Chapter 28 Roman
ROMAN
We return to the throne the way a tide returns to shore. The floor opens. I sit and the chair takes my weight like it always has. Mina folds across my lap. Faces tilt. Bodies angle. Everyone finds a reason to be looking without getting caught doing it.
We give them a show. I set a hand to her hip and let the grip read as possession because she is mine. It is theater and it is not. I want her again. I also watch the mezzanine, the stairs, the dark cut of the private hall behind the riser that runs to the staff restroom.
Vitaly likes the element of surprise. He will not get it here.
Her fingers find my collar. She draws my head down and kisses me as if there is no one else in the room. The man at the far pillar stops pretending to talk. The woman in a red lace mask leans against the rail and angles for a better view. We have the crowd’s attention.
Mina moves on me in a rhythm that tells the room we are lost in it. She is not lost. She is calculating every possible equation. I feel the insistence gather. She is pulling me toward a line she said she does not want to cross.
I completely understand that. I don’t want to cross it either. But what I want stopped mattering a long time ago when it came to Vitaly.
I wanted a son I could bring up to be better than me. One that grew into a man I respected. I wanted to rest on my deathbed knowing the world was a better place for the man I brought into it.
If this goes right, I’ll rest on my deathbed knowing the world is a better place for the two boys I saved.
I let my palm settle on the arm where the switch hides. I do not look down. I do not look at her hand when it closes over mine and squeezes once. Earlier she asked me to keep the walls down. Now she presses my wrist and does not pull me away from the panel. I read the change and accept it.
She is ready for the walls to go up. If I raise the walls, I tell a boy who wants a crown that I feel safe. He will make himself known, and all of this will be over.
I press. The motors hum below the sound of the music. The panels rise clean and slow. A hush follows the lift. New quiet. The walls climb until the room is sealed. The light inside the box is softer by a shade.
Mina’s breath catches. She straddles me, knees tight, weight low, stare bright. It reads as hunger from the outside. I know the difference. It is decision. It is fear turned into action. She strokes my jaw with one hand. Her voice is a thread against my mouth. “I love you.”
“I love you too, Mina.”
She leans back, slow and sin, before unzipping me and stroking my cock. Her warm hand would be enough to wake the dead, and I was already hard as a rock. She slides down my length just enough that her eyes roll back.
Then, her hand disappears under the arm where the joint meets the seat.
She does not draw the blade. Not yet. She keeps her shoulders loose and her eyes on me.
Her mouth skims mine and then my cheek and then the shell of my ear.
She whispers nothing and makes it sound like a vow.
He told her to make me feel comfortable.
To do the things I like. She is certainly doing them now, which means he’s watching.
He must be. He’d never miss my execution. But where the fuck is he?
She arches her back as she rides me. The perfect distraction, had I not already known the plan.
The blade comes free with a slow whisper I can feel through the chair, but I ignore the threat.
The metal vanishes behind her back. To anyone watching it looks like she successfully distracted me with her body. Any other night, she would have.
She strokes my face with her other hand. Tears stand at the edge of her lashes and hold. The moment is real and a play. I do not know which I hate more.
Her eyes flick past my shoulder. Not far. Just enough. That is all the warning I get.
I do not turn. I look at her raised blade. The flat catches the light. Within that light is a sliver of the restroom door behind me. Reflected in that sliver is the person I tried to raise right.
My son steps out with a gun in his hand and a grin like a slash.
I draw the pistol from the holster that sits under the line of my jacket. I set the muzzle onto my left shoulder. The shot is a hard crack inside the small room.
I tumble Mina from me and keep her behind my body as I stand and aim once more. Vitaly curses and staggers, his shoulder hit high. He snarls and lifts his gun through the pain.
I shoot again, lower. His leg goes out from under him. He hits the floor in a twist of anger and shock. His pistol skitters and kisses the baseboard and stops. He grabs for it with his wrong hand and fails. It’s too far anyway.
He swears. It is not a word. It’s a sound a boy makes when the picture in his head breaks. I know the sound. I once made it in a different room.
Vitaly pushes to his knee and finds a second weapon under his jacket. He fires wild. The round catches my forearm and grooves it. Heat and pain flare, and I ignore it on my way to him.
Everything else is background noise. Vaguely, I hear Mina tell someone, “He’s gotta do this himself.”
