Chapter 40
forty
Nikolaj
Vincenzo stands ten feet away on the sand, alive.
Alive.
The word doesn’t fit inside my skull.
He looks thinner. That’s the first thing I notice because my mind is trying to be practical to avoid losing itself entirely. His skin is paler beneath the tan, face sharper at the cheekbones, mouth tense, dark hair longer than when I last saw him, and swept back by the wind.
There’s a healing mark along one side of his jaw and a stiffness in the way he holds his left arm close to his ribs. He’s wearing dark trousers and a loose white shirt, the kind he liked on the island, sleeves rolled to his forearms, collar open at the throat.
No crown. No suit. No guards. No wife. No empire hanging off his shoulders like a noose.
Just him—alive and here, looking at me like I am the wound he made and the only place he wants to kneel.
The bourbon glass falls from my hand into the sand as I stare at him. For several seconds, the entire world is the distance between us and the impossible fact of his breathing.
Then rage arrives.
It doesn’t build. It detonates.
I’m on my feet before I know I’ve moved, ring clenched in my fist, heart slamming so hard it feels like it’s trying to break out of the cage it’s been buried in for a month.
Vincenzo takes one step forward, then stops when he sees my face.
“What the fuck?” I say, because language has narrowed to the only phrase that can hold even a fraction of what is ripping through me. “No. No, you don’t get to stand there. You don’t get to look like that. You don’t get to be alive.”
“I know,” Vincenzo says.
“You know?” I laugh, and it comes out broken enough that his face flinches. “You know. That’s fucking wonderful. He knows.”
“Nikolaj,” Vincenzo says carefully.
I point at him with the hand holding the ring. “Don’t say my name.”
His mouth shuts. I don’t know whether I’m going to kiss him or hit him or collapse into the sand and never get up. He stands there and takes the silence. His eyes are wet, but he doesn’t let the tears fall. Of course not. Still so controlled. Still so fucking beautiful, devastating, and alive.
I start toward him, then stop halfway because getting closer feels dangerous in every direction. “Explain,” I say. “Explain why the fuck you’re still alive when I saw your body.”
He swallows. “Before the summit, I made plans with Kieran King.”
My entire body goes cold with rage. “Plans.”
“Yes,” Vincenzo says. “Extraction plans. Identity plans. A way out. I knew they were planning to hit the summit. Not exactly how, but enough. The intelligence was too inconsistent to bring before the council without tipping off whoever still had access. I knew if I moved openly, they’d adapt.
If I canceled, they’d know I knew. If I included you—”
I step closer so sharply that he stops speaking.
“If you included me,” I say softly, “… what?”
The softness makes him pale.
Good.
“If I included you, your reaction had to be real,” Vincenzo says. “The grief had to be real. Everyone had to believe Vincenzo Vieri died in that explosion.”
The words hit my ears and refuse to make sense.
The grief had to be real.
My vision blurs, and I laugh again, quieter this time and far more dangerous. “So, you made sure it was.”
Vincenzo’s throat works. “Yes.”
I take another step, and now there are only a few feet between us. I can see the pulse beating at his throat. Alive. I can see the wind moving the edge of his shirt. Alive. I can see the faint tremor in his fingers before he curls them inward.
Alive. Alive. Alive.
I want to scream until the island breaks in half.
“Who was the body?” I ask.
His expression tightens with something like disgust. “Lucien. Kieran’s people handled the switch.”
My stomach turns. “The tests?”
“Kieran owns enough laboratories and enough people with sealed records to make the world believe what he tells it to believe,” Vincenzo says. “And I gave him half of my empire to make it happen.”
That lands like another slap, and I stare at him. “You… what?”
“I signed half of the Five Families holdings under my direct control to King interests through quiet channels. The half I could move without collapsing the structure before the summit. The other half was signed back over to Salvatore. He should receive the papers within a week.”
For one long second, I have no words.
He left it. All of it.
Title, empire, chair, bloodline machinery, every room that had turned him into the King of the Five Families and kept him lonely enough to drink himself to sleep for eight years.
He gave half to Kieran King to buy death as a disguise and signed the other half back to his father, the old king, who should have had enough pain by now and apparently will receive the empire as an inheritance from a son who refused to remain a ghost in his own life.
“You left everything,” I say.
Vincenzo nods. “Yes.”
“For me.”
“For us,” he says. “To have a future with you.”
