Age hasn’t softened that, either. It’s made it broader—less a collection of moments, and more a country I’m exiled from.
I can still walk through it if I’m not careful. The hotel rooms. The corridor outside the winter garden in Vienna. The villa where we both became stupid enough to speak about futuresas if fathers were not already moving knives across tables elsewhere.
The council chamber. The dagger. The rain after.
I wonder sometimes if Ruslan hears my voice the way I still hear his.
I wonder if he ever forgives me in private, and then hates himself for it.
I wonder if he watches Nikolaj now and understands that our punishment is not just what we lost, but that we get to watch that loss repeat with younger faces.
I hear the parlor door open behind me, but tonight I don’t reach for the weapon in the drawer next to me. Instead, I grab my cane and get to my feet to welcome the would-be assassin.
Because that’s the only thing it could be—no one sneaks into an old King’s home after midnight as a courtesy call. I find, to my own surprise, that I am not afraid. Tired, yes. Curious, maybe. But not afraid.
The doorway darkens, and for one monstrous, impossible beat of time, I think it’s Ruslan.
Tall, broad-shouldered, and that same brutal stillness in the doorway, like violence has learned how to stand upright and wait. The blond hair pushed back, and those impossibly frost-bitten eyes have my old heart doing something grotesque in my chest.
Then the illusion shifts.
The jaw is wrong—younger, and the mouth is crueler in a different way. The eyes are colder, though God help me, they still carry something of Ruslan when they settle on me.
Nikolaj Dragovich steps fully into focus, and I nearly laugh at the irony… He looks so much like his father that it feels like punishment—my demise will come in the form of a blade my lover forged.
He closes the door behind him without looking away from me. The sound of the latch settling into place is very soft, but final, all things considered.
“Don Vieri.”
His voice is lower than Ruslan’s. Rougher and less amused by the world and more inclined to gut it. Good. That difference saves me the indignity of forgetting myself again.
“Nikolaj,” I say.
He doesn’t offer a hand, but I don’t expect one. There is too much history between our bloodlines for performance to serve any real purpose.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I say stupidly, but old men say stupid things when the past walks through the door wearing the face of its future.
Nikolaj’s mouth curves very slightly, and there’s no humor in it. “And yet.”
The echo hits me harder than it should. Ruslan used to say that to me the same way—half mocking, half resigned, as if fate itself had gotten too repetitive to deserve anything but contempt.
I study him openly then, because if this is the shape of the end, I’m allowed that much. The black coat. The rigid line of his shoulders. The left eye has an inherited scar.
He is Ruslan and not Ruslan. The son, not the man. The next generation of damage, standing in my parlor with old ghosts in his blood and fresh reasons of his own.
I think of Vincenzo instantly.
Of course I do. These boys, these men, these fucking sons. Always caught in the aftershocks of what their fathers set in motion and never had the decency to finish properly.
“You know why I’m here,” he says, his eyes flicking to the cane in my grasp.
I move back toward my chair, but don’t sit yet. “You should have come in the daytime. Unfortunately, I cannot offer you any hospitality with half my staff asleep.”
It’s a ridiculous thing to say to a man who is about to kill me, which is exactly why I say it. Habit, I suppose.
Nikolaj doesn’t smile. “I didn’t come for hospitality.”
“No, I suppose not,” I say, and because I am still a Vieri before I am anything else, my first instinct is defense. “Your father made his own choices.”
