Chapter 42 Vincenzo
Vincenzo
Arseniy shows up like a fucking thunderstorm wrapped in wool. His coat clings to his frame, soaked and heavy, hair slicked back from the downpour outside, shoulders braced like he’s been holding the weight of the Bratva on his spine since birth.
The only reason I don’t put my fist through his face is that I’m still holding pressure against the soaked bandage across Nikolaj’s ribs. I’m still counting each rise of his chest, shallow and strained. I’m still watching him like he might disappear if I look away for more than a second.
“Tell me what happened,” he demands, voice already fraying at the edges. His coat leaves a dark trail on my floor, but he doesn’t care. His eyes are locked on his brother. On the boy I haven’t let go of since I found him bloody.
I don’t move. I don’t even blink. “He was rerouted during the lockdown to West A Hall and ambushed. They didn’t come to scare him; they came to send a message.”
Arseniy curses and scrubs a hand down his face, stepping forward like he can pace away the guilt bleeding into his voice. “Why didn’t he tell anyone?”
I finally look up. “He did tell someone. He told me. He texted me that he was being rerouted. That he might be ambushed. But it came through three hours late because the system was overloaded with emergency transmissions.”
I hand him my phone to show him the text Nikolaj had sent, and that quiet fury breaks. He drags a hand through his hair and lets it rest on the back of his neck, pacing another few steps before stopping again. “Why would he tell you and not me?”
I stand slowly, my hands curled into fists. “Maybe because you weren’t the one he trusted.”
Arseniy’s eyes harden at that. “Don’t get righteous with me, Vieri. You think I wanted this? You think I knew they’d go after him?”
“You knew something was off!” My voice rises now, sharp with grief. “You knew Dragna blood doesn’t forget, and you left him exposed. And none of your precious cousins thought to fucking check why Nikolaj never made it to the safe zone. No one even noticed he disappeared!”
Arseniy’s eyes flick to the bed, to the way Nikolaj’s body lies limp under my sheets, bandages already soaked through.
He looks smaller, pale and silent, with his arrogance stripped away.
For a second, something in his expression shatters.
The enforcer vanishes beneath the older brother.
“I didn’t think they’d go after him. I thought they knew the lines. ”
We stare at each other across the bed, nothing but air and Nikolaj’s weak breaths between us. Every second he doesn’t wake up stretches like a noose pulling tighter around my chest.
A sharp inhale tears through the room. A pained, rasping breath. Then a groan. His arm twitches once against the blanket, and we both freeze.
Nikolaj stirs, head rolling slightly toward the window. His brow furrows, then pulls taut in a grimace as he tries to sit up, only to hiss and collapse back onto the mattress.
“Kolya,” Arseniy breathes. “Don’t move. You’re hurt.”
“Arseniy?” Nikolaj’s voice is hoarse, cracked down the middle.
“I’m here,” Arseniy says quickly, stepping to the side of the bed, but I stay frozen where I am, uncertain of what to say or do. Not only because he’s awake… but because no one is supposed to know I love him.
Nikolaj’s lashes flutter, his fingers clawing weakly at the sheet.
When his eyes open—those glacial blue eyes that once burned through every defense I had—I am torn between dropping to my knees and running from the room.
His eyes find his brother first, because blood knows the path home before love does. “Where the hell am I?”
“You’re safe,” Arseniy says. “You were attacked, but you’re safe now.”
Nikolaj squints at the ceiling, frowning, then ever so slowly, he turns his head and finally looks at me.
I brace for anything except for the thing I get—there is no recognition in him, no soft pull of relief, no flicker of the last thing he said to me in the dark.
Only a hardening, a coil of venom in the gaze I first met on a Winter afternoon.
A glare that changed the shape of my life, and I watch the hatred gather in him like a storm he thinks I started.
“What the fuck… are you doing here?” he snarls, voice hoarse but sharp enough to cut. He tries to sit up, pain flashing through his body, but the anger holds him upright longer than it should.
