I slowly push to my feet, making sure nothing in the motion reads unsteady. Across the room, Vincenzo stands at the same time. Lucien says something low to him, but he doesn’t seem to hear it, because his eyes come back to mine again. This time, I hold it without flinching.
I’ve learned three things from this meeting.
One: the summit is a real negotiation, not just theater, though there is certainly plenty of theater around the edges.
Two: everyone here is watching the two of us more than they admit.
And three: whatever is buried in my head has Vincenzo Vieri’s fingerprints all over it.
I want answers. I want them with a violence that makes my skin feel too tight. I want to know why my own fucking body reacts to him like this. I want to know why the sound of his voice opens rooms in my head that pain immediately slams shut.
Whatever this is, whatever’s been buried, erased, withheld, or locked behind years of everyone’s fucking silence, I know one thing with absolute certainty:
I now have a face to put to the voice in my dreams—and it’s his.
five
Vincenzo
Thesecondthesuitedoor shuts behind me, I understand how men end up crawling into bottles and never climbing back out.
I just had to breathe the same air as Nikolaj for the first time in eight years and pretend it didn’t split me open. Eight fucking years should have weakened the effect of his voice. It hasn’t.
I stride through the suite in the dark, not bothering with the lights. My pulse is still too chaotic, as though I’ve come up from deep water too fast with half my chest still crushed by the pressure beneath it.
Tearing off my jacket, I throw it over a chair without my usual care as I head to the drinks cabinet. Then comes the tie, dragged loose with a hand that isn’t steady enough for finesse. The top two buttons of my shirt go next. Every inch of tailored perfection feels like another fucking hand around my throat.
The cabinet is built into the wall beside a large entertainment section. Whiskey. Bourbon. Scotch. The sort of curatedcollection hosts like to provide for men in my position because wealth assumes it understands appetite.
I don’t reach for a glass; I don’t have the patience for ceremony. My hand closes around a bottle of bourbon because it’s closest, and I twist the cap off so hard, the metal bites into my palm.
The first swallow is brutal and perfect. It scorches all the way down, and I welcome every inch of it. The second one is worse—bigger and less controlled. By the third, I’m leaning with one hand against the sideboard and trying to forget the confused look on Nikolaj’s face when he laid his eyes on me as soon as I walked in.
That look nearly put me on my fucking knees. Hatred would have been easier.
I’d prepared myself for it and told myself I could survive that look again. I could meet hate with civility. I could smile with all the grace my cursed bloodline bred into me and let him direct every ounce of his contempt at a face trained to never crack in public.
I could withstand cruelty from him again… but cruelty isn’t what he gave me. It was curiosity tinged with confusion. He studied me like I was a word on the tip of his tongue he couldn’t quite remember.
When I spoke, he reacted viscerally. He grabbed his head and flinched so minutely, I know the others didn’t catch it. But I still know Nikolaj even after all these fucking years. I know his tells.
I lift the bottle again and drink until I’m forced to stop for breath, then I walk toward the bedroom. I lower myself down onto the edge of the mattress and shrug my shoulders, trying to shake the phantom feel of his stare.
The bed is too soft and neat, with the sheets tucked in with military precision. It makes me think of another bed in another life, one that smelled of clove cigarettes and expensive cologne.Sheets twisted from nights we pretended we had any right to each other.
“Don’t go there, Vincenzo,” I say out loud because the last thing I need is to drown in that room when I barely survived leaving it.
I drink instead. Another long pull from the bottle, the liquid burning a path down my throat until it hits my stomach with a warmth that should be nauseating.
It doesn’t help, not really. It only clears space for the truth to come stalking in without the mercy of distraction, and the truth is that seeing him again is one thing, but really looking at him is what ruins me.
My mind keeps dragging itself back there, whether I want it to or not, back to that first impossible second when I walked in and saw him wearing thirty thousand dollars’ worth of tailoring and the kind of violence no suit can hide.
He isn’t the boy I knew at Vintermoor—not even close—and that should make this easier. It should put distance between memory and the place where it keeps trying to collapse. Instead, it does the opposite.
Twenty-year-old Nikolaj had been feral in a way that made common sense feel optional. Back then, he carried himself like a man perpetually on the verge of either starting a fight or fucking someone senseless against the nearest wall, and half the danger came from the fact that.
Now he is something far worse—now he is violently beautiful.
