He flinches, so I know the words cut him. His free hand comes up once, as if by reflex, like he means to touch my face before the blade does.
“Forgive me,” he whispers in Russian before the dagger cuts across my left eye in a burst of white agony so bright it erases the room.
I don’t cry out. Fuck him if I do.
The mark of exile—public enough that everyone will know what the scar means if I survive it. The left eye opened with Vieri steel—banished, not killed, because that would be easier. Exiled because legacy prefers men to live long enough to feel their sentences.
I look through blood and blur and find Salvatore standing there with the dagger in his hand and horror all over his face now that the act is done.
Everything else keeps happening at once. Viktor hauls me toward the side exit and nearly gets us both killed doing it. Another round tears through his shoulder on the way, but he barely slows. My father is half-conscious between us, but still trying to stand because dying on his knees in front of Italians would offend him more than death itself.
The car waiting outside is one of ours—thank fuck for that. We shove our father into the back seat, and Viktor gets in beside him. I collapse on the other side, half blind, hand still clamped over my eye, the world streaked in blood, and the taste of betrayal so sharp it feels chemical.
For a few minutes, no one speaks except to curse, then Mikhail laughs, but it’s a wet sound.
“Father,” Viktor says sharply, pressing harder at the chest wound. Mikhail’s hand catches his wrist with surprising strength. He looks past him at me, one eye already glazing, the other still viciously alive.
“A Vieri,” he rasps.
I can barely see him. My left side is red haze and pain, but my right gives me enough to understand the shape of his mouth.
“Yes,” I answer.
He laughs again, then coughs harder. “I should’ve killed him the first time I saw him looking at you, instead of making you pursue him.”
The sentence lands like another blade. I suppose some part of him has always known, and in dying, he chooses to say it aloud instead of taking that knowledge to the grave with any fucking dignity.
Viktor’s face goes white beneath the blood on it. “Save it.”
My father ignores him. His fingers tighten once more on my brother’s wrist, then slip. “Weakness,” he says, and I can’t tell whether he means me or himself or the whole damned story. Maybe all three.
He dies before we hit the city limits. No ceremony, just a body that stops being animated by will and becomes weight in the back seat of a moving car while his blood dries on my hands and his last coherent thought is still of a Vieri.
We don’t stop moving, and by dawn, the news has already moved faster than we do. The Dragovichs are named expansionist traitors. The violence at the council is framed as our response to exposure, not the engineered slaughter it actually is.
Accounts freeze. Doors close. Neutral allies stop answering calls. Men who swore loyalty two days ago vanish into safer houses under safer names.
Exile doesn’t always arrive with a formal declaration. Sometimes it comes in the shape of every road home being shut by morning.
And all of it traces back to a folder in a safe and the man I let into my house.
Two days later, I go to meet Salvatore in an abandoned shipping yard in Moscow. Even after all of it, even after the eye, the blood, my father dying in the car, and the entire line being pushed outof the Five Families with a cut over my face to prove it, I still go when his message comes.
That’s the final humiliation.
The yard sits at the edge of the water, where the city begins to give way to industrial rot. Rusted containers stacked three high. Puddles of oil-black rainwater reflecting broken security lights. The smell of salt and diesel and old iron. A place where things get abandoned on purpose because everyone who matters agrees not to ask what disappears there.
He’s already waiting when I arrive. No guards that I can see, though I assume there are some far enough away to let us pretend we’re alone. Salvatore stands beneath a broken stone awning with rain darkening the shoulders of his coat. He looks exactly like what he is: a king’s son who’s just bought his inheritance with the man he loves. Shattered in all the places his tailoring can’t hide.
The scar over my left eye is still raw beneath the dressing, throbbing with every heartbeat. I can feel it pulling when I look at him. The bandage beneath it is already wet again, but I don’t care. Pain feels honest, and honesty is in short supply between us now.
I stop several feet away from him, letting the silence build until it turns ugly enough to stand in. “You found the safe.”
He closes his eyes for a breath, then opens them. “Yes.”
The word goes through me cleaner than any bullet. Hearing it from him kills the last little lie still trying to survive in me.
I look at him and see it all at once now, every piece fitting so neatly I almost choke on it. His face when I came home that final night, and how he said I trust too easily when I love. The way he clings to me like grief before a death.
