The courier tries to speak again, but Viktor plants a hand on the back of his neck and forces him lower.
Ruslan doesn’t look at Viktor. He keeps his eyes on the man and goes on. “If he’ll sell paper routes for pocket money, he’ll sell names next. Then schedules. Then blood. The mistake isn’t that he took money. The mistake is that he thought he could do it twice and still sit in rooms where anyone takes him seriously.”
Mikhail’s face remains unreadable. “And the solution?”
Ruslan leans back slightly in his chair. “Public consequence, private follow-up. Keep him alive long enough to pull every name out of him, then make sure what’s left gets sent backthrough the same channels that paid him. That way the Dragnas get the message, and everybody else remembers there’s a difference between greed and suicide.”
The words land across the table like a blade laid down gently.
No heat or dramatics. Just cold fucking efficiency.
For the first time since meeting Ruslan, I no longer see him primarily as the man who holds me against walls, mouths off across dinner tables, and uses filthy language like he was born with it.
I see the shape of what they’re making him into—a king in training disguised as a reckless son. Mikhail lets the arrogance stay because it distracts people. Men see the grin, the open collar, the insolence, and assume carelessness. They don’t realize the arrogance is part of the armor.
My father notices it too. I can feel his attention narrow, though his expression never changes.
The courier is crying openly by now. “Please,” he says, looking not at the Russians but toward the Italians. “Please, Don Vieri, I can explain—”
My father doesn’t even turn his head.
That might be crueler than if he had.
Mikhail gives a tiny nod, and Viktor drags the man upright by the collar. Not out of the room, not yet. That would be too easy.
“Names first,” Mikhail says.
The guards haul the courier toward the side chamber, his broken leg dragging wrong, his pleas dissolving into wet, humiliating noise. The door closes behind them. The room remains very still for a beat, everyone recalibrating around what they’ve just been shown.
Then Mikhail says, “Now. About Trieste.”
As if they haven’t just arranged a man’s destruction in front of breakfast coffee.
I understand now that Ruslan wears his chains differently. I can see the edges of the cage, and I understand he’s learned to make the bars look like a throne.
He’s not the free, reckless prince he wants the world to see. He’s being built.
It should remind me that sleeping with him isn’t just dangerous because of who his father is. It’s dangerous because of what his father is turning him into.
Instead, horrifyingly, it makes me want him more.
Maybe because it reframes everything. I’ve spent two years seeing his arrogance and mistaking some part of it for freedom. Now I understand that he’s performing too. Different costume, same role. And under it, there’s the same problem I’ve got: a son shaped toward a throne with no right to ask whether he wants it.
My lover is being groomed into a king, and I’m the only man alive who’s ever made that king come apart with my mouth alone.
By the time the evening begins to dissolve for real, the guests have split into predictable patterns. The older men retreat to private studies, libraries, and rooms with soundproof doors where actual business gets done.
The younger ones drift outward, some toward cards, some toward bars, some toward beds they have no business climbing into.
My father remains in conversation longer than most, which means he’s either winning or setting a trap for later. I’ve inherited enough from him to usually know the difference. Tonight I’m too distracted to care.
Ruslan catches me in the corridor outside the winter garden.
Not with a dramatic gesture. Not even with words at first. He just appears at the edge of the lamplight, stepping out from a side hall as if he’s always been there waiting, and the house itselfhas been keeping his place warm. His jacket is back on. His expression is unreadable until his gaze lands on me properly.
“Well,” he says, voice low. “That was educational.”
“Is this the part where you pretend your family isn’t insane?”