I freeze, and my heart leaps into my fucking throat at the coldness in his tone. “Nikolaj,” I say quietly. “You don’t—”
“Don’t fucking say my name like that.” He cuts me off like the sound of my voice offends him. “He’s a Vieri,” he spits at Arseniy. “Why is he standing here? Why the fuck—” His gaze darts around the room, lands on the bed, then the sheets. “Am I in his bed?”
“You were ambushed,” Arseniy says carefully, like he’s trying to speak to a bomb. “During the lockdown, your route was compromised. Vincenzo found you.”
I open my mouth, then close it—what the hell do I even say after that? Every inch of my skin burns like I’ve been stripped raw. “You don’t remember?” My voice comes out in a croaked whisper, my stomach bottoming out.
His face twists in disgust. “I remember enough. I remember you’re the Vieri heir. East Wing scum. The fucking crown prince with a silver spoon and a vendetta. You’re the enemy.”
Arseniy steps between us. “Niko, calm down.”
“No.” He glares at his brother. “You let him touch me. You let him near me.”
“He carried you back here because no one else knew where you were! Not Kai, not Maxim,” Arseniy says, then he gestures to me. “You didn’t tell anyone but him.”
“Bullshit! I would never trust a Vieri,” he hisses, and my heart fucking shatters into a thousand pieces.
“Nikolaj,” I say, louder this time, hoping my stronger voice can evoke a response that isn't disgust.
He turns on me like a loaded gun. “I said don’t call me that,” he spits, eyes blazing. “I don’t know what kind of game this is, Vieri, but if you’re waiting for gratitude, you’ll die waiting.”
The air leaves my lungs. “You don’t remember anything,” I say, and it isn’t a question anymore, it’s a funeral. “Do you?”
His voice drips with disdain. “I remember exactly what you are.”
What… not who.
Every memory of his mouth on mine, every whispered word, every bruise we left on each other—they all collapse under that tone of revulsion. I’ve seen him furious. I’ve seen him violent. I’ve seen him hate. But never like this. Never toward me.
“Stop,” Arseniy says, trying to catch his arm. “You need rest—”
Nikolaj jerks free, ignoring him. “Why am I… in this bastard’s room? Why the hell would he save me? What’s the angle? You think I don’t know how… his family plays? Maybe this is mercy before the knife.”
“You were left to die,” I say quietly. My voice breaks in the middle, and I hate that he hears it. I hate even more his lack of reaction to it. “I wasn’t going to let that happen.”
He stares at me like I’m insane. Like the words don’t fit or make sense.
And that’s when I know, with a clarity that I don’t want, he doesn’t remember anything past the first time we met. Not the chapel. Not the library. Not the way he touched me with reverence. Not the confessions he whispered night after night.
He forgot it all.
He forgot us.
This isn’t him. It’s his voice, his body, his rage—but not the man who once held me after fights, who once whispered he’d rather burn than kneel. Not the one who memorized the sound of my breath like a sacred prayer.
The cruelest part is that he looks lighter without the memory of me—cleaner, clearer, unburdened by what we built. The line of his mouth doesn’t carry the weight of our secret, or the shape of my name anymore.
He glares at me one last time, jaw tight, chest heaving. “I want out of this room.”
Arseniy hesitates. “Niko—”
“I said I want out.” His voice cracks through the air. “Get me away from him.”
Arseniy’s eyes meet mine—a shard of apology caught in the eyes of a man who doesn’t apologize, and I don’t stop him. I don’t say his name again. I don’t beg. Because I know if I do, I’ll fall apart in a way I can’t recover from.
He swings his legs over the side, the bandages darkening as soon as gravity takes him, and he half-falls into his brother’s hold. He doesn’t fight it because pride is heavy and pain is heavier, and they move toward the door in a slow stagger that looks too much like a departure to be temporary.
Nikolaj doesn’t look back, and I don’t take my eyes off him until the door closes. I can’t. But then he’s gone, and I shatter.
I am the only one who remembers what we were.
I don’t realize I’m kneeling until the cold of the floor beneath me bleeds through my knees.
