Chapter 39
thirty-nine
Nikolaj
Aweek on Isle Lucia teaches me the difference between silence and absence.
Silence is something I used to like. Silence meant control. It meant no one was speaking unless I allowed it, no one was moving unless I heard them, and no one was trying to fill the air with useless noise because they were too afraid of their own thoughts to sit still inside them.
Silence used to feel clean to me. Cold, maybe, but honest. A room either had a threat in it, or it didn’t. A hallway either held footsteps, or it didn’t. A bed was either empty, or it wasn’t.
These were simple things, and I was always good with simple things, especially when the world tried to dress them up as emotion.
Absence is not simple.
It sits in the villa with me and waits. It moves from room to room without making a sound.
It gets into the sheets, the bath, the terrace, the fucking kitchen, where Vincenzo stood with a coffee cup and looked at me as if learning calm with me might become a habit if the world let us be stupid enough to try.
Absence is the shape left behind when someone belonged everywhere for one weekend, then stopped being alive before the house learned to exist without him.
It sits in the chair opposite mine at breakfast. It stretches out across the bed and makes the mattress too large. It stands at the window at sunset and looks out at the sea through his eyes because grief has a talent for using architecture against a man.
I never understood depression when I was younger. Not really. I understood rage and boredom. I understood grief in the way people around me expressed it: through silence, revenge, drinking, or decisions that made entire families suffer because one man could not admit he was hurt.
I understood the kind of despair that has motion in it. It could become strategy if you were disciplined enough, or bloodshed if you weren’t.
This is different.
This is a pit.
Waking every morning a little deeper than the day before and realizing at some point that the light above you is still there, but you no longer believe it has anything to do with you.
I eat because someone leaves food, and Kai, from a continent away, has apparently decided starvation is not an acceptable mourning practice.
I shower because smelling like death would offend Vincenzo’s ghost, and I can’t bring myself to disappoint even the imaginary version of him that keeps haunting the villa.
I sleep when exhaustion knocks me out hard enough that dreaming becomes another form of injury. I wake with the ring in my fist and the taste of his name in my mouth, and for a few seconds every morning, I forget.
That’s the worst part.
For a few seconds, I forget. Then I remember, and the day starts with a burial all over again.
Ruslan and Salvatore lasted four days before leaving.
Not because they abandoned me. I know the difference now, though I’m not sure I would’ve a year ago.
They stayed because they thought someone should be here.
They stayed in the cottage with its green shutters and stiff old porch chairs, moving around each other with the tentative, painful intimacy of men who got thirty years back too late but decided too late was still better than never.
Salvatore came up to the villa twice with food I didn’t eat and a face that looked like he wanted to say a hundred things and knew none of them would survive my silence.
Ruslan sat with me on the terrace one night without speaking for nearly an hour. Two glasses of vodka between us, his bad eye turned toward the sea, like he understood too well what it meant to sit somewhere beautiful and want to become part of the stone.
On the fourth morning, Salvatore told me they were going back to Kolomna.
He said it gently; that was how I knew Ruslan had not written the speech.
“This island belongs to you and Vincenzo,” Salvatore said as he stood near the kitchen island with one hand around the head of his cane and the other in Ruslan’s grip like they were both still learning how to let people witness contact.
“It always did, even if you forced the purchase through like a madman with too much money and no respect for logistics.”
Ruslan looked at me from beside him and said, “We are going back to the villa in Kolomna.”
“Your villa,” I said.
“Our villa,” Salvatore corrected quietly.
That word had landed strangely.
Our.
For them. After thirty years. I should’ve felt bitter; some part of me did, probably. I envied them so violently for one hard second that I had to look away.
They get to leave together. They get to go back to an old house and try to turn regret into a final life.
They get gray hair and bad joints and apologies that arrived late, but still breathing.
They get to touch each other in daylight and say, “our villa,” as if time had not eaten half of them first.
But I was happy for them too. That’s the fucked-up part about grief. It doesn’t always make a man mean in clean ways. Sometimes it makes room for tenderness you don’t know what to do with.
I looked at Ruslan and Salvatore and wanted to hate them for having what I didn’t, but I couldn’t. Not fully.
Not when I’d seen my father alone on that terrace in Kolomna with a gun and Salvatore’s name on the bullet.
Not when I understood now that getting someone back after believing them lost does not erase the death you already lived through, but it does give the body a place to put its next breath.
“Go,” I told them.
Ruslan watched me for a long moment before he said, “You should not be alone here.”
I looked at him and almost smiled because if anyone alive understood the appeal of isolation as self-destruction, it was the man in front of me. “You don’t get to say that to me.”
Ruslan’s jaw flexed. “No. I suppose I don’t.”
They left that afternoon.
Salvatore hugged me before he boarded the helicopter. It was brief, stiff, and awkward because Vieri men and Dragovich men were all apparently designed by the same emotionally constipated architect.
Still, he held my shoulder afterward and said, “He loved you beyond sense, Nikolaj.”
I looked at him and said, “I know.”
Ruslan kissed my forehead like I was a boy, and I let him because the week had already stripped me of whatever pride would’ve once made that impossible.
Then they were gone.
