Chapter 38
thirty-eight
Nikolaj
Amonth later, I learned there is a special kind of silence that comes after a man stops waiting for the phone to ring.
At first, there is noise. There is too much of it. Reports, footsteps, doors opening, men saying my name carefully, the constant scrape of violence against consequence.
There are names to extract, bank trails to follow, and people to cut loose from their own lies. There is Tatiana appearing in doorways with blood under her nails and fury in her eyes, asking whether I want someone alive or whether death will satisfy me this time.
There is Kai standing beside me with a tablet, giving me data in the same voice he might use for weather, because if he sounds like he feels anything, I might break his neck for making grief visible in the room.
There is Maksim keeping his jokes behind his teeth, which is the loudest proof of mourning he has ever given anyone.
Then there is Arseniy, somehow always there and never too close, wearing guilt like another coat and saying nothing unless silence becomes more dangerous than words.
Then, slowly, the noise thins.
Not because the work is finished—it never is. Revenge doesn’t finish; it breeds. Every name leads to two more, every confession opens another hallway, every corpse leaves behind men stupid enough to mistake grief for weakness.
But after the first weeks, people begin adjusting to the shape of loss around me.
They learn where not to stand. They learn which questions I answer and which ones I punish.
They learn that saying Vincenzo’s name in front of me is no longer enough to make me react, which scares them more than rage ever did.
That is how I know I’m dead inside. Rage would mean there is still heat left.
Vincenzo is dead.
That sentence still doesn’t sound real.
I don’t say it often. Not out loud. Out loud, words become things people can hear, and people who hear things often believe they have the right to respond.
I don’t want responses. I don’t want pity. I don’t want Kai’s careful looks, Maksim’s angry silences, or Arseniy’s haunted presence in the corners of rooms he has no right to haunt after five years of absence.
I don’t want Ruslan’s voice through the phone, the one time he called and said nothing for so long I nearly hung up before he finally rasped, “I’m so sorry, Nikolaj,” like the words had teeth coming out.
I don’t want anything.
That’s the problem.
For a month, I’ve lived without wanting.
Not revenge, not really. Revenge is movement, and I’ve ordered plenty of that. Men have vanished. Accounts have frozen. Families have fractured under pressure I applied with surgical boredom.
Byrne’s remaining loyalists are being hunted. Reyes’s lines are collapsing. I thought revenge would give me something. It didn’t; it was just another kind of paperwork.
Vincenzo’s ring sits on my desk. Not in a box or hidden away.
Not kept somewhere safe like a memory too fragile for daylight.
It rests beside my laptop, black metal and a thin line of gold, clean now because Kai had the blood polished out of the grooves when I stopped noticing it was still there.
I hated him for that. Then I kept it on the desk anyway.
My hand moves toward it without permission, and my fingers close around it.
I don’t put it on. It doesn’t fit my finger because I had it made for Vincenzo, measured for the hand he held out to me in his bed while crying like he couldn’t believe forever had survived long enough to be offered.
Sometimes I thread it onto a chain and wear it beneath my shirt. Sometimes I keep it in my fist until the edges bite into my palm. Today it lies on the desk because I’ve been pretending I’m working, and men pretending to work don’t sit there with dead husbands’ rings pressed to their mouths.
For the last month, I have been dead inside, but not inactive. That distinction matters to men who need orders from me. Dead men can still sign documents. Dead men can still have others killed. Dead men can still maintain empires if habit is strong enough.
I have done the work because the work came to me, and because the machine does not stop simply because its master has no heart left. I have watched men kneel. I have watched them bleed. I have listened to them swear they didn’t know, swear they only followed orders.
Now, looking at the dim laptop and the ring, I realize something with a clarity so calm it almost feels holy.
I am finished.
Not with revenge. No. The people involved will die. I will put them into the ground so thoroughly that history will forget their names. But I am finished pretending that sitting in this chair matters more than the only place left in the world where Vincenzo still feels possible.
I open the laptop properly.
The screen brightens, and my face appears ghosted over the files for one second before the document resolves. I move with the same flat efficiency that has carried me through the last month.
Password. Encrypted folder. Succession directives. Emergency transfer protocols. Authority structures. Papers I drafted years ago, because powerful men who do not prepare for their own death deserve the chaos that follows.
