I glance up at him. “Helena will be there. Reyes will not have the luxury of pretending he doesn’t know why he’s been summoned. I’ve frozen three accounts, pulled two intermediaries, and I have men working through what remains of Lucien’s channels. I did all of that without telling you.”
“That’s different,” Nikolaj says carefully.
I raise a brow. “Is it?”
He holds my gaze for a second, then grimaces. “No. Maybe. Fuck.”
Despite myself, a laugh nearly escapes me. It comes out as a breath instead.
Nikolaj drags another hand through his hair. “It is different because the Five Families are your house, and if someone inside them is moving against me, then it’s your right to start cutting rot before you brief me on every fucking incision. But it’s not different in the way that matters to you, is it?”
“No,” I say.
He nods once. “Because you shut me out because you were angry.”
“Yes.”
“And because I hurt you.”
“Yes.”
He absorbs that with visible difficulty. Then he nods again. “Alright.”
That answer catches me off guard. “Alright?”
“Yes,” Nikolaj says. “You’re allowed.”
I stare at him.
His mouth pulls tight. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’ve grown a second head because I’m not yelling.”
“You’re making it very difficult not to.”
His laugh is brief and rough, but it dies quickly. “I don’t want to fight you about whether you had the right to be angry. You did. You do. I just…” He stops, jaw flexing again. “I don’t want us to start handling each other like problems. That’s all everyone else ever did with us. Manage the risk. Manage the fallout. Manage the inconvenient fact that I loved you so much they had to carve me back into shape. I don’t want to do that to you, and I don’t want you doing it to me, even when we’re pissed.”
I turn fully toward him. The movement is small, but he notices. His shoulders loosen by less than an inch. Hope is a dangerous thing on Nikolaj Dragovich’s face because it looks too much like surrender.
“You should have called me,” I say.
“I know.”
“No,” I say, and now my voice cracks just enough for both of us to hear it. “You should have called me because I love you, and I am tired of finding out after the fact that someone has decided where I’m allowed to stand in your life.”
His face goes still with the kind of pain that does not need performance to be real.
“I know,” Nikolaj says again, softer.
“You do not get to protect me by putting me outside the room. You do not get to make yourself a target and then act surprised when I care where the gun is pointed.”
“I know.”
“And if you ever say you’re not one of my men to me again in that tone, I will shoot you in a place you deeply value.”
That finally pulls a real, crooked little smile from him, terrified relief and old filth breaking through the tension at once. “My heart?”