Now it’s just me.
Me and an island I bought for the love of my life, because I thought enough money, enough distance, enough sea between us and the world might finally give us somewhere no one could touch.
Me and a villa built for two men who only got one weekend inside it. Me and the cottage down the hill emptied of old lovers who had at least earned the right to leave together.
Me and the ring. Always the ring.
Now, I sit on the beach at sunset, with a glass of bourbon and the ring turning slowly between my fingers.
The sand is cool beneath me, though the air still holds the last warmth of the day. The sky burns itself down in layers of orange, rose, and purple over the water, obscene in its beauty. I hate it a little for that.
I roll the ring over my knuckles and catch it against my palm. Black metal. Gold line. My thumb moves over the inside engraving so often that I think I could read it by touch if my eyes were gone.
Vincenzo is everywhere here.
That’s the part that feels impossible. We spent one weekend on Isle Lucia. One. Not a lifetime. Not years. Not even a full week. One weekend, and still he has somehow invaded every inch of it.
He is on the terrace laughing at me for buying the place and then kissing me as if he forgave me.
In the villa bath, his back against my chest with whisky beside us, he talked about Arabella, Marie, and Lucien while I loved him so much, I almost opened my ribs to let the love out.
He’s in the kitchen, in the bed, at the window, confessing he doesn’t know how to be free, and I told him we’d learn.
We did not get to learn it. We got one weekend.
One.
I take a swallow of bourbon. It burns, but not enough.
I understand Russian Roulette now. I used to think Ruslan’s little destruction game was pathetic in the way old men become pathetic when regret outlives their usefulness.
A gun, a bullet, a terrace, a dead lover’s name. How poetic. How stupid. How indulgent. But I understand it now.
Not the desire to die, exactly—that’s too simple. It’s the desire to let fate stop asking you to make choices. The relief of putting one round in a chamber and saying, ‘Fine. You decide.’
I am tired of being the hand that moves every piece. I am tired of surviving as an active verb. But there is no revolver in my hand tonight, just bourbon and the ring.
I take another drink and let the bourbon sit on my tongue before swallowing. A breeze moves over the beach and lifts the hair off my forehead, and I close my eyes.
“I don’t know what to do without you, My King,” I say.
The confession drops out quieter than everything else.
“I handed it all to Arseniy,” I say. “The family. The sectors. The whole fucking machine. He looked like he wanted to hit me again, which was almost comforting. Tatiana cried. Kai made plans to come here because he thinks I don’t notice him parenting me from three countries away.
Maksim told me not to get soft. I told him too late. ”
My mouth twists around something that isn’t a smile.
“You would’ve liked that. You would’ve looked at me with that smug mouth and said you always knew I was soft under the blood. Then I would’ve called you a liar and fucked the smirk off your face.”
The image comes too vividly.
His mouth.
His laugh.
His eyes in the villa light.
I bow my head until my forehead nearly touches my knee, ring trapped between my fingers.
“Fuck,” I whisper. “Fuck, Vincenzo. I miss you so much.”
“Still so eloquent.”
The world stops, and every muscle in me locks so violently the glass nearly slips from my hand. My breath cuts off. The sea continues its soft, stupid movement, but everything else goes silent around the shape of the voice behind me.
His voice.
No. Grief does this. That is the first explanation, and I hold onto it with both hands because the alternative is impossible. Grief makes men hear things. It makes rooms speak, and waves carry voices. It makes the dead cruel enough to answer when loneliness becomes too loud.
I refuse to turn around because if I do and there is nothing there, the last functional part of me will shatter completely.
I keep staring at the ring. “No.”
Behind me, the voice softens. “Nikolaj.”
I squeeze my eyes shut.
No.
No, because I know that tone. I know the exact way my name bends in his mouth when he’s trying to get beneath my anger without making me feel handled. I know the breath before the final consonant. I know the softness he never gave anyone else the same way.
My body reacts before my mind can defend itself, a hard, brutal kick of hope through the ribs that I immediately hate.
“Fuck off,” I say, and my voice breaks on it. I shake my head once. “You’re not real.”
“I am,” the voice says.
“No, you’re not.”
“Nikolaj, please turn around,” it says, and the plea in his voice is worse than the voice itself.
I laugh once, sharp and ugly and almost hysterical. “Don’t. Don’t you fucking do that. Don’t use that voice.”
“It’s the only one I have.”
“No,” I snarl, still refusing to look, because the sand beneath me has become the only thing keeping me from falling through the world. “His voice died on the phone.”
A breath catches behind me, and my hands start shaking.
The ring slips, and I catch it against my palm so fast the edge bites into skin. That little pain is the first real thing I can trust. I grip it hard enough to hurt and force air into my lungs, but there isn’t enough. There hasn’t been enough for a month.
“Nikolaj,” Vincenzo says again, closer now. “Please. Look at me.”
I don’t move.
If I turn and it is an empty beach, I am finished.
If I turn and it is him, I might be finished anyway.
“Nikolaj,” Vincenzo says, and this time his voice cracks. “Mio re, turn around.”
The endearment destroys the last of my refusal.
Slowly, like my body has forgotten how movement works, I lift my head and turn.