He exhales slowly through his nose, and when he speaks again, there’s no softness in it. No brotherly overture. No attempt to make the truth easier to take. Just the same blunt Dragovich instinct that raised us both and wrecked us in different ways.
“There’s a bounty on your head,” he says.
For one ridiculous second, I almost laugh.
Of all the things I expected to come out of his mouth after five years, a fistfight, and a confession that he was wrong, that wasn’t one of them.
“There’s always a bounty on my head,” I say. “That’s what happens when people fear me more than they respect themselves.”
“This one is formal,” he replies.
That wipes the humor right off me.
I straighten fully, towel still in one hand, and watch his face. “Explain.”
“It went out quiet.” He folds his arms over his chest. “Not public enough to shake the structure. Not loud enough to look like a declaration of war. A whisper network first. Then money—enough money that ambitious men are starting to look at your pulse like a career move.”
The gym suddenly feels smaller.
“From who?”
Arseniy’s mouth flattens. “Someone inside the Five Families.”
My jaw locks.
“And before you start,” he adds, because he knows me too well, “it isn’t Vieri.”
That lands harder than the rest of it, because some ugly, suspicious corner of me was already moving in that direction even while the rest of me rejected it. I hate that he sees thatflicker cross my face. I hate it even more that he’s right to look for it.
“You’re sure,” I say.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Because if it were Vincenzo, the first thing I’d have done before walking in here was tell you to shoot me and go to war.” The corner of his mouth twitches, humorless and brief. “And because I know the shape of a Vieri hit. This isn’t it.”
I drag the towel across the back of my neck and throw it onto the bench harder than necessary. “So who?”
“I don’t have a name yet.”
“Then what the fuck good is this warning?”
His eyes flash.There.That old spark. He’s still in there under all the exile, grief, and whatever private hell he’s been carrying. Good. I was getting tired of talking to regret in a coat.
“The warning is that somebody with enough reach to move inside the Families has decided you’re worth more dead than alive. The useful part is that they aren’t moving openly because they don’t have a consensus. That means they’re testing the edges first. Small contracts. Contractors with deniability. Men who can disappear if the attempt fails.”
I pace once, because stillness is impossible all over again. My heartbeat has gone from fight to calculation now.
“Who knows?” I ask.
“Enough people that I’m hearing the shape of it from outside our lines,” he says. “Someone is testing whether your death would solve more problems than it creates.”
I let that sit for one beat, then say, “That still doesn’t tell me why you’re here.”
Arseniy leans back slightly on the bench and studies me with that same old unreadable focus that used to make younger menin our house feel twelve years old again. “Because people are talking.”
I don’t like the sound of that.
