Chapter 41
forty-one
Vincenzo
Iwatch Nikolaj sleep and wonder how many times a man can survive getting his heart back before the body realizes it should’ve died from the shock.
They make coming back to life seem beautiful in stories.
Cinematic. A door opens. A silhouette stands against the light.
The lover turns, disbelief cracking open into joy, and all the pain that came before becomes a staircase leading to the moment of reunion.
The dead man breathes again, the music swells, and grief is retroactively made noble because it has been rewarded.
No one shows the after. No one shows the lover flinching every time the returned man leaves the room for too long. No one shows the body that survived lying awake beside the body that mourned it, unable to touch without wondering whether touch itself is another apology too small to matter.
Coming back to life isn’t how they make it seem in movies.
It’s ugly.
It’s stiff ribs and a healing side that pulls every time I breathe too deeply. It’s waking up in a bed that should feel like a miracle and realizing the man beside me hasn’t been sleeping because he’s too busy watching me.
It’s watching Nikolaj blink himself awake in the dark, eyes wild for half a second before recognition lands, before his hand shoots out and finds my chest, my throat, my wrist, as though each pulse must be counted before the world is allowed to continue.
It’s freedom, yes—God, it is freedom—but freedom after a staged death does not feel like stepping into sunlight.
It feels like standing outside the burning building you escaped and realizing someone you love was still inside while you were running.
Even if you ran for both of you. Even if you set the fire because the building had become a prison and every locked door had his name on it.
Even if the only way out was through smoke and lies and a corpse wearing my ending.
It still smells like ash.
I used the fact that Nikolaj loves me in a way no one could fake.
I used the truth of him. I built my disappearance around the certainty that his grief would be convincing because it would be real.
The world would look at Nikolaj Dragovich breaking and know no actor alive could perform that kind of ruin.
It was the only way. A clean extraction required a believable death, and a believable death required the people closest to me to be fooled deeply enough that every enemy watching accepted the wound as evidence.
So, I let the wound happen and I did not stop it.
That is the truth.
I knew what it would cost him, and I still did it. I told myself a month of grief was better than a lifetime of running, better than a bullet through his skull because someone found the seam in the lie.
I told myself he would survive it. Of course he would survive it. Nikolaj survived everything. Vintermoor. Arseniy. Ruslan’s legacy. Me.
That is the unforgivable arrogance of loving a strong man; you begin to treat survival like a talent instead of a wound.
My throat tightens until breathing feels like trying to swallow glass. I press my hand against my mouth, careful not to make a sound.
Nikolaj needs sleep. God knows he needs sleep. Since I came back to him, he has barely allowed himself more than scraps of it, and even then, only when his body betrays him.
The first night, he didn’t sleep at all. He sat in the chair beside the bed like a furious guardian, refusing to lie down with me, refusing to leave, refusing to stop staring.
The second night, he climbed into bed only after I fell asleep and woke me twice with his hand pressed to my chest.
The third night, he woke up shouting my name and nearly knocked the lamp over before he realized I was beside him.
Tonight is the first time he has truly slept, and I’m lying here crying silently like a coward beside the man I hurt most.
My side aches where the healing injuries pull, a deep, ugly throb from the blast and the surgeries and the aftermath. I haven’t fully told him yet because every confession feels like adding weight to a man already carrying too much.
I turn my head and look at him again. A tear slips sideways over my nose and into the pillow. Then another. I stare at his sleeping face through the blur, and the whole room bends out of shape around him.
My beautiful, violent, impossible man. My husband. My grave and my resurrection.
I thought I was saving us. I was. I know I was.
If I had stayed, the Five Families would have eaten whatever life we tried to build.
If I had warned him, the grief would have failed the test. If I had brought him in, every enemy watching would have known the death was staged the moment his devastation came one degree too late or one shade too controlled.
The plan worked.
That is the worst part.
The plan worked perfectly, and Nikolaj paid the price in blood that I never saw leave his body.
I can’t lie here anymore, so I slide carefully out of bed instead.
The mattress dips as I shift my weight, and I freeze when Nikolaj’s fingers tighten slightly in the sheet. He doesn’t wake. His breathing stays deep, though not easy, never easy anymore.
