Chapter 13 Nikolai
Nikolai
Two Weeks Later
I was making Vince’s bad mood my problem before it became a regional problem. Because once again, my brother’s temper was causing waves.
Not like last time splashed across Veil feeds with a blood-soaked quote playing on loop. This time, it was behind closed doors. Quieter. Which was worse.
I found him in a field an hour outside Villain, climbing out of what was clearly a half-dug grave, like that was just how he ended his meetings now.
There were three men on the ground, and none of them intact.
A hand cleanly severed lay at the edge of the shovel like some grotesque calling card.
“I’m not holding that,” I said.
Vince looked up, cigarette already between his teeth. “Why? Too good to hold a mangled hand?”
“Scared it might drip blood on my shoes.”
He didn’t laugh. He rarely did anymore. But he crouched, picked up the hand, and held it out to me like it was a glass of wine at dinner.
I sighed and took it. Reluctantly. It was heavier than I expected. Still warm. Fucking disgusting.
Vince didn’t look fazed. His bad mood had been stretching for weeks. People were flinching when he walked into rooms now. Rome had gone vegetarian entirely. After tonight, I was starting to understand why.
“Why do you even want this?” I asked as Vince stepped out of the pit and rolled his neck like it had been a workout. “What’s the point?”
“Sending a message.”
“Great,” I muttered. “Another message.”
He dropped the cigarette into the pit.
“Who getting this one?” I asked, nodding to the bloody hand I had the awful pleasure of holding.
“Someone who should keep their hands off things that don’t belong to them.”
That particular tone of his, cool, lethal, was always a problem. It meant the emotion was gone. He wasn’t even mad anymore. He was resolved.
I looked at the blood drying on his arms, knuckles he hadn’t bothered to clean.
“You done?” I asked. “Or should we swing by another alley before midnight?”
He gave me a dry look, one that said he knew exactly what I was referring to and wasn’t going to bite.
He checked the time. “I’m heading home.”
“Good. I’m coming with you.”
He gave me another look.
“No lecture. I promise.” I passed the hand to one of our men who had a bucket of ice. I’d look into increasing their pay while Vince is in this mood.
“You sure? Because if this is about strategy or optics or the—”
“I swear, Vince. This isn’t a boardroom talk.”
He didn’t answer at first, just stared at the ground like he was deciding how many more graves he could dig before breakfast.
Finally he nodded. “Fine. But I mean it, Nik—”
“If I mention the D-word, you’ll throw me out your front door,” I finished.“Understood.”
“And no lectures,”
“Absolutely not. You’re the picture of mental health.”
That earned me a smirk. Barely.
We walked to the car in silence. I wondered how many times I’d have to scrub my hands to forget the feeling of holding that.
Vince had a habit of sleeping at the nearest house he owned when he finished the day. I shouldn’t have been surprised that the house look exactly like how it was when he purchased it.
I set the food down on the coffee table and sat. Five minutes passed before I heard the water shut off.
Another five before he walked out. I was sure he was hoping I was on a time limit and would leave. I wasn’t.
He rubbed his jaw with his hand and eyed the table. “You brought food?”
I nodded, “It’s what people do sometimes of a night they have dinner, real food, not a protein bar.”
He didn’t deny it. Just grunted, crossed to the table, and sat down across from me.
I looked around the room again. No photos or signs of life. The gun safe was the only thing that looked used, knowing Vince it was the probably the only thing he had made sure was moved in.
“These places could be decorated, you know,” I said.
He shot me a look, while reaching for a box off the coffee table.
“A lamp. A chair that isn’t designed by military contractors. A bed that doesn’t look like it cries itself to sleep.”
“I sleep. I shower. I grab a gun and leave,” he took a mouthful of his food.
“That’s poetic.”
“It’s functional.”
I didn’t say what I was thinking, that it wasn’t living. But I’d learned over the years, Vince only heard what he was ready for. He sat. Dug into the food without a word.
“How’re the boys adjusting?” I picked up my food.
He nodded. “Luca’s over-caffeinated and installing cameras in things that don’t need it.”
