name, a throne, a fucking empire. I don’t get to break because the world still needs the monster in one piece.
The sound comes again, and my hand isn’t enough to hold it back.
I bend forward slowly, ring trapped in one fist, the other hand pressed over my mouth, and my whole body starts to shake with the force of keeping silent.
My elbows dig into my knees. My spine locks, my shoulders burn, and I try to breathe, but it doesn’t work.
The first sob tears through my hand.
I hate it. I hate the sound. I hate the weakness of it. I hate that my body has chosen now—alone in this room with drawn curtains and dead air—to finally understand what the reports have been saying for two days.
Vincenzo is dead.
The thought lands whole.
The ring falls from my fist and hits the carpet soundlessly. I go after it immediately, panic punching through the grief, fingers clawing at the floor until I find it. I close both hands around it and bring it to my chest like the act of holding it there can reverse anything.
“No,” I say again, louder now. “No, no, no, fuck, no.”
My voice cracks on the last word. There’s no one here to hear it, and that makes it worse somehow.
If Kai were here, he would stand near the door and say my name in that low, infuriating voice.
If Maksim were here, he would say something stupid and angry because he doesn’t know what to do with tenderness unless he can disguise it as a threat.
If Vincenzo were here, he would climb onto my lap without asking, take my face in both hands, and say something sharp enough to make me want to kiss him.
But Vincenzo isn’t here.
He’s not late. Not obeying a boundary. Not trapped in a meeting. Not walking toward a hotel room with that look in his eyes, the one that made me feel like I’d finally dragged him back from a grave neither of us had finished digging.
He’s gone, and he’s never coming back.
The sobs become harder then.
There is no dignity in it. No controlled grief. No beautiful collapse worthy of the man I lost. It’s fucking ugly. It rips out of me in broken, violent waves that bend me over until my forehead nearly touches my knees.
My hands stay clenched around the ring at my chest while my body shakes so hard the bed frame creaks behind me. I try to stop it once, then I give up because there’s no command left in me strong enough.
“Vincenzo, please…” I say, but it comes out wrecked, barely his name. “Vincenzo.”
My husband.
I press the ring harder against my chest until pain blooms under my hand.
He said it first.
My husband.
In his bed, crying and smiling and so fucking alive, wearing the ring I had made for him because I had been stupid enough to think we might steal something real from the world after everything it took.
He said it, and I felt the whole room tilt under the truth of it. Not legal, public, or clean, but real. More real than anything else in my life.
He was mine for one night after the vow.
One night.
The laugh that breaks through the sobs is terrible. It scrapes my throat raw.
“One night,” I say to the empty room. “I got to be your husband for one fucking night.”
The grief twists.
“Fuck,” I choke out against my fist. “Fuck, Vincenzo.”
His name breaks free, and the next sound worse. I bend forward until my forehead hits the floor. The stone is cold. Good. Cold is real. Cold does not care. Cold does not ask me to be sane.
I press the ring to the floor in front of me and stare at it through a blur I refuse to name for half a second before the tears make everything useless.
I’m crying hard enough that breathing becomes labor. My chest and throat hurt, but I can’t stop. Every time I think there can’t possibly be more, another wave comes up out of the dark in me and breaks across my ribs.
I laugh once through the sobbing, and it sounds deranged.
“Look at you,” I whisper to myself, voice mangled. “Pakhan Dragovich. On the fucking floor.”
Vincenzo would hate that.
No.
He’d come down here with me.
That thought is worse. He wouldn’t mock, not for this. Not really. He’d kneel in front of me, probably in some ridiculous suit worth more than most houses and put both hands on my face. He’d tell me to breathe in that low, impossible voice.
He’d be furious on my behalf, even if the grief was for him. He’d find a way to make it less shameful without making it small.
But he isn’t here.
There is no hand on my face.
No voice.
No ‘my husband’ whispered like the world cannot have it.
The room is so empty I can hear my own grief coming back at me.
I push myself up enough to sit back against the side of the bed, one knee drawn up, the other stretched uselessly across the floor.
I clutch the ring in both hands now, folded around it like a prayer, though God has never been invited into anything between us except as witness to what He failed to protect.
“Are you happy now?” I ask the dark ceiling, voice shredded. “Was that the fucking price? Was that enough?”