I take one breath, then another, and finally stand. The cool tile meets my bare feet. My body protests immediately, a hot pull through my side and down my ribs, but pain has become background noise by now. I’ve been trained in worse things than walking while hurt.
I pick up the shirt from the chair and pull it on because I suddenly feel too exposed in my own skin.
It’s one of Nikolaj’s, black and too large on me, smelling faintly of him and the laundry soap stocked in the villa.
The fabric hangs loose over my shoulders, brushing the healing dressings beneath.
I don’t button it. I don’t have the patience for buttons right now.
Then I leave the bedroom quietly and walk into the living room overlooking the sea.
I stand in front of the glass and finally let the sound out, pressing both hands over my mouth, bending slightly as the sob tears through me, sharp enough to rip at my stitches.
My shoulders shake. My breath catches and fails, then catches and fails again. The living room blurs, and the ocean disappears behind tears.
I try to keep it quiet because he needs sleep, because he needs one night where my return doesn’t cost him something else, because I have already taken enough from him, and I can’t take even this.
But grief has its own language, and guilt speaks it fluently.
I sob into my hands and hate myself with a clarity so cold it feels almost peaceful.
I did all this for us.
That’s the thought that keeps circling, desperate and useless. I gave up Rome. The title. The public name. The chair at the head of tables men killed to sit near.
I’m free. For the first time in my life, I’m free, but all I can feel is the shape of the wound I left in him to get here.
My knees weaken, but I refuse to sit because sitting feels too close to collapsing, and collapsing feels too close to asking the room to forgive me. I deserve the pain in my side. I deserve the rawness in my throat. I deserve the way my hands shake when I drag them down my face.
I deserve the memory of Nikolaj screaming at me on the beach, tears on his face, voice broken open as he asked for the month back. He wanted the one thing I can’t give him—time untouched by the lie.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper to the sea, and it isn’t enough. It will never be enough. “I’m so sorry, my love.”
My reflection stares back faintly over the sea. I look awful. Pale. Thinner. Eyes swollen already, jaw unshaven, shirt hanging loose over bandages, and a body that still feels like it belongs partly to a hospital bed and partly to the explosion. I look alive in the least convincing way possible.
A sound cuts through the villa behind me.
It’s quiet at first, rough and strangled, and for half a second, I think I imagined it through my own crying.
Then it comes again.
“No,” Nikolaj says from the bedroom, voice thick with sleep and panic. “No, no, no.”
I turn so fast, pain rips through my side, and nearly takes me down. I don’t care. I push away from the glass and move, stumbling once against the edge of the sofa, then forcing my body down the hall because the sound that follows is not sleep-mumbling anymore.
It is terror.
“Vincenzo!” Nikolaj shouts, and there is nothing controlled in it. No Pakhan. No Blade. No pride. Just raw panic, tearing my name out of him like he’s back in the car and hearing the line go dead.
“I’m here,” I call, my voice breaking as I reach the bedroom doorway. “Nikolaj, I’m here.”
He is half upright in the bed, the sheets twisted around his hips, eyes wide and wild in the dark. His hair is a wreck, chest heaving, one hand dragging over the empty space beside him while the other is already reaching for a weapon that isn’t there.
He looks frantic enough to kill anything that moves and terrified enough to die from the lack of me in the bed.
The second he sees me, everything in his face breaks open. He doesn’t speak, he runs, and I barely have time to brace before he pulls me into his arms with a force that steals the breath out of me.
Pain flashes white along my ribs, but I bury the sound against his shoulder because I would rather split every stitch I have than make him let go right now.
His arms lock around me, one hand at the back of my head, the other spread wide across my back, holding me so tightly it feels less like an embrace than a man trying to fuse reality into place before it can betray him again.
“I thought I dreamt it,” Nikolaj says, voice shaking violently against my hair. “I woke up, and you were gone. I thought I fucking dreamt it. I thought I was still on the beach talking to myself like a madman, and you were gone again.”
“I’m here,” I say into his chest, my hands gripping his waist. “I’m here. I only went to the living room. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”