Chapter 37 #2
No answer.
Of course.
I drag a breath in, and it breaks halfway.
“You gave him back,” I say, and the words spill out because there is no one here to stop them now. “You gave him back to me. You gave me his voice, his mouth, his fucking hand in mine. You let me remember. You let me put a ring on him. You let him call me husband.”
My voice cracks so badly I have to stop. “Then you took him,” I whisper.
I don’t know who I’m accusing. God. Fate. The Families. Reyes. Byrne. Lucien. My father. His father. Myself. All of them. None of them. The room doesn’t care, and the dead don’t answer.
Dead.
My whole body rejects the word so violently that I almost vomit.
I twist sideways, one hand braced on the floor, and breathe through my teeth until the nausea passes. The ring stays in my other hand. I will not drop it. I will not. If this is what’s left of him in my room tonight, then I will not let it hit the floor like evidence.
It was on his hand. He wore it. He said yes.
He looked at me and said forever while still angry, because that was us; that was the miracle of us.
Not soft perfection, not clean romance. Anger and love in the same bed, honesty before control, his hand in mine while the world sharpened knives outside the door.
For those few suspended moments, I had my heart back.
I look at the ring again, and something inside me twists. They found it with the body. They found his ring with what was left where he said he was.
The words repeat: brutal and stupid. The body where he said he was. Burnt beyond recognition. Tests confirmed. The ring confirmed. The world confirmed.
But my body won’t, and the denial is humiliating. It is also all I have.
“I love you,” I whisper. “I love you, My King. My husband. My beautiful, impossible fucking heart.”
My bedroom door opens without a knock. I know who it is before I look up because only one person in this house would dare.
Tatiana steps in, then stops so abruptly her boots make no sound after the threshold.
She’s wearing black again, hair loose around her shoulders, face pale in the lamplight.
For once, there’s nothing sharp in her expression.
No pout. No bright violence. No little sister act wrapped around an assassin’s smile.
She sees me on the floor and her face changes.
“Kolya,” Tatiana says softly.
I hate the softness. I want to tell her to get out. I want to snarl. I want to become something awful enough that she leaves, and I can keep breaking without a witness. Instead, the moment she says my name, another sob rips through me so violently I curl around it.
Tatiana crosses the room fast. She drops to her knees in front of me, but not too close, like I’m a wounded animal and she knows exactly how badly I bite when hands come too near the wrong part of the pain.
“Kolya,” Tatiana says again, her voice smaller now. “Brother.”
I shake my head hard, but I don’t know what I’m denying. Her presence. The grief. The ring. The body. The entire world.
“Go,” I manage.
“No,” she says.
“Tatiana,” I say, and it comes out broken enough that it doesn’t work as a warning.
“No,” she repeats, and then she does come closer, carefully, stubbornly, until she’s beside me against the bed. She presses her shoulder into mine and sits there.
That almost finishes me.
Because she’s twenty-one and lethal and still my sister. Still the child who used to climb into my bed after nightmares and kick me in the ribs because she refused to admit she was scared.
Now she sits beside me while I fall apart over the man everyone told me I should hate, and she doesn’t flinch from any of it.
“I can’t,” I whisper.
Tatiana’s breath shakes once. “I know.”
“No,” I say, turning my head toward her, vision blurred, voice tearing itself apart. “I can’t. I can’t do this. I had him—I fucking had him. He was here. He was mine. He was my husband.”
The last word breaks completely, and Tatiana’s face crumples. She suddenly looks younger. Too young for the blood she carries and the things she’s done with my permission.
“I know,” Tatiana says, and her own voice cracks. “I know he was.”
I clutch the ring so tightly my hand starts to tremble again.
“He said we’d always have Isle Lucia. He said it like goodbye,” I whisper.
“I told him no. I told him we’d go back.
I told him I’d buy another island to piss him off.
He said he loved arguing with me.” I laugh again, and it falls apart at once.
“Then the line went dead while he was still speaking.”
Tatiana makes a small sound, like pain has caught in her throat, and she doesn’t know what to do with it.
