Nico’s mouth tightens. He looks away, toward the broken window, the shifting dark, anywhere but at me. He says nothing.
"Nico?" I press.
He shakes his head slowly, jaw flexing. "I don’t know, Steph."
The honesty hits harder than a lie.
"I know I love you," his voice is low. "I know Grigori is a decent guy buried somewhere under all that psycho behavior. I care about Oksana and Solnyshko… but hell. I don't know." He scrubs a hand over his face. "I just don’t know."
My stomach knots. Because I know what he’s really saying. He might go to war with the Arsenyevs. My brother-in-law. My wife.
I rub the back of my neck. "Nico."
He nods. "I know."
The truth is written in his eyes. He does know. He might make a decision that will tear me in half, because I can't go against my wife.
He continues, softer, "Grigori’s your brother-in-law now. Oksana’s your wife. You can’t go against him, and he can’t go against you. But me?" He lifts his eyes. "I need to find out who Alexei Voronin is. Where I came from. If I owe him anything. If I owe the Venezuelans. With Aurelio and Silvestre dead, I'm the last Valverde. I need to find out if I owe anyone anything."
A long beat stretches between us, heavy, uncertain, alive with the kind of tension that can make or unmake empires.
Then Nico smirks faintly. "Time will tell. Brother?"
That word. Brother. This time, it feels like something earned, not inherited. I step forward and pull him into a rough, brutal embrace. The kind that mends a crack without closing the wound.
"Always," I say.
He pulls back. Gives me a last look, stormy, steady, alive. Then he turns and walks down the ruined hallway, boots thudding softly, swallowed by the dark. A man going to war with his bloodline.
I watch him go.
My brother.
By choice.
By war.
By whatever comes next.
The night feels different now.
Sharper.
Hungrier.
Like it knows a king has risen—a king ruthless enough to go to war with his brother if he needs to.
Early the next morning…
I don’t sleep.Not because of exhaustion, or adrenaline, or the glow of a job half-finished. I don’t sleep because something in me—the part sharpened by years of killing and running and listening for footsteps in the dark—keeps whispering that something is wrong with Stephano.
That while I sit in this room pretending I can relax, the man I married is out there bleeding in ways I can’t bandage. The dread sits under my skin like a splinter.
It grows. It spreads. It coils in my throat.
And when he finally comes home… I know I was right.
He looks older. Drawn.
