Chapter 19 STEPHANO #2
"I know," I roll my eyes, staring at the hole in the roof, the empty rope, the way the dust hangs like ash. "I’m dead."
"No," Grigori says, almost gently. "You’ll wish you were."
The line clicks dead.
"Nice," I mutter to the ceiling—because the alternative is letting the crack inside me widen.
"Conti!" Ettoro looks down through the hole. "He’s secured. I’ve got your brother. Go get your wife."
The word hits like a bullet under my ribs—wrong and right, soft and savage.
Wife. Paper fiction. Heat-hard truth. A line I never meant to cross, a line I can’t uncross now.
The word slams into me. Wife. Hearing Ettoro say it now—here, in this burning hellhole—it hits something in me I didn’t know was exposed.
Wife.
For a heartbeat, I can’t move. I’m torn clean down the center, ripped between blood and… whatever the hell she’s become to me in the span of days. Hours. A handful of breaths.
Nico—my brother, my ghost, my failure—alive and in reach for the first time in three years. And Oksana—bleeding, taken, because she walked into hell at my side and didn’t think twice.
Duty drags one way.
Instinct drags the other.
My chest feels like someone hooked me from the inside and pulled in opposite directions until something cracked wide open.
I want both.
I can't have both.
Not at the same time.
And that’s the part that guts me.
Ettoro’s voice drops like an anchor from above. "I’ve got your brother. Go."
I force air into my lungs. I trust Ettoro with my life; tonight, I trust him with Nico’s. But it still feels like ripping out a piece of myself to say it.
"Bring him home," I tell him, the words scraping out raw.
Because I’m going after her.
Because I can’t not.
Because somewhere between the lair and this warzone, Oksana stopped being a line I could walk away from.
"Copy." He disappears into the dark like a promise.
Something hardens in me. Not breaks—no, breaking would be mercy.
This is the opposite. This is the moment every Conti man is forged for, the one faced by all who have come before me, the moment I finally understand what kind of creature I’ve been pretending not to be. I can’t save anyone by being a prince.
Princes inherit.
Kings take.
And kings—real kings—are ruthless bastards who burn the world before they let it take what’s theirs.
Nico’s life.
Oksana’s blood.
The betrayals running under our feet like rot.
All of it demands a version of me I’ve avoided becoming, a version I no longer have the luxury to hold back. The part of me that was tempered in fear, in loss, in three years of ghosts and unanswered questions… that part finally stands up.
Cold. Clear.
Crowned.
I’m not a prince anymore.
The door gives way, and the man who steps through it isn’t the one who climbed in through the roof. That man thought rescuing Nico was a mission, an operation, an adventure.
This man knows better.
This man has seen the distance between life and death shrink to a hair’s breadth. He feels the thin line under his boots, feels how easily it can snap, how effortlessly he can cut it for anyone who stands in his way. And it hits him—hard—that it isn’t a privilege anymore. It’s a responsibility.
A crown made of choices no one else can bear.
This one walks like heat doesn’t touch him, like fire parts for him, like hell itself would bow or burn at his command. A king carved from war and promise, cloakless, but crowned all the same.
If there were a cape, it’d be smoke. If there were a throne, it’d be built from the bones of anyone who tried to take what’s his.
Like the unlucky guard who staggers into view.
I put two in his chest without slowing. Another at a burning vehicle—I catch the swing of his rifle, knock it wide, jam my barrel under his chin, fire. Bone, spray, silence.
My boots hit the uneven concrete, and everything I’ve been holding in—the fear, the rage, the guilt, the love—burns in my throat like acid.
Wife.
If I lose her now…
After everything…
After Mexico carved a monster out of me…
I don’t know who the fuck I’d be next. And that terrifies me more than any bullet ever could.
Hummers burst through the peeled fence, our guys hanging out the sides, shooting in disciplined, controlled bursts. I sprint through a curtain of dust and tracer fire, lungs hot and small. One of my men swings a door open at a skid. I dive into the passenger seat and slam it shut.
"Drive," I bark. "Now."
We peel onto the road, tires screaming. Seven men with me, all good ones.
Two in the back are already changing mags with the lazy competence that means we’ll live.
Another slaps a fresh drum into the SAW and grins like he’s going to get laid.
I jab the tracker link open. A red dot flares on the map like a fresh wound.
An hour north, a warehouse in the middle of nowhere.
I put the map on the screen for the driver to see. "It says an hour. Make it thirty minutes."
Even thirty minutes will drive me insane. Thirty minutes without knowing what's happening to Oksana. Part of me says she'll be fine, she is Metelitsa, after all, but the other part, the one that insists she is my wife, tells me that she's barely recovering from her wounds.
"Traffic?" the driver asks, already weaving through the debris.
"Just us and whatever dies in the way," I reply, keeping my eyes on the dot that won't tell me if she's dead or alive. "Headlights off in the last ten. We ghost it."
"You've got it, boss."
The adrenaline starts to betray me; it always does when there’s a lull long enough to think. My hand finds my hair and drags it back hard. "Fuck… fuck, fuck," I breathe, not sure if I’m cursing her for being taken or myself for not chaining the world to the floor.
I drop the half-empty mag from my pistol, slam in a fresh one, check the slide, check the chamber, check again because checklists keep men alive when feelings try to drown them.
I grease the bolt on the rifle across my lap with a thumbprint of oil, click the light, click it off, settle the sling against my shoulder like a promise.
Oksana’s voice replays in my skull, ice-calm: HQ breached.
Call Grigori. She said it like a grocery list and meant it like a will.
The image knifes in, her alone in a cheap room, bright bulb making a halo of someone who doesn’t believe in God, rifles pointed center mass.
The thought makes my vision blur around the edges.
The men are quiet—they’ve seen captains break before. I won’t give them that. I look out at the road, at the way the night is a long throat swallowing us whole. The map pings steadily in my hand; the dot doesn’t move.
"Seven minutes to the highway," the driver says. "Forty to the turnoff if we don’t meet friends."
"We will," I say. "But they won’t like us."
I thumb my phone again and send a single text to the number that just threatened to invent a new hell for me.
Me:
En route. One hour. Move if you can get there sooner.
Grigori:
I don't have men in Mexico. Yet.
The threat is clear and makes me chuckle.
I send another text to Ettoro.
Me:
Vitals?
Ettoro:
BP 92/58. HR 118. He’s holding.
I exhale a breath I didn’t know I was holding until it hurts.
The Hummer bucks over a culvert. Stars skid across the windshield.
The engine note settles into a hunting purr.
I can taste the warehouse already: the taste of cold metal and old dust and cheap cigarette smoke.
I can see the kind of men who think a woman is a toy until she names herself a weapon.
I can see her, alive because the universe won't like what I do if she isn't.
"Boss?" the backseat says softly. "We hit hard?"
"We hit like we’re owed," I say. "We hit like a motherfucking tornado."
The road unspools. My heart is a fist that won’t unclench. I run a hand through my hair again and feel grit and sweat and the night’s ash on my scalp. I force my jaw to unlock.
"Hold it together," I tell myself, quiet enough only I can hear. "Get in. Get her. Get out."
I rack the rifle once more, feel the spring answer. Ahead, the world narrows to a red dot and the sound of my pulse. My brother breathes in a metal bird I can’t see. My wife—God help me, yes, my wife—waits in a room I will tear down to studs if I have to.
"Ten out from the highway," the driver announces.
"Faster," I tell him, and the pedal goes down. The night leans forward with us.