That should not make me want to kiss him again, but it absolutely does. He must see the shape of the thought across my face, because he looks irritatingly satisfied with himself. “Relax.”
“Don’t tell me to relax after just admitting you broke into my father’s house!”
“Low security standards clearly run in the family.”
I glare up at him. “Is my father still alive?”
Nikolaj chuckles again, far too entertained by my horror. “Yes. The old king is still alive.”
A relieved breath slips out of me, but it’s laced with irritation, which is safer to admit the spike of fear that first hit. My father and I are only just mending our relationship—I cannot lose him now.
“You absolute fucking bastard,” I growl. “What did you say to him? Why did you go there?”
He tilts his head slightly. “That depends on what you mean.”
“Nikolaj.”
There it is again; the effect of his name coming out of my mouth. It catches him for half a heartbeat, enough to soften his eyes. “I asked him a few questions about him and my father,” he says casually, as if those words aren’t insane. “I wanted to know what happened between them and if it’s the same as…”
His sentence trails off, and it confuses me more. “What are you talking about?”
He closes his eyes and leans forward again, one hand braced by my head, the other splayed across my chest. “My memories are coming back.”
This time, the room really does seem to drop away beneath me, not all at once or even neatly. The sentence feels like standing in a church and hearing the first crack in a stained-glass window you’ve been praying beneath for years.
Beautiful, terrifying, and so fucking dangerous.
“How much of it?” I whisper.
He doesn’t mock me for the way my voice breaks. “Fragments,” he starts. “Some from the files I read, some from what you said, some from dreams because my head finally decided to stop being such a stubborn cunt once it had enough pieces to work with.” His mouth tightens. “The library, the chapel, the ball, your room, and mine. The bullet. Not all of it, not even in order, but enough to know what it was.”
Pressure builds behind my eyes all over again, but it’s different from before. Not grief exactly, but not relief, either. I lift one hand to touch the side of his face, and he freezes.
I brush my thumb just beneath the scar over his eye, and he doesn’t pull away. “What did my father say?” I ask softly.
“Enough,” he says, and I decide then that I hate that word. “More than I expected, less than he knows.”
That sounds like Salvatore Vieri.
I close my eyes briefly and let my hand drop. “God help me.”
“Waste of a prayer,” Nikolaj mutters.
I laugh again, because there’s that filthy, impossible mouth again. That refusal to let anything too earnest sit between us without nicking it with sarcasm. My chest hurts so badly it borders on absurd.
“We’re really doing this again?” I say more to myself than to him.
His brows lift slightly. “Doing what?”
“Destroying my peace,” I answer.
That actually gets a grin out of him; the younger one, the one that still has too much boy in it for a man who terrifies sectors. “Your peace was shit, anyway.”
I hum. “My peace was functional.”
“Your peace involved copious amounts of alcohol.”
I consider that and incline my head. “Fair.”
