“Talking about what?”
He doesn’t answer right away, and in that hesitation, I already know I’m not going to enjoy the next sentence out of his mouth.
“You,” he says. “And Vincenzo.”
I look at my brother and think of a hundred things at once. The hotel. The gala. My kitchen. His bed. My bed. Every file. Every recovered second. Every stupid, dangerous look that passed between Vincenzo and me in rooms where we should have known better by now.
Then I think of the thing that matters most.
Who saw.
I don’t ask that immediately because the answer is already obvious. Enough—not everything, not certainty. But enough that the wrong people are starting to connect things they were previously content to call coincidence.
“What are they saying?” I ask.
Arseniy’s mouth twists. “That the old Vintermoor animosity doesn’t explain the way he watches you. Or the way you watch him when you forget to hide it. That too many shipments got hit in ways that should have started a war, and somehow didn’t. That the summit in Bucharest changed something neither side has publicly acknowledged.”
He pauses, studying my face. “That if the Pakhan isn’t moving against the Vieri King when he has reason, there must be another reason.”
There it is.
The problem with powerful men is that they’re stupid in every normal way and brilliant in exactly the ones that make them dangerous. Give them an odd silence where blood should be, and they’ll start sniffing around for motive.
I laugh once. “So, they’ve all suddenly become fucking poets.”
“No, they’ve become suspicious. Which is worse.” He gives me a flat look. “You think you’re being subtle.”
“I’m usually better than this.”
“Not with him.”
That irritates me because it’s true.
Arseniy keeps going before I can bite anything back at him. “I don’t think they see the complete picture, but they know enough to wonder whether old loyalties have started breathing again. Enough to ask whether the summit did more than reopen trade discussions. Enough to decide a quiet solution might be worth exploring before you and Vieri turn personal weakness into political fallout.”
My laugh is short and ugly. “Personal weakness.”
“That’s what they’ll call it.”
“What do you call it?”
That surprises him. I can tell because his face stills for half a second. Then he says, “A threat.”
I bare my teeth. “Careful.”
He doesn’t flinch. “Not to me, to them. To the structures of men who built their lives on the assumption that family lines, enemy lines, and blood debts stay where they’re fucking put. Men like us don’t get to love cleanly, Nikolaj. We never did.”
The line scrapes through me because it sounds too much like a truth spoken by a man who had five years to drown on his own understanding of it.
I look at him more carefully now. Not just at the bruises I gave him or the old damage he’s carried in with him, but him sitting in my gym with his coat still on, face harder than I remember and somehow more honest for it.
He didn’t come here to posture or to pick another fight. He came with a warning and information. Which means, forwhatever reason, he decided I needed it enough to put himself in this room with me despite everything between us.
That matters.
“Why?” I ask again.
This time, when I say it, there is no challenge in it. Just the question that’s been sitting under every other one since he appeared in the doorway.
