Chapter 41
Rafa
Two weeks. Fourteen days since I put a bullet in Vadim Petrov’s chest. Fourteen days since Kira watched her father die by my hand. Fourteen days of silence that feels like slowly drowning in regret.
The Rosso safehouse in the Hamptons sits like a fortress against the autumn sky, all weathered stone and bulletproof glass overlooking endless stretches of gray ocean. It’s where we brought her after the warehouse, where she’s been “recovering” from the trauma of that night.
Where she’s been avoiding me.
I climb the stairs to the second floor, my footsteps echoing in the empty hallway. Three doors down from the master suite I’ve been occupying alone, I pause outside the room where she’s been hiding from the world.
From me.
I raise my hand to knock, then stop. What am I supposed to say? How do you apologize for saving someone’s life in the only way possible? How do you explain that killing her father was the only choice that kept her breathing?
The door opens before I can make contact, revealing Nicolai’s pale green eyes and carefully neutral expression. He steps into the hallway, pulling the door closed behind him with deliberate finality.
“She doesn’t want to see you,” he says without preamble.
“I need to talk to her.”
“She’s made her wishes clear.”
“Has she? Or are you making decisions for her?” I try to step around him, but he moves to block my path. For someone with a desk job, he’s surprisingly solid.
“Rafael.” His voice carries the kind of authority that comes from years of managing crises. “She’s not ready.”
“Ready for what? To have a conversation with the man she’s supposed to marry?”
“Ready to face the man who killed her father.”
The words hit like a physical blow, even though I knew they were coming. Because that’s what I am now, isn’t it? Not her partner, not her protector, not the man who loves her.
The man who killed her father.
“He was going to murder her,” I say quietly. “You saw the surveillance footage. You know what happened.”
“I know you did what you thought was necessary.” Nicolai’s expression softens fractionally. “I also know that understanding something intellectually and processing it emotionally are very different things.”
“So what am I supposed to do? Just wait until she decides she can stand to look at me again?”
“You’re supposed to give her time to grieve. Time to figure out who she is now that everything she used to be has been stripped away.”
“She’s still Kira.”
“Is she? Because the woman in that room lost her father, her brother, her family, her entire identity in the space of a single night. She’s inherited an organization built on the corpse of the man who raised her.
She’s become something she never wanted to be because the alternative was death.
” His eyes harden. “So no, Rafael. She’s not still the same person. And neither are you.”
I want to argue with him, want to insist that love doesn’t change just because circumstances do. But looking at Nicolai’s face—exhausted, grief-stricken, older than his thirty-one years—I realize he’s right.
None of us are the same people we were two weeks ago.
“How long?” I ask.
“I don’t know. However long it takes.”
“And if it takes forever?”
“Then you learn to live with the consequences of the choices you made.”
The dismissal is gentle but absolute. I stand in the hallway for several minutes after he disappears back into Kira’s room, staring at the closed door and fighting the urge to break it down.
Instead, I do what I’ve been doing for two weeks.
I walk away.
Versace nightclub, Manhattan. 11:47 PM.
The bass line thrums through my chest like a second heartbeat as I nurse my fourth Scotch at Luca’s private table. The VIP section provides perfect isolation from the chaos below—writhing bodies, pulsing lights, the kind of desperate hedonism that makes grief temporarily manageable.
“You look like shit,” Luca observes, sliding into the booth beside me with his usual graceful ease. “When’s the last time you showered? Or slept? Or did anything other than stare at the bottom of a glass?”
“Tuesday,” I mumble, though I’m not sure what day it is now.
“Tuesday was ten days ago.”
“Then longer than that.”
Luca signals the waitress for another round, his expression shifting from amused to concerned. In the strobing lights, he looks younger than his thirty-one years—all tousled hair and expensive clothes, the eternal playboy who somehow always knows exactly what to say.
“Talk to me, fratello. What’s eating you alive?”
I drain my glass, welcoming the burn that momentarily distracts from the ache in my chest. “I killed her father.”
“Yeah, I heard. Congratulations on saving your fiancée’s life.”
“She won’t see me.” The admission comes out rougher than intended. “Won’t talk to me. Won’t even let me in the same room as her.”