“Of course.”
“Rome’s meditating. Claims it helps him ignore how much he hates people.”
“That tracks.”
“Bastion’s brooding in the east wing like he owns half the fucking city.”
“He does.”
“Exactly.”
He took another bite, more out of habit than hunger. His knuckles still looked bruised. His jaw was tight.
“They’re good,” he added. “Mostly.”
“Villain suits them.”
“Yeah.” He tapped his fork on the container. “Better than the Academy did.”
“Only because this time, they’re the monsters in charge.”
That earned me a smirk. Brief, but real. When Vince hurt, it usually bled through other people. Sometimes it was harder to pull him back.
“And the girls?” he asked, after a moment.
Ah. There it was. The tether, the cord that pulls him back always had.
“Soph and Ceci are somewhere off the coast of Monaco. Or maybe Malta. Hard to say with those two.”
He raised a brow. “Still on the yacht?”
“Still.”
He exhaled, shaking his head. “Buying them that thing was a poor investment.”
“I thought you bought it.”
“I did.”
“Then stop complaining.”
He shrugged. “They’re happy.”
“That’s all that matters.”
“It is,” he agreed.
“Veil says there’s been a few men rotating through the deck logs.”
“Unless someone touches them wrong. They get total privacy.”
I nodded. “Agreed. I never understood the brothers who get jealous over that shit.”
“Weird fuckers who are in love with their own sisters,” Vince muttered.
I laughed. He didn’t, but the edge in him faded just enough to call him human again. My life battle will be pulling him back from being the enforcer our grandfather trained in him.
“You heard from her?” I asked.
Just like that the air changed. He didn’t look at me. Just blinked slowly, the quiet ringing louder than it should’ve.
“No,” he wouldn’t look at me when he said.
I studied him. “You want me to get Luca to track her?”
“No.”
“Vince—”
“No one should know about her. Including you.”
That stung, but I didn’t show it. Vince never had a woman he cared about, nor had he hidden one from us. He didn’t talk to women. I wanted to ask what she had done to change that.
“We’re brothers,” I said. “I know all things.”
“Then pretend you don’t,” he muttered, shoving the last bite into his mouth like it might shut down the conversation.
I didn’t push. Only because I knew that when Vince started locking the doors inside, forcing them open only made him disappear faster.
“You hear the latest?” I asked, leaning back on the couch, watching Vince pick the last of the meat from his container like it had personally wronged him.
“Which latest?” he muttered.
“Apparently, we’re going to start stealing dynasty daughters.”
He scoffed. “Again?”
I grinned. “Genuinely, this week’s rumor is we’ve already picked targets. One from each house. Some Veil post claimed we’re repopulating the Crow bloodline manually.”
“Oh good,” Vince said flatly. “Can’t wait to find out who I’m married to.”
“Better hope she doesn’t want laughter from a husband.”
He rolled his eyes.
“Think Damius is behind the whispers?” I asked, mostly joking.
“If he wanted us married, we’d be married,” Vince said. “But he doesn’t control Rome. Or the twins.”
“Fuck no, he doesn’t. We didn’t take that oath for no reason. Anyway,” I ate the last of my food, “Damius is too busy wedding the Harlan Crow cousins to care what we’re doing.”
“Thank fuck.”
“I swear, if I see another bloodline interlock chart with that region’s crest, I’m gonna stab someone.”
“That’s how you start wars, Nik.”
“That’s how I finish them.”
Vince smirked and stood, tossing his empty container into the trash.
“Stealing dynasty daughters,” he muttered again. “The shit they come up with.”
“Luca probably already has a flowchart for it. Surveillance tiers, backup vaults.”
“I give Bastion six months before he starts training her security.”
“They’re still obsessed with that girl from the academy,” I said. “They also think we don’t know about her.”
“After years,” Vince agreed.
“They might be the first of us to actually take a bride,”
“If that’s what they want. But you saw her last name. They’d probably have to steal her.”
I nodded once.
