Chapter 41 #2
“You weren’t there,” he says, and the accusation is raw because it isn’t only about the bed. It’s about the month. The explosion. The ring. The island. Every place I wasn’t when he needed me most. “You weren’t there.”
His hand slides into my hair, holding me against him as if the words hurt too much, but he can’t let go long enough to be angry properly.
“Don’t vanish from the bed in the middle of the night,” he says, and there is command in it, but under the command there is a boy on a beach with a ring in his fist and no answer from the sea. “Not yet. Fuck, Vincenzo, not yet.”
“I won’t,” I say immediately. “I won’t. I’m sorry.”
He breathes hard against me for several seconds, arms locked around my back, body still shaking with the remnants of the dream. Then something shifts. He goes still—not relaxed, but alert.
Slowly, he pulls back enough to look at me. The panic drops from his face piece by piece, and worry replaces it.
His eyes move over my cheeks, the tears, the swollen heat around my eyes, the mouth I have bitten too hard trying to stay quiet. The way I’m holding myself slightly to one side because running reopened pain I had been pretending was manageable.
He reads all of it in a second because Nikolaj has always been terrifyingly good at noticing what I don’t want seen. His hand leaves my hair and comes to my face with such care that it almost hurts more than the grip did.
“You were crying,” he says, and I look away on instinct. His fingers tighten gently at my jaw. “No. Look at me.”
The command is soft, which makes it impossible to resist.
His face is still pale from panic, but his eyes are focused now, searching mine with a fear that has changed shape. “Why were you crying alone in the living room?”
I look at him, and for one weak, humiliating second, I think about lying.
Bad dream. Pain. Couldn’t sleep. Something simple. Something manageable.
But we promised honesty before control, and I have already betrayed that promise in ways that nearly destroyed him. I don’t get the comfort of another lie now, even a small one.
My lips tremble before I can stop it.
His expression tightens. “Vincenzo,” he says, and my name is a warning and a plea at once.
“I couldn’t stay in bed. I was watching you sleep and thinking about what I did to you, and I couldn’t breathe.
You were finally sleeping—really sleeping.
And I didn’t want to wake you because God knows you need it.
I tried to be quiet, but I…” My voice breaks.
“I keep seeing your face on that beach. I keep hearing what you said. That you came here alone with my ring, and I stayed dead for a month while you—”
“Stop,” he says. “Your guilt isn’t heavier in the bedroom than it is in the living room.”
I shake my head. “No, Nikolaj, I need to say it because if I don’t, it sits in me like poison.”
The tears spill again, and this time I don’t try to hide them.
“I did it for us, and I hate that I can even say that. I did it so we could have this. So Rome couldn’t drag me back.
So Arabella could have Marie. So Salvatore could take what was left and stabilize the Families.
So you and I could be here without every structure in our lives sharpening itself against us.
I did it for us; I know I did.” My breath stutters. “And it still feels unforgivable.”
Pain moves over his face, not the old explosive kind from the beach, not that first raw devastation. This is quieter; a wound learning how to stay open without bleeding everything out at once.
“I hate myself for what I did to you,” I whisper.
“I didn’t want to stay away that long. I was going to contact you as soon as I woke up properly.
Nikolaj, I tried. I pulled lines out, I fought them, I kept asking for you, and then the infection hit, and everything got worse.
Kieran kept telling me if I moved too soon, I’d lead them straight to you.
I hated him for it. I still hate him for being right.
I kept thinking every hour I waited was another hour of damage I couldn’t undo, but I couldn’t get to you without risking bringing the whole thing down on your head. ”
His hand stays on my face and his thumb moves once under my eye, catching a tear I hadn’t realized had fallen. He looks at the tear on his skin as if it has offended him personally.
“I know,” he says, then flinches at himself. “No, I fucking hate those two words. From now on we say ‘I hear you’, alright? And fuck, I hear you, Vincenzo, but I need you to hear me too.”
His other hand comes to my waist, gentler now, careful of the bandage.
He takes a breath, and I can feel him choosing each word with effort because Nikolaj’s first language has never been careful honesty.
It has been command, violence, action, and touch.
Words are something he uses like weapons or refuses entirely. But he is trying. For me. For us.