“How long has it been?”
“Two weeks.”
“Two weeks since you prevented her from being murdered by her own blood, and she’s punishing you for it?” Luca’s tone carries genuine incredulity. “That’s fucked up, even for a Bratva princess.”
“It’s not punishment. It’s...” I search for the right words. “It’s processing. According to Nicolai.”
“Ah, the middle brother. The one who thinks everything can be solved through careful analysis and strategic planning.”
“Something like that.”
The waitress returns with fresh drinks, and I immediately reach for mine. Alcohol doesn’t solve problems, but it makes them temporarily easier to ignore.
“Let me ask you something,” Luca continues, settling back in his seat. “When you pulled that trigger, what was going through your mind?”
“That he was about to kill the woman I love, and I couldn’t let that happen.”
“Not duty to family? Not strategic considerations? Not anything other than protecting her?”
“Nothing other than protecting her.”
“And she knows this?”
“She was there. She saw what happened.”
“That’s not what I asked.” Luca leans forward, his party-boy demeanor shifting into something more serious. “Did you tell her? Did you explain that killing her father wasn’t about eliminating a threat to the Rosso family, but about keeping her alive?”
I’m quiet for a long moment, replaying that night in the warehouse. The gunshot, the blood, the way Kira looked at her father’s body. The silence that followed.
“I told her I couldn’t let him hurt her,” I say finally.
“And?”
“And then everything went to shit. Alexei ran off, Vito started making arrangements for the transition of power, the cleanup crew arrived. We never had a chance to...” I trail off, understanding finally hitting me.
“You never had a chance to actually talk about what happened,” Luca finishes. “About what it meant. About what it cost both of you.”
“I gave her my word,” I admit quietly. “Before all this started, I promised her that her father wouldn’t be killed. That we’d find another way.”
“And when he tried to murder her?”
“All bets were off. But that doesn’t change the fact that I broke my promise.”
“By saving her life.”
“By becoming exactly what she was afraid I’d become. A killer. Someone who solves problems through violence.”
Luca is quiet for several minutes, processing what I’ve told him. Around us, the club continues its relentless celebration—beautiful people pretending their lives aren’t as empty as the bottles accumulating on our table.
“You know what your problem is?” he says eventually.
“Enlighten me.”
“You’re trying to communicate with her like she’s a normal person instead of recognizing what she actually is.”
“Which is?”
“A hacker. A systems analyst. Someone who thinks in code and logic and carefully constructed algorithms.” He gesttures with his drink, alcohol making him more animated than usual. “You can’t just tell her you love her and expect that to override the programming. You have to speak her language.”
“Her language?”
“Code, you idiot. Digital communication. The medium where she’s most comfortable expressing complex emotions and processing difficult information.”
I stare at him, wondering if the alcohol is making him seem more brilliant than he actually is, or if he’s stumbled onto something genuinely insightful.
“You’re saying I should... what? Send her an email?”
“I’m saying you should find a way to communicate that makes sense to someone who’s spent her entire life translating human chaos into clean, logical systems.” Luca grins, clearly pleased with his own wisdom.
“Make it a puzzle she has to solve. Make it a code she has to crack. Make it interesting enough that her curiosity overrides her grief.”
“That’s...” I pause, considering the implications. “That’s actually not terrible advice.”
“For someone who’s drunk and high as often as I am, I occasionally make sense.”
“Occasionally.”
“More than occasionally. I’m a fucking genius, and you people just don’t appreciate my intellectual gifts because I choose to express them through hedonistic excess and recreational pharmaceutical consumption.”
Despite everything, I find myself almost smiling. “You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m effective. There’s a difference.” He raises his glass in a mock toast. “To speaking the right language to the right person. And to recognizing that sometimes love means becoming fluent in someone else’s native tongue.”
I drink to that, feeling something like hope stirring in my chest for the first time in two weeks. Because maybe he’s right. Maybe the problem isn’t that Kira doesn’t want to see me—maybe the problem is that I haven’t figured out how to reach her in a way that makes sense to who she is.
Maybe it’s time to stop thinking like a man in love and start thinking like a hacker trying to crack the most important code of my life.
The code that leads back to her.
Kira