Chapter 37 Nikolaj #2
I don’t move. I don’t react. I don’t even breathe, because I know that trembling in his voice. I know that silence that follows like a final blow. And when he drags in a shaky breath, chest stuttering against mine, I realize the drop wasn’t sweat.
Vincenzo Vieri—heir born and bred to be the sharpest blade in a dynasty built on blood—just broke open above me, and the sound of his breath is almost enough to tear me in half.
He always carries himself like a man whose bones were forged in gold and expectation, but right now he feels human against me; trembling, unraveling, terrified of what this means.
He tries to pull back again, maybe to hide what else he’s feeling, what else he’s terrified to say, but I grab his jaw gently and force him to look at me.
“Vincenzo,” I whisper, staring up into the face of the enemy I’ll die for. “Tell me what you’re afraid of.”
He swallows hard, throat working, breath uneven. He opens his mouth, closes it again, tries to speak, fails, tries a third time.
“I’m afraid,” he finally breathes, “that you’re the only thing in my life that wasn’t forced on me. And I don’t know how to survive losing something I chose.”
My heart doesn’t just twist—it detonates. Because I feel the truth in every word, taste it in the air between us, hear it in the trembling exhale that follows. He’s not afraid of death. He’s not afraid of punishment. He’s not scared of legacy.
He’s scared of losing me.
And that… that is the most dangerous truth he’s ever admitted.
I take his face in both hands, holding him steady when he tries to look away again. “You’re not losing me.”
He shakes his head. “You don’t know that.”
“I do.” My voice stays firm even while everything in me trembles. “I’m not going anywhere until I’m forced to. And even then, I’ll find my way back to you.”
His breath catches. A single, silent stutter. My hands slide down his neck to his shoulders, gripping tight because if I don’t I might break apart under the weight of everything we can’t say.
“I’d burn my crown for you,” he whispers. “I’d give up everything. You just have to say the word.”
“And I would bury mine,” I answer. “But they were here first. The crowns. The names. The legacies.”
“We could run.”
I almost laugh. “You wouldn’t make it to the border. And I’d die before I let them touch you.”
“Then what’s left?” he asks. “What the fuck are we supposed to do now?”
I choke on a sound I don’t have a name for. My throat’s too tight. My chest too full of everything I’ve never said.
“I don’t want to survive you,” I whisper. “If this ends with you bleeding, I don’t want to be the one left standing.”
His eyes close, face twisted in pain. “Then don’t.”
We both already know that’s not possible because this isn’t a love story, it’s a eulogy.
A requiem for two boys who weren’t allowed to want. Who dared to touch what should have been untouchable and found something holy in the filth of it.
“Promise me something,” I whisper against his mouth.
He pulls back just enough to look down at me, breath catching in his throat. “Anything.”
“When they find out,” I say slowly, “don’t let them use me to hurt you.”
His whole body stiffens for a second before he buries his face in my neck, and I know… I fucking know he’s already preparing to die for me, just like I would for him.
He rocks down harder, drawing a strangled noise from my throat. I grip his hips, fingers bruising into bone, holding on like it’ll somehow anchor me to the moment. Like if I just hold tighter, I can make this last longer than the seconds we’ve stolen.
My chest burns beneath him—right over the carved scar of duty. It throbs with every movement, every thrust, every breath I shouldn’t be taking like this. I’d bleed the whole fucking world out of my veins if it meant I could keep him.
Vincenzo moans, head dipping down, hands dragging up my chest as he fucks himself on my cock with the kind of desperation that makes my throat go tight. He looks down at me then—eyes half-lidded, lips swollen, his thighs trembling around my hips.
I reach up and cradle his jaw with a hand that’s killed men for less than what I feel right now. “You don’t even know,” I murmur, my voice wrecked, “what you’ve done to me.”
He blinks, dazed, lips twitching like he’s about to say something smart, but I don’t let him. I sit up and kiss him instead—hard. Desperate. Bruising.
Our mouths crash, and for a second, it’s not sex, it’s not betrayal, it’s not war… it’s home.
I close my eyes and let myself pretend a little longer.
Because tomorrow, my phone will ring, and I won’t answer until he’s out of this bed, out of my arms, out of reach.
If this is the last time I’ll ever be touched like I’m human, I want it to be like this—his hands in my hair, his lips on mine, his body trembling as he comes apart above me, not as a king, not as an heir, not as a future tyrant of the Five Families—
But as mine.
When he moans my name this time, it doesn’t sound like sin.
It sounds like grief. He shatters against me, coming with a broken gasp of my name, buried against my throat, clinging to me like it’s the last time.
And maybe it is. Maybe that’s why I thrust into him like it’s my own fucking funeral, like I’m trying to mark him from the inside out, to carve something into him that no bullet, no father, no empire can erase.
When I come, I don’t say his name—I give it to him. Wrapped in a breath, in a moan, in the sound that will haunt me until the end.
My sin. My salvation. My end.
Loving Vincenzo Vieri isn’t just treason—it’s a death sentence.
And I’ve already signed it with every kiss.