“No,” Arseniy says immediately. “It just makes it familiar.”
That is the truest thing either of us has said all night.
We sit with that for a while.
I don’t know what to do with the warning yet. A bounty on my head from somewhere inside the Five Families. Suspicions are moving under the surface about Vincenzo and me. Old Vintermoor ghosts are turning visible enough that men with too much to lose have started treating us like a problem that might need a permanent solution.
There are at least three things in there that should make me move fast, hit hard, and burn names out of men’s mouths until I know exactly who set the price and who’s sniffing too close to our shadows.
But the thing I can’t stop circling is him.
Arseniy.
This brother-shaped ruin of a man, sitting opposite me, telling me he understands why I chose duty the same way he once chose it, only he had five years to sit inside the aftermath and learn the exact shape of the wound it leaves when love gets caught under the blade.
“Is that why you’re really here?” I ask quietly. “Not the bounty. Not Vincenzo. Me.”
His mouth tightens. “Don’t get sentimental.”
I bark a laugh despite myself. “There he is.”
He shakes his head once, but there’s less contempt in it now. More exhaustion. “I’m here because you need to stay alive long enough to decide what the fuck you’re doing. And because ifyou’re going to keep standing too close to Vieri, you should know the room is already starting to notice.”
I rub my split knuckles together and wince when the skin pulls. “You say that like stepping away is still an option.”
Arseniy watches me for a long moment.
“No,” he says. “I don’t.”
And somehow, that lands as the kindest thing he could’ve said, because it means he sees it. Not the politics or the risks. Not the scandal or the practical nightmare of a Dragovich Pakhan and a Vieri King bleeding into each other’s lives again with history this loaded and enemies this hungry.
He sees the simpler, uglier truth beneath all of that. The point of no return. The place where love stops being a decision and starts being a condition.
He stands then, slower than before. We both feel the fight in our bones now. He rolls one shoulder once as if checking the damage and looks at the broken bag on the floor again.
“You need a better hook,” he says.
I snort. “I need fewer conversations in cellars.”
“That too.”
I don’t say anything; maybe because I’m not ready to let him leave just yet, not with all this still ringing in the room. Maybe because saying more would make this too formal, too much like an ending instead of the first ugly crack in a wall I’d long ago assumed was permanent.
“When did you hear about the bounty?” I ask.
“Three days ago.”
“You sat on it.”
“I confirmed it.”
“With who?”
His mouth twitches. “You know better than to ask that.”
I do. Still, I ask, “And now?”
“And now I’m telling you because the whispers changed. They went from interest to appetite.”
