Chapter 48 Nikolai
Nikolai
By the time my jet hit Villain airspace, I’d already decided it couldn’t be as bad as Bastion made it sound.
I was wrong.
Four missed calls from Rome. Three from Bastion. One from Luca.
The last one bothered me the most.
Rome called when Vince was pissed. Bastion called when Vince was bleeding. Luca didn’t call unless he couldn’t get Vince to move, and Luca usually could get Vince to move.
The elevator ride up to the War Room felt longer than the flight.
Glass. Steel. The soft hum of the tower’s heart. Below us, Villain glowed like a circuit board—ports lit, casinos pulsing, Aureum strip burning blue-white against the dark. The same city we’d bled for, killed for, rebuilt.
The doors slid open.
The first thing I saw was the jet. Not a real one. A hologram, hovering above the war table—sleek, silver, rotating slowly on its axis. Flight paths arced around it in pale blue lines. Altitude stats hovered in the air. Tail number: Aurelio Marcellus’ private aircraft. Highlighted in Crow red.
The second thing I saw was Vince.
He stood at the end of the table, shirt sleeves rolled.
There was a coffee cup on its side bleeding onto a stack of manifests, one cigarette still burning in the ashtray, another dead and flattened under his thumb like he’d put it out too hard.
Faint sighs of white lines. My brother was pushing himself to stay sharp.
He didn’t look up when the elevator chimed.
“—we don’t need the whole wing gone,” he was saying, voice low and steady in the way that meant he was anything but.
“Just enough structural damage on ascent. Force the pilot to call in an emergency and dump it over water. Engines flame out, bird drops, everyone screams, some of them live if they swim fast enough.”
He tapped a section of the jet’s projection. A red overlay flickered along the undercarriage.
“And then,” he continued, “we hire a salvage crew to strip the wreck. I take a piece of the fuselage, mount it over my office fireplace as a reminder not to let anyone touch what’s mine again.”
I stared at him for two full seconds.
“Absolutely the fuck not.”
His head snapped up.
Dark eyes. Bloodshot. Too bright. I’d seen that look on soldiers who’d been awake three days.
“Nik.” He exhaled, as if he’d ordered me like a drink and I’d just arrived. “Good. You’re here. Look at this.”
“No,” I walked in. “On principle.”
He frowned. “You don’t even know what I’m proposing yet.”
“I heard ‘drop a sovereign heir’s jet into the ocean and hang a trophy on my wall.’ That was enough.”
“It’s not a sovereign heir,” he snapped. “It’s Aurelio Marcellus.”
“Same difference. Dead enough to start a war either way.”
He stabbed his finger through the hologram, enlarging a cross-section. “Who said anything about dead? We don’t need a fireball. Just a break. Engine failure. Fuel leak. I don’t care. I want him terrified. I want him thinking the air hates him.”
“The air,” I repeated.
“Yes.” He pointed at a glowing coordinate. “Here. Over deep water. I don’t want debris washing ashore with his fucking crest on it.”
“You want to drop a man’s plane into the ocean because he put a ring on your girl’s finger. Not even his fault, by the way.”
His jaw worked. “Don’t call him ‘her man.’”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I said ‘he put a ring on her finger.’ There’s a difference.”
“It’s not happening. She’s not marrying him.”
“Then put away the crash simulation.”
“No.”
He said it with the flat, immovable tone that had scared grown men since he was seventeen.
I walked further into the War Room. The space was mostly empty—just the live-feed wall on one side, the war table in the center, the city grid lighting up Villain ports, Black Vault Casino, Aureum, all our holdings in neon lines.
“Where are they,” I asked.
He dragged on his cigarette, exhaled smoke away from the table. “Rome’s at Aureum pretending nothing’s wrong. Bastion took Luca to the docks to keep him from coming back up here and joining my insane plan.”
“So they think you’re insane too. Good. I’m not alone.”
He gave me a look that would’ve shut anyone else up.
I didn’t shut up. That was why they’d called me.
I leaned my hands on the edge of the table and stared at the rotating jet.
Tail number. Usual route between Villain, St Cross, and Marcellus territory. Flight windows. Maintenance logs. He’d pulled everything. Every time that aircraft breathed, Vince knew about it.
“How long have you been up,” I asked.
He checked the nearest clock like he hadn’t thought about it. “Since the island.”
“That’s not a time. That’s a trauma.”
“She is not okay, my baby, is not okay.” He broke the stylist in his hand. “She thin. So fucking thin. And her eyes… it’s like someone crushed her happiness and that someone is fucking me.” He started to pace.