Vitaly spits blood and pushes up on a bad leg like a wounded gazelle. He yanks his shoulder straight with a hiss and throws a punch. It lands on my jaw and lights a little fire. I take it and give him back one that shuts his mouth and resets the room.
I strip the second gun from his hand and kick it behind me.
He grabs for my wounded arm. He wants the pain to make me stupid.
I give him the forearm and take his ear and the base of his neck and drive him into the doorjamb.
The air goes out of him. He claws for skin and misses, his eyes wide and furious.
My next strike lands where the jaw hinges.
I need him down. The one after lands in his kidneys.
I hear his breath go thin and ragged. He tumbles down, and I pin his leg and dump him on his belly and take the back of his head in my hand.
“Vitaly. You will never be pakhan. You are not my son anymore. You are nothing.”
He laughs. It’s not a stranger’s laugh, nor is it a son’s laugh. It’s madness and hatred all at once. “Stop talking and just fucking kill me. I have heard enough of your bullshit for one life.”
“Kill you?” The words land flat. “I told you you’re nothing, boy. You’re not worth the cleaner it will take to get your blood off this floor. I’m not going to kill you.” I roll him over to look him in his swollen eyes. “I’m going to do worse. You are going to prison for the rest of your life.”
“I will get out.” He spits pink and grins like a boy who still thinks he has a trick left.
He’s missing a tooth in the front. His voice is nasal from the swelling.
“You know I’ll get out. When I do, I will torture and murder that bitch and your bastards, and I will make you watch before I kill you too. ”
Every thought vanishes as if it were never there.
Vitaly’s cleared them all away with that declaration.
He believes every word he’s saying right now, and he’s crazy and capable enough to make it happen.
I can picture it vividly. He will make them suffer for the mercy I showed him tonight.
He will make good on his word, and they will die in agony.
Not in this lifetime. “You will never touch her again.”
“Yes, I will! I will—”
I shoot him in the forehead.
He goes slack. His breath stops. I stand with the pistol in my hand and the world in a small quiet.
I look down at my son for the last time. He is smaller. Death always does that. Makes us all smaller than we were. Humbles us. He was a man who refused to be humbled. The choice isn’t his anymore.
He was a danger to every person I love. Even himself.
Especially himself.
My men step in now. They do not rush. The first two check the corners. The third confirms what I already know. Dead. The floor manager appears in the crack with a face like a curtain drawn to the side. The DJ lifts the bass because people do not need to know they heard a murder.
I look at Mina. She meets me without blinking and zips my trousers. I’d forgotten they were open. Her dress is smoothed back into place as if it had never been moved.
She presses her palm to my forearm above the graze. Her touch is steady. Her eyes are the only place in the room where the dead cannot get in. “You’re hurt.”
“I’m fine.”
She gives me a look that says she does not like that answer and will accept it for now. She steps in and sets her forehead to mine for a breath.
I turn to my men, already occupied by what I’m about to say. “Clean this up.”
I walk to the door and push the panel. Outside my throne room, people return to their drinks and their rituals. Staff do the dance that turns catastrophe into a story told differently tomorrow. I signal the team and they move with the quiet speed I pay for.
This is not the first death Rope has seen, and it probably won’t be the last. But it’s the first that meant something to me.
It means my family is safe.
Someone hands Mina a first aid kit, and she wraps my forearm with clean gauze and tape that does not pull hair. She cleans the groove the bullet dug, and I don’t feel it. I only feel her touch. Her warmth.
“Call Leon Valivov,” I tell one of the men at the door. “Tell him the storm has passed and left a fallen tree.”
“Understood,” the man says. He steps into the hall with a phone for the call.
I’d make the call myself, but my head is too empty to talk to someone who might want a conversation.
Can’t focus on that. Next steps are all that matters. Reflection, emotions, all of that bullshit will wait. There are more important matters than the gnawing pain in my chest.
My first boy is dead. Flashes of his life spring to mind unbidden, no matter how I try to shut them down.
Bridgette’s round stomach. The day he was born.
The baby he was—cool and calm, no matter the chaos around him.
I had naively thought that meant he would weather the storm of the life he was due to inherit.
But then he became a boy. A cruel, sinister boy who hurt the helpless. And then, he grew into a man who was worse.
That gnawing pain eats away at my heart, despite knowing all of this. He was my first boy, but my son died years ago.
Tonight, I laid him to rest.
Mina leans in. “What now?”
“Now we find the people he tried to take from us.”