“Still, you think she’d survive Bastion’s nightmares and Luca’s need to control everything?”
“Strong woman to handle both,” Vince said.
Silence followed but it was never uncomfortable. I pretended not to be bothered by that tapping pattern he was doing with a fork. He pretended to ignore I was clocking his health.
“Island wedding’s this weekend,” I looked around the empty house. “Overseas branch.”
Vince nodded, reaching for the bottle of water on the counter. “We flying in together?”
“Yep. We’ll fly back after the blood ritual. Like normal.”
“We cutting left hand again?”
I held up mine. Faint scar still there, right beneath the base of the thumb.
We had been to too many of these damn things. Weddings soaked in ink and blood. Traditions we were too desensitized to call barbaric anymore.
And the sick part?
I didn’t hate them.
Not really. I started wondering what it would feel like to mean it. To look at someone and want the vow to bleed.
For the pure possession of it.
“Imagine explaining it,” I stared at the scar no my hand “When she asks—what’s the wedding day look like?”
“You mean the part where we slice her dress open in front of our dynasty?”
“Yeah,” I said, laughing under my breath. “That part.”
He raised his brows. “She’ll love that.”
“Oh, definitely. Just thrilled that we’re cutting a dress off her just after our extended family stands in a circle bleeding on her.”
Vince scoffed. “Saves on alterations.”
“And then,” I went on, lifting my hands as if framing the pitch, “after the ink dries on her back. What does she get? Not a ring. Not even a gold bracelet. No—”
“A fucking collar,” Vince finished. “During the lock-in.”
“Which,” I said, pointing a chopstick at him, “is also when she gets tattooed again. On her thigh. With our blood mixed in.”
“Romantic as fuck.”
“Literal blood, Vince.”
He smirked. “Bonding.”
“Branding.”
“Same thing in our family.”
“No wonder people think we have to steal brides,” I said.
“That’s propaganda,” Vince muttered.
“Is it?”
He looked at me.
“I mean, seriously,” I went on. “Imagine you’re some dynasty girl.
Sweet. Used to gala announcements and press releases.
Some asshole Crow shows up and says, Hi, you don’t get a wedding band—you get a collar.
You don’t get a bridal suite—you get a lock-in.
That ends when I say. And oh, by the way? Your body is now a dynasty record.”
“We’re traditional,” Vince offered.
“We’re unhinged.”
“We’re effective.”
“And unhinged.”
Vince tapped a rhythm on the table with the edge of his fork—just once, like his mind had gone somewhere else.
“You ever think we’d get married?” I asked.
He looked over. “You mean us personally, or our generation?”
“Both.”
He scoffed. “Rome’s allergic to commitment. The twins are still pretending they don’t remember the girl they’ve been obsessed with since the Academy.”
“And what about you? Do you ever think about finishing your crest?”
He shrugged.
There was a space, on every Crow man’s back, intentionally left blank inside the crest. A perfect curve designed, where her name went. The only person we were ever meant to carry.
Once filled, it couldn’t be undone. That space was forever.
“You ever think it’s all too much?” I asked, looking down at the table. “The bloodletting. The thigh tattoo. The red-to-green claiming light system. The oath scars. The post-lock-in branding ceremony. The—”
“Don’t forget the ancestral blade that gets passed down to the groom’s oldest living male relative so he can cut the collar tags off the bride’s dress before the claiming,” Vince added, deadpan.
I laughed. “Jesus Christ. That’s normal to us.”
“That’s Thursday.”
We both shook our heads.
I leaned back and looked at him, really looked this time. And I said, “Is it that we have to steal brides, or that no one sane would walk into this willingly?”
He didn’t answer. Because we both knew the truth. It wasn’t just that our rituals were heavy. Or soaked in generational madness. It was that deep down—we liked it.
We wanted to claim them in ways no other dynasty dared. And that was the real reason most of us would never say it out loud.
Because it wasn’t the dynasty world that scared us. It was the fear that if we ever loved someone that much, we’d never stop. Not even when we should.
Possession didn’t end at the lock-in. For a Crow, it started there.