“If you leave the bed because you need a minute, I can learn that,” he says. “Not tonight, maybe. Maybe not tomorrow. But I can learn it. I don’t want you trapped beside me because I’m fucked in the head.”
My chest tightens. “You’re not—”
“I am,” he cuts in, then gives me a look when I open my mouth again. “Don’t argue with me about my own head. I’m very aware of the damage.”
I close my mouth because, unfortunately, he has a point.
His thumb drags along my cheekbone, rough and tender. “But if you leave because you think your pain is one more thing I shouldn’t have to deal with, then we have a problem.”
I look down between us, but he doesn’t let me hide for long. His hand tips my face back up.
“I don’t want to be another room you have to protect from the truth,” he says.
“That’s what you did for eight years. You carried things alone because you thought knowing would hurt me, or because my memory was gone, or because our families made silence feel like mercy.
Then you did it again with the plan. I understand why.
I hate it, but I understand. But I can’t live like that here. ”
Here.
Our island. Our house. The life I killed everything else to reach.
“I don’t want that either,” I say.
“Then stop leaving me out of your pain.”
A sharp breath leaves me. “I was trying to let you sleep.”
“Bullshit,” Nikolaj says, with such immediate force that it almost startles a laugh out of me. “That was part of it, fine. But you were also punishing yourself somewhere I couldn’t stop you.”
I stare at him and he arches a brow faintly, though his eyes remain too bright. “You think I don’t know you?”
My throat works.
He does know me. That is the terrible, beautiful thing.
Memory loss stole years from him, but it did not steal the shape of us forever.
He learned me again with frightening speed because some part of him had never stopped knowing.
He knows when my silence is strategy and when it is shame.
He knows when I am being careful with him and when I am using care as a prettier name for distance.
“I hate what I did to you,” I whisper.
His expression softens and hardens at once. “Good. You should,” he says, not cruelly. Honestly. “It was cruel.”
My eyes burn again. “I know.”
“I hear you,” he corrects, almost automatically now, but there is no bite in it.
“I hear you,” I say.
He nods once. “It was cruel. It saved us, maybe. It gave us this. I’m still deciding what to do with that contradiction, and I reserve the right to be a fucking nightmare about it.”
A laugh breaks out of me, wet and involuntary.
His mouth twitches and he huffs softly, then his expression goes serious again. “I hate what you did,” he says. “I don’t hate you.”
My chest aches at his honesty.
“I know you know that,” he continues, and before either of us can flinch, he adds, “I hear myself. Fine. I believe you hear it. But I need to say it anyway because I see the guilt on your face every time I go quiet too long. You think every silence is a verdict.”
I swallow hard because he is not wrong. “I’m working on that,” I say.
“I know,” he says, then exhales in frustration at himself. “Fuck.”
Despite everything, I smile faintly. He glares at me. “This is your fault.”
“My fault?”
“You made me emotionally articulate. I used to be terrifying and efficient.”
A laugh bursts out of me. “You are still terrifying.”
“Not enough. I just used the phrase ‘emotionally articulate.’”
“You did,” I say softly. “I’m very proud.”
His glare weakens, and then he kisses my forehead. The tenderness of it nearly drops me.
He keeps his mouth there for a moment, breathing against my skin, one hand on my face and the other at my waist. I let myself lean into him, not fully, because my side still hurts and his body is still trembling faintly from the panic, but enough.
Enough to tell him I am here. Enough to let him tell me the same.
“I thought I dreamed you,” he says quietly.
The words break what little composure I had managed to gather.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper again.
He closes his eyes. “I know, My King.”
The title ruins me in a different way. It shouldn’t still.
I am not a King anymore, not in any way the world recognizes.
Vincenzo Vieri is dead, and whatever crown he wore is buried under false evidence, burned records, and half an empire handed away.
But when Nikolaj says it, the word has nothing to do with power.
It means mine, beloved, impossible man, the one I lost, the one I kept, the one who survived long enough to come home.
“I’m not a King anymore,” I say, but weakly, because we both know it isn’t true.
His eyes open, dark and fierce in the moonlight. “You’ll always be My King. Even if you’re unemployed now.”
“Unemployed?” I ask, deeply scandalized.
“You died dramatically and moved to my island. That’s not a profession.”
“I have skills.”
“You have trauma and expensive taste.”
“I also have excellent diplomatic instincts.”
“You used those to fake your death.”