The way he says my name changes everything.
Not sharp or teasing. Not even furious. Slow.
Too slow.
“No,” I say immediately.
He lets out something that could be a laugh if it weren’t so thin. “You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”
“I know that voice.”
There is a pause, then another distant burst of gunfire. Vincenzo doesn’t fire back this time. That terrifies me more than the shots.
“Nikolaj,” Vincenzo says, and I hear him shift, hear fabric drag against something hard, hear the strain he tries to flatten. “I need you to listen.”
“No,” I say again, louder now. “You can tell me when I see you.”
Kai puts a hand on my arm, and I nearly break his wrist before I realize it’s him. “Nikolaj,” he says carefully, “breathe.”
I look at him, and whatever he sees in my face makes his own go still. I know I’m losing it. I can feel it happening.
The edges of me are coming apart, and I am trying to hold them together with rage because if I let fear have even one inch more, it will take the whole fucking room.
“I love you,” Vincenzo says, and his voice is still calm in that awful, kingly way, but underneath it, I hear the pain. I hear the blood. I hear the goodbye he is trying to smuggle into a confession. “I loved you at Vintermoor when I should’ve hated you. I loved you when you forgot me. I loved you when I had to stand there and let you look at me like I was a stranger. I loved you every year after, even when it made no sense to keep carrying it.”
My vision blurs so suddenly, I almost can’t see the windshield ahead.
“No,” I say, and this time the word is broken. “Stop talking like that.”
“I need you to know,” Vincenzo says. A gunshot cracks somewhere distant, then another, but he sounds farther from them now, or maybe I’m just losing track of space. “These last few months… Nikolaj, I didn’t think I’d get this. I didn’t think I’d ever have you look at me that way again. I didn’t think I’d wake up with you, or hear you laugh, or hear you call meMy Kingand know you meant it.”
I press the heel of my hand hard against my eye like I can hold myself together physically. “You’re going to have that again. Do you hear me? You’re going to have it tomorrow and the day after that and every fucking day I can steal from the world. Just stay on the line.”
“I’ve never been happier,” Vincenzo says. “And Isle Lucia. It was perf…ect. It was perfect, Nikolaj.”
The sentence destroys me because of how quietly he says the words. Like a man looking at a finished room and accepting it might be enough if it has to be.
“I mean that,” he continues, and he coughs harder this time. The sound turns my stomach. “I spent eight years surviving. These last few months, I lived. You gave me that back.”
I slam my fist into the back of the front seat hard enough that Maksim flinches despite himself. “Drive faster,” I snarl.
“Iamdriving faster,” Maksim says, voice tight. “Any faster and we fly.”
“Then fucking fly.”
Kai keeps one hand near my arm but does not touch me this time. “Three minutes,” Kai says. “Nikolaj, we’re three minutes out.”
Three minutes is a lifetime. Three minutes is Vintermoor burning. Three minutes is a corridor I didn’t reach. Three minutes is every stolen second we ever had gathered up and weighed against blood loss on the other end of a phone.
“Vincenzo,” I say, forcing my voice down because hysteria will not keep him alive. “Listen to me. Put pressure on the wound.”
“I am.”
“Harder.”
“Bossy,” Vincenzo says, and the faint ghost of humor in it makes my chest crack wide open.
“You love that.”
