She’s still on the bed, sheets gathered around her, makeup ruined, necklace from the gala still at her throat, looking for all the world like a queen who finally told the truth and doesn’t yet know what it will cost or save.
“Get some sleep,” I tell her. “Tomorrow you can decide whether you want Marie here, and if we’ll make it work.”
She presses trembling fingers to her mouth and nods again, unable to say anything for a second. Then, very quietly, “Thank you.”
I incline my head once and leave before she can make me feel any worse about the fact that this marriage, for the first time, might actually contain some mercy.
As I walk out into the hall, I instruct my guards to move Lucien to the cells below. When I’m back in my room, I touch the fading mark on my throat and think, not for the first time, that every single person in this house is living the wrong life under the right name.
Maybe that’s fixable.
Maybe it isn’t.
Either way, tomorrow is going to be very busy.
twenty-four
Nikolaj
WhenIgetbackto my room at Saint Helena, I smell like gunpowder, blood, and the kind of long night that leaves a bad taste in your mouth even after the bodies are gone.
The monastery is quiet above me, all old stone and false sanctity, the halls dressed in shadow and silence the way only rich, guilty places know how to wear them.
Down here, under it—under the chapel and the polished lies and the expensive restoration—the walls still remember what men like me do when shipments get hit and traitors think distance will save them.
I’ve been dealing with this since dusk. One compromised route, then another. A truck intercepted outside Ryazan, a warehouse lock tampered with, two men missing, one found with his mouth full of his own teeth because he thought saying nothing would somehow make him harder to kill.
By the time the pattern takes shape, I’m already in the car and halfway to the first location with Kai and Maksim beside me, allthree of us knowing from the smell of it that this wasn’t random greed or some opportunistic little local crew trying to make a name for itself.
This was organized. Directed. And every ugly line of it points in a direction I do not fucking enjoy.
Vieri.
Not cleanly, not with a signed note and a family seal—nothing that stupid. But the route timing, the way the pressure came from the west side of the corridor, the rumor chain wrapped around the ports we know the Vieri network has had an interest in for years, the names that keep surfacing when we drag men in and open them up with the right incentives.
It has that taste. That shape. That old political rot in it. Enough to piss me off and make my head hurt and drag half my old instincts back to the surface before the newer, more rational part of me can stop them.
The problem is that IknowVincenzo wouldn’t do this.
I know it with the kind of certainty that only comes from loving someone in the exact places they’re most likely to lie to the rest of the world and seeing for yourself where they draw the line in private.
He wouldn’t hit one of my shipments this way while we’re still trying to figure out how to exist in the same world without setting fire to half of it, and he wouldn’t be this sloppy. He wouldn’t take a shot at me through back channels and deniable filth like some petty bastard with too much pride and not enough spine to look me in the eye afterward.
But knowing that and feeling it are two different things. Because when men start dying, and the evidence smells of his family, some older, uglier piece of me still wants to pace in circles around the possibility until it can either kill it or drag it by the throat into the light.
I’ve had enough lies around him to last a lifetime. I don’t enjoy fresh ones.
The blood on me isn’t all mine. Hardly any of it is. A smear across my jaw from one idiot who got too close with a knife before I opened his throat.
More down the front of my shirt from the second man who tried to run after telling me, through broken teeth and a mouthful of panic, that he only knew a payment route had changed hands and a name tied loosely to an Italian contact had been whispered in the right ear.
There’s more on my cuffs, dried darker now. A splash near my collar where someone coughed their last bad decision onto me while I held him up by the front of his coat and asked the same question three different ways.
It’s enough that the shower runs pink for a while when I step under it.
The hot water should help; usually, it does. Wash it off, wash the voices down the drain with the blood, let the steam settle the fight still stuck in my muscles.
Instead, I stand under it with one hand braced to the tile and my head lowered while water streams down my spine.
