I asked Vincenzo to stay away, and he did. That’s the part that keeps pissing me off. Not because I wanted him to ignore me; I didn’t.
At least that’s what I keep telling myself when the nights get too quiet and my temper starts prowling the edges of the house because there is no dark-haired Italian bastard in my kitchen drinking my coffee.
I needed the space. I know that. I needed time with the truth before I did something stupid with it. Time to let the memories come back however they wanted, instead of forcing them through a wound that still wasn’t done bleeding.
I asked for distance because I knew that if he kept showing up, I would’ve folded.
I couldn’t afford that. So yes, I asked him to stay away. And because Vincenzo is still the kind of man who can gut you with obedience as efficiently as he ever did with a blade, he listened.
At first, I was relieved.
Then I was irritated.
Then quietly furious at him for being decent enough to give me what I demanded, when I wanted him to ignore my request and come anyway.
He respected the line, and that’s somehow been harder to live with than if he’d trampled it.
I stood in that kitchen like a fucking martyr when every brutal, selfish part of me wanted to drag him back, bend him over the counter, and prove we still knew how to ruin each other with our eyes open. I hated having enough control to do the right thing. I have never been fond of control when it costs me something I want.
And Idowant him.
That is the truth I have spent five months carving into something I can look at without flinching.
I want Vincenzo Vieri. I wanted him then, and I want him now. Memory loss, war, title, blood, political union, family history, and every old rule written by dead men can go fuck themselves in whichever order seems most convenient.
The wanting returned first through the body, because the body is a traitor and remembered him long before my mind stopped being stubborn. His mouth, his throat, and the weight of him under me. The exact pitch of his voice when he says my name.
Then the wanting started finding roots in memory. A library, a chapel, his bed, and mine. Terraces. His hand in my hair. My own laughter against his neck, shocked and young and too alive.
Some mornings I wake hard, angry, and aching with his taste still in my mouth. That makes no sense because he hasn’t been near me in five months, but my body still hasn’t accepted that fact.
The bullet came back in two separate memories: when I carved it, and when he found it in my drawer.
I had to sit down after that one.
Maksim found me ten minutes later in the lower armory with the lights off and a pistol half disassembled in front of me, staring at nothing. He took one look, turned around, and told the men outside that anyone who came in for the next hour would leave missing something useful. Then he came back, sat on a crate across from me, and said, “Memory kicking your ass again?”
I told him to fuck off.
He did not fuck off.
That’s loyalty, apparently. Annoying and difficult to kill.
The feelings have come back, too, which is worse than memory in every meaningful way. Memory at least has structure. Feelings are treason dressed in heat. They don’t care that I’m Pakhan or that he’s Capo dei Capi. They don’t care that my family name and his were raised across from each other like loaded guns. They return without permission, sliding under the doors I closed and making themselves comfortable in the rooms I thought I’d burned out years ago.
I can now say without flinching that I loved him—that part is done. Fact. History. Evidence.
The harder part is that I still do.
Not in the simplistic, sentimental way weaker men mean it when they speak of old lovers with softened eyes and selective memory. What I feel for Vincenzo is not soft; it never was. It is violent, possessive, furious, inconvenient, and alive with teeth. It comes with grief attached, with the ugly ache of every yearI spent walking through the world with a missing organ and mistaking the emptiness for ambition.
It comes with rage, too, because he remembered. He remembered every second I lost. He built his life around absence, while I built mine around a lie other people called survival.
Sometimes that thought makes me want to go to him. Sometimes it makes me want to kill every man who decided silence was a mercy.
Which brings me back to my father.
Ruslan Dragovich is not easy to hate. That’s the fucking problem.