I look down at the ring. “They said the tests confirmed.”
She doesn’t speak.
“Tell me they’re wrong,” I say.
Tatiana goes still.
I turn on her, desperation crawling up through the wreckage and finding teeth. “Tell me they’re wrong, Tanyusha,” I beg. “Please, tell me they’re wrong.”
Her eyes fill properly then, and that alone gives me the answer before she says anything.
“Nikolaj,” Tatiana says carefully. “The tests—”
“Fuck the tests,” I snarl, but the force dies immediately because my voice breaks under it. “Fuck them. Tell me.”
She reaches for my wrist. “I want them to be wrong,” she says, and she is crying now, quiet and furious about it. “I want that more than anything.”
It is not enough, but it’s the truth.
I collapse sideways before I can stop myself, and she catches what she can. I end up with my forehead against her shoulder, and one hand still closed around the ring between us.
She wraps both arms around me and holds on like she used to when she was little, and I pretended I didn’t need it as much as she did.
This time, there is no pretending.
I sob into my sister’s shoulder like the boy I never got to remain, like the man I became has finally run out of blood to stand in and call it purpose.
Tatiana holds me tighter, one hand at the back of my head, her own breathing unsteady against my hair.
“I’m going to kill them,” I whisper. “All of them. Reyes. Byrne. Every bastard who touched the service access. Every man who knew. Every man who breathed near this and didn’t stop it.”
Tatiana turns her face slightly toward my hair and says, “I’ll help.”
Of course she will. My little sister. My head assassin. My blood.
I close my eyes against her shoulder, exhausted and shaking and empty in places I didn’t know a man could be hollowed out and still breathe.
For a while, there’s only the two of us on the floor, the dying fire, the old walls, and the ring in my fist. The whole empire could be burning outside the door, and I wouldn’t hear it. Maybe it is. Maybe by morning I’ll care.
Tonight, I have nothing left except this.
My sister’s arms.
My husband’s ring.
A grief so big it makes Saint Helena feel small.
After a long time, I pull back enough to look at the ring again. My palm is marked by it, a dark circular imprint pressed into skin.
Good. Let it mark me. Let it leave something. Let there be proof somewhere on me that he existed, that he said yes, that he slept beside me, that he laughed.
That he lived.
Tatiana looks at the ring too. “It’s beautiful,” she says softly.
“He called me husband,” I say. “Like it was true without the legal papers.”
Tatiana opens her eyes and looks at me with a grief older than her face should know. “Because it was.”
The words enter me quietly.
Not healing. Nothing heals this. But they settle somewhere near the ring, near the torn remains of my breath, near the part of me still refusing the word dead because refusal is all that keeps me upright.
I close my hand around the ring again, but less violently now.
“I don’t know how to live after this,” I admit.
Tatiana rests her head against the side of mine like she used to when she was small. “Then don’t decide tonight.”
I stare at the dying fire. That sounds like something Vincenzo would say. Practical. Gentle without insulting the wound.
“Tonight, you breathe,” Tatiana says. “Tomorrow, you burn the world down if you still want to.”
I nod once. It is not agreement, not really, but it is all I can manage.
My eyes are raw. My throat feels shredded.
My body is shaking less now, but not because the grief has passed.
It has only lowered its teeth for the moment.
It will bite again soon. It will bite when I see his name in a report.
When I reach for my phone. When I wake and there is no message.
When Isle Lucia appears in my head and I remember him standing in the villa, frightened of calm and trying to learn it with me.
I press the ring to my lips one more time.
This time, I don’t apologize for crying when I do it.
“Goodnight, My King,” I whisper against the metal.
Outside, Saint Helena remains cold and quiet and full of men waiting for orders from a Pakhan who has spent two days pretending he is still made of iron.
On the floor of my bedroom, with Vincenzo’s ring in my hand and my sister holding me through the first honest wreckage, I finally stop pretending.
Not forever, maybe not even for long. But for tonight, I let myself be only what the world has made me and what love has broken me into.
A man.
A husband.
A blade with no sheath.
And a heart that does not understand why it is still beating when his has supposedly stopped.