The answer should soften something, but it doesn’t. Because under it, beneath the impossible miracle of his living body and the knowledge that he gave up the entire world he wore like armor, there is still the month I grieved.
I hold up the ring between us, and his eyes drop to it immediately. His face breaks, which only makes me angrier.
“I buried you with this in my hand,” I say.
His eyes lift back to mine, full of pain. “I know.”
“No, you fucking don’t,” I snap, and the scream finally tears out of me. “You don’t know. You weren’t there! You weren’t in that car when the line went dead. You weren’t there when they said the body was yours. You weren’t there when I held this and believed it was all I had left of my husband.”
His mouth trembles at the word. I keep going because if I stop, I’ll drown.
“You let me think you died,” I shout. “You let me hear you say goodbye. You let me lose you again. Again, Vincenzo! Do you understand that? I had you ripped out of me once by everyone else, and then you did it yourself.”
His face is wet now. I hope it hurts him. I hope every fucking word cuts.
“I came back here because I stopped being a person,” I say, voice cracking so badly I hate it.
“I handed the family to Arseniy. I left Saint Helena. I sat on this fucking beach for a week trying to decide if I understood my father’s gun better than I understood my own life.
I talked to the ocean because you weren’t here to talk back. ”
“Nikolaj—”
“Don’t!” I shout, and he flinches. I am crying now. I realize it only because the world has gone blurry and my face is wet. The anger is no longer clean enough to hide it.
The tears come hot and humiliating, and I hate him for seeing them. Hate him. Love him. Want to put my hands on him and make sure he is real so badly that my bones ache with it.
“You ripped my heart out,” I say, each word shredded. “You left me to die with it still beating in my fucking hand.”
Vincenzo stands there and takes it.
That makes me furious, too.
He doesn’t defend himself fast enough. Doesn’t interrupt. Doesn’t tell me there was no other choice with the kind of polished certainty he could use to make murder sound reasonable. He stands there in the sand with tears on his face and lets me carve into him because he knows he earned the blade.
“Say something,” I snap.
His jaw tightens. “I deserve every word you’re saying.”
I laugh through the tears, and it sounds awful. “That’s what you have? Martyrdom?”
His eyes flash then, pain sharpening into temper at last. There he is; not dead, not a ghost, not some noble hallucination come to receive my grief. My Vincenzo, alive enough to get pissed off.
“I’m not being a martyr,” he says, voice rising. “I am trying very hard not to excuse what I did just because I did it to survive.”
“You did it to disappear.”
“I did it to come here,” Vincenzo snaps.
“I did it to get out of a structure that was closing around me and would have kept closing until it used you as the blade or the wound. I did it because the summit wasn’t just a political threat anymore.
It was a cage collapsing in real time, and if I stayed King, one of us was going to die for real. ”
“I thought you did die for real!”
“I know!” Vincenzo shouts, and his own control finally cracks wide enough for the sound to reach the sea.
“I know, Nikolaj! I heard what that did to you before the line cut. I heard you begging me to stay alive, and I still had to let it happen because if there was one inconsistency in your grief, one sign you knew, one slip from Kai or Maksim or Tatiana or anyone close enough to you, it would have exposed the whole thing before I got out.”
I stare at him, breathing hard.
He drags both hands through his hair, shaking now. “I hated it, every second of it. I hated knowing what you would feel. I hated knowing what I was doing to you. I hated myself for it—I still do. But I did it because it was the only way to kill Vincenzo Vieri without killing the man underneath.”
The words hit me strangely.
Kill Vincenzo Vieri.
He looks at me then, chest rising hard, tears still on his face. “Vincenzo Vieri died in Bucharest,” he says.
My brow pulls down. “Don’t.”
“No,” he says, stepping closer despite the warning in my face. “Listen to me. Vincenzo Vieri died. The King of the Five Families died. Arabella’s husband died. Salvatore’s heir died. The man every enemy knew how to find, died.”
I stare at him, confused despite the rage. He reaches into his pocket slowly and pulls out a small leather wallet. Not his usual one, but something plain. New. He opens it and holds it out between us.
I don’t take it, so he turns it slightly.
New passport.
New name.
The letters sit there in clean black print, absurdly calm for the amount of destruction they carry.
Vincenzo Dragovich.
For a second, I cannot make sense of it.
Then I do, and the world tilts.