I don’t realize I’m shaking until I’m staring down at my hands; all I can see is blood in the lines of my palms, and none of it is mine.
I try to put my hands together to pray and remember I don’t do that, not for God, not for kings, not for anything except the man who just looked at me and saw a last name he was raised to hate.
The room keeps his scent like a bruise keeps a thumbprint; the sheets hold the shape of his body as if they haven’t understood what absence is yet.
As if I didn’t just watch the only person who ever truly saw me look through me like I’m filth and never mattered.
Like I never held his heart in my hand and dared him to crush mine back.
He looked at me like I was the worst thing that had ever happened to him, and I couldn’t even blame him. A piece of him died in that attack, and he took a piece of me right along with him.
He doesn’t remember loving me. He doesn’t remember the vows we never said, or the way I touched him like he was the last god left in the world. And maybe that’s what he needs to survive, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to survive this.
My breath stutters in my throat—then the rage hits.
I’m on my feet before I’m even aware I’ve moved, hurling the bedside lamp across the room without thinking. The crash of shattering glass is sharp and violent; it’s not loud enough to drown out the way my chest caves in, but it helps. A little. Not enough. Nothing will ever be enough.
I kick the edge of the bed where he slept, where he bled, where he belonged. The mattress shifts like it still remembers the weight of him, and that’s what shatters me all over again. Because everything in this room still feels and smells like him.
He left behind his blood. His pain. His goddamn silence. And I let him go.
I stagger toward the wardrobe, rip it open like there might be answers folded into the sleeves of the shirt he once wore.
There’s nothing. Just one of his spare leather jackets hanging there—forgotten, or maybe left on purpose.
My hands curl around the collar, and I crush it to my chest like that’ll keep me from falling apart, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t do anything.
Whipping around, I drag my arm across the desk, sending papers, books, and crystal decanters clattering to the floor. The mirror across the room catches my reflection, and I hate what I see. I hate the man staring back at me with bloodshot eyes and a hollowed-out expression.
The mirror explodes under my fist, and blood trails down from my knuckles, but I keep on hitting it, the pain in my chest eclipsing everything else.
He was just here. He was just fucking here.
“Merda!” The curse is guttural, ripped from somewhere in my chest that I thought I’d boarded up years ago. “Fuck!”
I pace the length of my room like a caged animal, hands dragging through my hair, breathing like I’ve just sprinted a hundred meters and lost. The walls feel too close. The air feels poisoned, and my lungs burn with the pressure of everything I didn’t fucking say.
My eyes snag on the decanter of scotch on the floor, one that miraculously didn’t break, and I smash it against the fireplace mantle just to hear something else break.
The amber liquid spills like an open wound, soaking into the rug he once knelt on, naked and flushed, whispering things in Russian I was never supposed to understand.
Now, I’m just a slur on his tongue again. An enemy across a table instead of a mouth he trusted. A problem to solve instead of a life to share, and there is not a blade in this room that can cut as cleanly as that knowledge does.
That’s all I am to him now. A fucking memory scrubbed clean.
I sink into the chair at my desk, elbows on my knees, head in my hands, and for the first time in a long fucking time, I feel powerless. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to be me without him.
“I gave you everything,” I whisper, and it’s the goddamn truth. I gave him everything I had. Every dark corner of my soul, every weakness, every part of me that no one else even knew existed. I handed it to him like a loaded gun and dared him to pull the trigger.
But now he’s gone, and I’m just a fucking ruin in the aftermath.
I think back to one of the nights we spent together. The night we silently admitted our love without saying the words. Nikolaj promised me something—something he can never keep now.
“I’m not going anywhere until I’m forced to. And even then, I’ll find my way back to you.”
I can't help but laugh at the irony. This is what happens to kings who play with fire and forget that some blazes aren’t meant to be controlled. This is what happens when you fall in love with your enemy and think love will be enough.
Nikolaj was right: we were always a slow-motion bullet that would end in war. But if this war wants to take everything from me, it will have to pay for what it stole.
Because love might not be enough, but vengeance?
Now, that’s a language we both remember.
The End…. For Now.