Vincenzo found me after they were done with me, carried me to safety through a hidden passage, and put me in his own room until Arseniy arrived.
“Fuck,” I choke out again and get to my feet. I stand with one hand braced on the desk, and the other pressed hard against myhead while the evidence of my own missing life lies open before me like an autopsy.
Pinned to walls. Kissing in libraries. Saving from poison. Sneaking into each other’s rooms. Failed reprogramming because I was already in too deep. But that reprogramming seemed to have kicked in after the Dragna ambush. My mind could only take so much trauma before it shattered.
The pain behind my eye detonates.
There’s no warning this time, no gentle pulse, no tightening at the temple before the blade drops. It explodes white-hot through my skull so violently that the room tips beneath me. My hand knocks the laptop as I fall, and it skids off the desk, crashing somewhere beside me with a crack that sounds far away and underwater. I hit my knees hard enough to feel the jolt through bone, but it’s nothing compared to the agony ripping through my head.
This time, I cry out. I fucking hate that I do, but there is no pride inside pain like this. It tears the sound out of me raw and involuntary, punches the breath from my lungs, and for one blind second, all I can do is clutch my head and try not to vomit from the force of it. The world goes white at the edges, then black at the center, then floods with images that aren’t images so much as memories coming back with their hands around my throat.
The sound of boots on a chapel floor.
A blade in my hand.
A throat bared.
“It ends with your name in my mouth, or mine in yours.”
Vincenzo leaning against a balustrade while talking on the phone.
“Don’t make a sound—”
A bullet pressed into his hand. My fingers closing his around it because I needed him to understand, needed him to fucking understand what he had done to me.
“...was sent here to kill you and earn my stars—”
Hands in my hair.
“....me choose between loving you and surviving you.”
My chest being carved by Arseniy, the bite of the blade, rage, humiliation, and heartbreak twisting inside me until I can barely breathe through it—“You do not bleed for him. You bleed for us!”
There’s no putting memory back now that the first cracks have split all the way through. That’s what I understand as I fall onto my side and curl around the agony splitting my skull open from the inside.
You can bury a thing alive and call it mercy, but when it starts clawing its way out, it won’t come gently. It comes angry, and it comes starving. It comes covered in every year you stole from it.
The office door slams open, and I hear footsteps.
“Nikolaj!”
Kai’s voice.
I hear him, but I can’t see through the pain, and I can’t answer. I can’t do anything except clutch at my head with one hand and reach blindly for the desk with the other, like there might be something solid enough in the room to keep me anchored while the past floods through me.
He came for me.
After the Dragna were done with me, after whatever they did, after blood and betrayal and whatever damage cracked my mind open enough to lose him, Vincenzo came for me.
Not Arseniy, my father, or even my cousins.Him.The enemy. The boy I was sent to kill. The man who had carried me bleeding through hidden passages and put me somewhere safe. The man who stood there after I opened my eyes with half my life missing and watched me become a stranger who knew only how to despise him.
Everything he said in that hotel was true: I did choose him before. Not in some vague emotional drift that everyone laterexaggerated into tragedy. I chose him actively, repeatedly, in corridors and libraries and locked rooms and on a terrace with poison in the air. I chose him enough that Arseniy tried to cut it out of me.
I loved him.
A terrible sound starts in my chest. For one wild second, I think I’m about to be sick. It turns into a laugh instead, broken and furious enough to border on grief.
“You all knew,” I growl, though I don’t know if Kai can hear me through the blood roaring in my ears. “All of you! You all fucking knew!”
