Of course she does. Of course, she didn’t tell me. I'll have to make a body sweep; she probably tagged me, too.
In the back, the winch screams; the litter jerks up through the opened roof, and my brother, Nico, is swallowed through the hole. The nurse is next, pleading, "No, por favor, no—" as Ettoro straps her in like salvation is a harness, not a choice. The rotors' blasts grit across my teeth.
"You're only about an hour's drive from her," Grigori confirms my suspicion about my tracker. Damn that woman. "I’m sending you her location." A beat. "And Conti—if anything happens to her…"
"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 theother.
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 ofcreature I’ve been pretending not to be. I can’t save anyone by being a prince.
Princes inherit.
Kings take.