When I’m done, I send three messages—Kai, Maksim, and Tatiana. Then one to Arseniy.
Me: Meeting. Main hall. Ten minutes. Everyone.
No explanation. They’ll come faster because of that. I stand and put Vincenzo’s ring in my pocket, close to my body, where it belongs.
I look around the office once and feel nothing. Then I leave.
The main hall of Saint Helena fills within eight minutes.
That, at least, still works.
The old monastery was built for worship once, then for war, then for whatever we turned it into after we bought the bones and renamed the blood beneath them.
The main hall still has the height of a chapel, vaulted ceilings, stone pillars, and tall windows black with night.
Men and women gather in clusters beneath them—soldiers, lieutenants, captains, my inner structure pulled from whatever tasks they were handling because when the Pakhan calls everyone, no one asks whether they’re busy.
Tatiana arrives first among the family, blue eyes sharp and suspicious.
She takes one look at my face and stops smiling before she starts.
Kai comes in next, tablet already in hand, because he is incapable of approaching disaster without documentation.
Maksim follows, gaze sweeping the room, then landing on me with a small frown he doesn’t bother hiding.
Arseniy comes last.
He steps through the far doors in a dark coat, hair tied back, jaw set like he already knows he isn’t going to enjoy this.
He looks from the gathered men to me, then to Kai, then back again.
The bruises from our fight weeks ago are long gone, but something of that night still sits between us.
Wrongness. Truth. The old family motto, like a blade, lay on a table.
Duty is not a choice.
Tonight, for once, it is.
I stand at the front of the hall with the printed documents in one hand. The room goes quiet without my asking. That used to satisfy something in me, now it only feels like weather.
Kai steps closer. “Nikolaj, what is this?”
“You’ll hear it with everyone else,” I say.
His eyes narrow. He does not like that. Good. I don’t need him to like it.
Tatiana comes up on my other side. “Who died?” she asks, then her face changes immediately because the answer is already in the room, and she wishes she could take the words back. She swallows hard and winces.
Arseniy remains ten feet away, watching me like a man looking at a bridge and realizing too late that it has already been set on fire.
I lift the papers.
“I’m handing everything over to Arseniy,” I say.
The hall erupts.
Not fully. No one is stupid enough for chaos in front of me, even now. But the shock moves like a wave, voices cut off halfway, bodies shifting, men looking at each other as if they misheard and hope someone else will be brave enough to ask.
Tatiana and Kai say my name at the same time, Maksim swears under his breath, but Arseniy does not move at all.
I continue over all of them. “Effective immediately, Arseniy Dragovich takes full command of the family, the sectors, all external negotiations, internal discipline, and operational authority. The documents are signed and sealed.”
Tatiana moves first, crossing the space in three fast steps. “No,” she says, voice too sharp. “No, you don’t get to do that.”
I look at her. “I already did.”
Her eyes flash. “Then undo it!” she says, the tone of her voice bordering on hysteria.
“No.”
“Nikolaj,” Kai says, stepping in carefully now, his voice controlled but tight. “This is not a decision to make in grief.”
I laugh once. The sound turns the room colder. “Do not speak to me about grief like it’s made me stupid.”
Kai’s jaw tightens. “I’m saying a month is not enough time.”
“A month was more than enough.”
“For what?” Tatiana demands, and now her eyes are bright with anger she doesn’t know where to put. “For you to decide we’re all disposable because he’s gone?”
I stare at her until she realizes what she said out loud.
“Tanyusha,” I say, and the gentleness in my own voice surprises me enough to make something in her expression worsen.
She shakes her head hard. “No. Don’t call me that right now.”
Maksim steps forward slightly. “Niko, what are you doing?”
I turn my gaze to him. “The only useful thing left.”
“That’s bullshit,” Maksim says, and several men in the room look like they’d rather vanish than witness him saying it.
“You want to leave, leave for a week. A month. Go to your island, break every glass in the place, come back when you’re done scaring the sea.
But don’t stand here and hand the whole fucking family over because you’ve decided there’s nothing left for you here. ”
“There isn’t,” I say.
Arseniy finally speaks. “No.”
I look at him. “This is not a request.”