“Carefree, funny, everything I loved about her I destroyed. My perfect sub who trusted me with everything, looked at me like I was…”
He paused and just stared at me. Grief. Painted all over his face.
“Not trustworthy?” I offered
“Someone she never knew.” He slumped back down in a chair, for a moment. Only to get straight back up.
“She hates me,”
“And yet, you’re up here trying to ruin her future.”
He shot me a look. “I am up here planning to get a piece of this fuckers plane. To mount on my mantle.”
“How Viking of you,” I put my feet up.
“No. Proof. To her. Someone tried to take her from me. Daddy takes that persons life.”
Possession, obsession tendencies are extreme in our bloodline. Which was why, I took my brothers threat as an intended plan. Not his ego screaming.
His fingers tightened around the edge of the console. I reached over and killed the rotation on the hologram. The jet froze mid-air.
“Vince, you’re not coping with the slow plan. I get it. But this is not an adjustment. This is insanity.”
He inhaled smoke, then crushed the cigarette out so hard the ashtray jumped.
“You and I agreed,” I reminded him. “We leverage Thorne first. We let their pride make them desperate. Then we offer them the solution they can’t refuse—marrying her into our line.”
“We planned that before my baby told me she was leaving. Before my girl looked me in the eye and told me she’s finished. She hates me, Nik.”
I shook my head. “No. She’s hurt.
“Same thing,” he muttered.
He flinched, just enough.
“But you’re right about one thing—the Thornes handing her over voluntarily is too long-game. We were banking on their fear. Now they think they’ve solved their problem. Marcellus takes her. Their ledger stabilises. They get royal adjacency. Why would they give that up?”
His shoulders went tighter. “So the plan doesn’t work.”
“This version doesn’t. Her marrying Marcellus does.”
His head snapped up. “You just said—”
“I said it works for them,” I cut in. “Not that it has to end well for him.”
Suspicion flickered behind his eyes. “Explain.”
I watched the city lights crawl across the live-feed wall.
“The Marcellus dynasty, their crest was inked in the sovereign codex before the Crow dynasty got scribed.”
He knew that. We all did.
“Damius hates them,” I added.
“That’s not a plan,”
“There’s an old debt between Marcellus and us. You remember.”
His jaw flexed. “They cut us out of two ports and used our name to close their deals.”
“And Damius let it slide because the optics were inconvenient.”
Vince’s eyes narrowed. “I’m listening.”
“Marcellus marrying a Thorne gives him a legitimate right to a presence in Villain’s courts. Not just as a guest. Their Dynasty will be given a voice in Villain.”
“Damius will hate it.”
“He hates anything that dilutes Crow dominance in this city. You want him on our side? Offer him a way to kill two dynasties with one spectacle.”
Vince stared at me. “Go on.”
“We invoke the debt. Publicly. Codex-level. The Crows call in what Marcellus owes.“
His throat worked. “In a bride.”
“In a bride,” I confirmed. “We demand payment in the form of Madeline Thorne, currently promised to Marcellus. We frame it as cleaning up a mess two dynasties created in our territory without proper respect.”
Vince went very still. “You think Damius will approve that.”
“He’ll fucking applaud it. He gets to remind everyone he’s god in this region.
That even royal-adjacent dynasties bend when he wants them to.
He gets Marcellus humiliated, Thornes punished, Villain secured.
And he gets to do it under the banner of ‘restoring codex balance,’ which is his favourite phrase when he wants to play executioner and priest at the same time. ”
Vince’s fingers curled on the edge of the table. “And Madeline.”
“She becomes the payment. Marcellus has to relinquish his claim to her ‘for the sake of peace.’ Thornes have to watch their carefully negotiated merger evaporate on Damius’ word.”
His gaze snapped to mine. “My wife.”
“Your wife. Damius can’t use her as punishment without undermining his own power structure.”
Vince’s jaw clenched so hard I heard it.
“Her name will be ruined. Thorne’s golden daughter, stolen out from under a royal-adjacent court like a bargaining chip.”
“Yes. It will terrify the region.”
His eyes burned. “And Madeline.”
“She’s going to think you did it to prove a point. For a long time.”
He stared at the dead hologram table like he could see the future laid out on it.
“And between now and that tattoo, you don’t get to feel a fucking thing.”
His head snapped back to me. “What.”
“If we go this route, you play it as business. Cold. Strategic. You don’t look at her like she’s your heart, or Damius will smell it and use her to crush you. Last thing, we need is him assigning her to one of our cousins.”
“She already thinks I switched her off. You want me to prove it.”
“I want you to survive long enough to prove her wrong. There’s a difference.”
“And I’ll spend the rest of my life proving to her I loved her.”