My jaw tightens. “Names.”
He gives them slowly, as if pulling teeth, except the teeth are his and the pulling is entirely his choice. Two routes. Three port contacts. One compromised customs officer. A banker. An intermediary in Milan who has been laundering payments through an art foundation. A name in Bucharest tied to an old Byrne cousin with gambling debt.
He admits to feeding misinformation to make it look like the Vieri family is turning against the Five Families, creating fractures where none existed so rivals would press, so internal pressure would rise, so I’d have to spend time fighting smoke instead of strengthening structure.
He admits to shaping attacks to appear as though they had family involvement, not because he wanted to ruin the Vieris,but because he wanted to keep me paranoid enough that I trusted no one fully.
Isolation as leverage. A king alone is a king easier to steer.
And all the while he watched me stand at the head of rooms and pretend loneliness was the cost of power rather than a symptom of rot.
When he finishes, his voice is hoarse. “So,” he says bitterly. “Now you know.”
I stand across from him again, hands loose at my sides, and let the calm in the room grow teeth. “Yes, now I know.”
Lucien lifts his chin. “You’re going to kill me anyway.”
That’s the strangest part: he isn’t pleading, he’s almost relieved.
“No,” I say.
His expression flickers in surprise. “No?”
“I didn’t say you’d live well,” I reply.
A shudder runs through him, quick and involuntary.
“You were right about one thing, the part where you said the fact I only noticed now proves something.” I lean closer so that he can’t pretend my words aren’t meant to cut. “It proves I trusted you.”
His eyes flash with something like shame, gone too fast to name.
“That was your mistake,” he says.
“Yes,” I agree. “It was.”
I turn toward the door, knock twice, and the guards open it immediately. Behind me, Lucien says my name one last time. I pause at the door but don’t turn.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, voice rough and ugly and almost amused again because, apparently, he can’t help himself, “finding me in your wife’s bed really did speed things up.”
I look back then. “Lucien, for what it’s worth, that was the least interesting betrayal.”
Then I leave him in the cellar and head upstairs to start cleaning the rest of the rot out of my empire before dawn.
Five years of betrayal. Five years of being watched, steered, and tested. Five years of a man I trusted deciding my grief made me weak enough to be manipulated.
Lucien was wrong about one thing—I am a capable leader, and he’s about to learn exactly how capable.
I have no patience left for rot inside my house, and now that I’ve finally remembered what it feels like to love someone who makes me want to be better, I’m not letting my empire be hollowed out by a man who mistook my silence for blindness.
By the time I reach the stairs, I’m making lists.
twenty-seven
Nikolaj
Sleepcangofuckitself.
That’s the first coherent thought I have sometime after three in the morning when I give up pretending the bed is going to do anything but trap me inside my own head.
