“Yes,” I say.
The word is simple. Cold, maybe. But honest.
His eyes close for half a second as if the answer physically hurts. When he opens them again, that fear is back, larger now because I have named mine and left him no room to pretend this is merely pride.
“I know,” he says. “I heard it, and I still picked a fight because hearing you scared for me did something to my head. I don’t know how to be…fuck.” He stops, jaw clenching, frustration flashing across his face because words have always been weapons for him until they become feelings, and then they start fighting back. “I don’t know how to be loved safely when danger’s in the room.”
That breaks something in me around the sight of him trying.Really trying.Tripping over words that do not sit naturally in his mouth, forcing himself to stay in the vulnerability instead of turning it into a knife.
He continues before I can answer.
“When people loved me growing up, it came with orders, corrections, and someone deciding where I belonged and what I had to cut out to stay there. My father loved me and hid half my fucking soul from me. Arseniy loved me and carved duty into my chest because I loved wrong. The family loved me, turned me into a blade, and then acted shocked when I learned to cut. So, when you called scared, some fucked-up part of me heard it like a hand on my leash instead of what it was.”
He looks disgusted with himself, and I am no longer angry in the clean way I want to be. That irritates me almost as much as it relieves me.
“That isn’t an excuse,” he says quickly, as if he sees the shift in me and fears I’ll mistake explanation for evasion. “I’m not givingyou a tragic little history lesson so you’ll pat my head and tell me I did my best. I didn’t. I fucked up. I hurt you. I made you feel shut out after you spent eight years being shut out of my life by everyone else. That is on me.”
My heart feels like it’s being slowly pulled apart, and the anger inside me takes a knee. Not surrendering or forgiving everything before it’s been fully addressed. Just bowing under the weight of his fear because I know exactly what it is to stand where he stands.
I stood there for eight years. Loving someone with both hands open, terrified every silence was another version of goodbye.
“Nikolaj,” I say.
He shakes his head once. “No, please let me finish before I lose the nerve.”
That silences me more effectively than any command would have.
He looks almost startled by his own honesty, then pushes forward because apparently, now that the wound is open, he has decided to bleed with purpose.
“I came here because when you hung up, I realized I’d rather walk into this house and have you shoot me than sit in Saint Helena pretending I could wait for you to cool down,” Nikolaj says. “And yes, I know how fucking dramatic that sounds. I hear myself. I sound like a lunatic.”
He moves closer again, one careful step at a time, until there are only a few feet between us. He still doesn’t touch me, and that restraint is its own apology.
The Nikolaj I knew at twenty would’ve grabbed first and spoken after, if speaking was required at all. The Nikolaj in front of me now looks like he wants to put his hands on me so badly it hurts him and is choosing not to because my anger deserves space.
God, I hate how much I love him.
“I don’t know how to do this, Vincenzo,” he says, and there it is, raw as bone. “I don’t know how to love you now without trying to control every threat around us until there’s nothing left standing. I don’t know how to tell you things before I’ve already decided how to fix them. I don’t know how to trust that if I hand you the ugly parts before I’ve made them useful, you won’t look at me one day and decide I’m more danger than I’m worth.”
He laughs once, wrecked and furious with himself. “And that’s not fair to you. I know it isn’t. You waited eight years with nothing but my ghost and my fucking hatred in your hands, and I’m standing here afraid you’ll leave because I mishandled one truth. It’s pathetic.”
“No,” I say. “It’s not pathetic.”
His mouth twists. “Don’t comfort me if you’re still angry.”
“I’m very capable of doing both.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It is.”
For the first time all night, something almost like a laugh moves through him, but it dies before it fully forms.
“I’m sorry for not telling you. For making you hear it from someone else, and acting like protecting you meant keeping you outside the door.”
I pick up my discarded cufflink and set it down again, uselessly. “I called for a summit,” I say.
The silence tells me he heard what I didn’t say. That I moved pieces without him. That I have spent the day doing to him a version of what I’m angry he did to me.
