He doesn’t turn to look at me, maybe because he knows he can’t. Maybe some part of him understands that if he faces me while asking, the answer might be written on my face.
Did I love you?
I see him at twenty, furious at what I was making him feel as he shoved me against a bookshelf. I see him pressing a bullet into my hand with my name carved into it as he explained why falling for me already doomed him. I see him above me, eyes soft and filled with so much horror at how much he felt for me, and knowing he would choose me over his bloodline.
I see him after the ambush, wild with pain and empty of me, looking at me as if my love had never touched him. I see eight years of silence, eight years of whiskey, eight years of my wife’s polite distance, and eight years of standing at the top of an empire and feeling the absence beside me more than the throne beneath me.
Did I love you?
Yes, you loved me like violence learning how to kneel. Yes, you loved me terribly, beautifully, and with every doomed piece of yourself they tried to turn into a weapon.
Yes, you loved me enough to hate yourself for it.
Yes, you loved me in the chapel, in the library, in my bed, in every stolen corridor, in every bloody lesson, and in every breathless argument we pretended was still only war.
However, the silence reveals my true feelings more effectively than words ever could.
“Fuck,” he whispers, and pulls the door open, slamming it shut as he leaves.
The room feels bigger without him, and somehow smaller at the same time. I sit there for a moment, listening to the echo ofhis fading footsteps. My throat throbs in time with my pulse as my heart is doing its own unpleasant drum solo.
“Look it up,” I murmur into the empty room. “Please, see what they took from us.”
Did I choose you before?
I close my eyes, and the answer rises inside me with the full weight of eight years.
Yes, beloved. You chose me so completely that it destroyed us both.
seven
Nikolaj
MorninginBucharestfeelstoo bright for the kind of night I had.
I don’t remember falling asleep after I left his room, but I remember walking back to my own suite, stripping off my shirt, heading to the bathroom, and bracing my hands on the marble counter. I remember staring at my own reflection while trying to convince myself that nothing about that conversation mattered.
It didn’t work.
My skull still feels bruised from the inside this morning, that ugly pressure sitting behind my right eye like a threat that hasn’t decided whether to bloom into pain or stay there and remind me it can. I shaved, showered, changed, and put on another black suit because armor is armor, no matter how many forms it takes.
But none of it fixed the fact that I spent half the night in Vincenzo Vieri’s suite with a blade at his throat and left with less certainty than I brought in.
I step out of the suite without looking back, knowing Kai and Maksim will fall into step on my right and left. We don’t speak until we reach the private elevator, and even then, the silence is thick enough to have a pulse.
The doors close, and the car begins to descend. Kai glances at me once. “You didn’t sleep.”
It isn’t a question. He knows the answer before he even says it. I keep my eyes on the mirrored doors, watching my reflection as it stares back in hard lines.
“Neither did you,” I say.
“Occupation hazard of being one of the Pakhan’s right-hand men,” he replies.
Maksim snorts softly. “That’s a very elegant way of saying you’re nosy.”
“I’m thorough,” Kai says without missing a beat.
Under any other circumstances, that might have pulled a real reaction out of me. Today, it barely brushes the surface because my mind is replaying the question I can’t quite believe I asked Vincenzo last night.
