Saint Helena is quiet above me, too quiet, full of old stone and old ghosts and the kind of expensive silence that only makes a restless mind louder.
I lie there for too long, staring into the dark with Vincenzo’s scent still faint in the sheets from the last time he was here. The memory of his body in my arms is warm enough to be a cruelty, and every single thing I don’t know yet is pacing circles in my skull until I feel like I’m going to climb out of my skin.
So, I get up.
No shirt, sweatpants, bare feet on cold stone. The corridors are empty when I cut through them and head below. Down into the private gym in the cellar, where the walls are thick enough to swallow impact, and the air always smells faintly of metal and rubber.
The lights come on in strips overhead as I enter, and the heavy bag hanging in the center of the mat looks like the only honest thing in the room.
I don’t stretch or bother with wraps. I just hit it.
The first punch lands hard enough to make the chain creak overhead. The second swings the bag sideways. By the fourth, I’m breathing through my teeth, and by the tenth, I’m no longer thinking in full sentences. Just heat, pressure, and all the jagged pieces of the last few months crashing into each other without enough room in me to settle properly.
Vieri.
That’s where my head always circles back first, because of course it does. The shipments hit near Ryazan with fingerprints that smelled of his family, even though I know with certainty that he didn’t order it.
Vincenzo telling me about Lucien and the quiet, ice-cold fury in his voice when he said his cousin and second had been feeding rot through the Vieri structure for five years.
And love—that’s the ugliest piece. I loved my enemy. I loved him enough to choose him over blood, over duty, over the whole goddamn machine I was born into. And I do now, too, which would almost be romantic if it would not get us both killed if the wrong people ever saw it clearly enough.
I hit the bag harder.
My shoulders burn, and my knuckles split somewhere along the way because I didn’t wrap them, but I don’t care. Sweat runs down my spine and into the waistband of my sweats. The heavy bag thuds and swings and absorbs every vicious thing I’ve got, but it isn’t enough because none of this is neat enough to punch out clean.
Left. Right. Hook. Cross. Knee. Elbow. Again.
The bag takes it and comes back for more, dumb and durable and exactly useful enough not to lie.
I imagine names while I hit.
Lucien.
The traitors from the warehouse.
The nameless bastard who thought shouting Vieri while dying would distract me from what mattered.
Ruslan.
Myself.
Every man who stood around my broken head and decided what parts of me I was allowed to have back.
Every stupid, patient, necessary part of Vincenzo that makes this harder, not easier.
The bag swings wildly, and I follow it, half stalking, half attacking, because stillness feels impossible and rest feels like cowardice.
The bag snaps sideways under a hook hard enough to make the ceiling mount squeal. I reset my feet and go at it with less rhythm now, less craft, more pure fucking force.
My breath tears through my chest and sweat runs into my eyes. The fluorescent hum overhead sharpens until it sounds almost like another voice in the room.
I don’t stop. If anything, the rage gets cleaner when the body breaks down around it—no room for performance after that, no prince’s posture, no King’s control. Just muscle and impact, and everything ugly in me trying to find a shape.
I drive my fist into the centerline of the bag hard enough that the chain jerks violently.
The next hit lands half a second after the previous one—full weight behind it, shoulder rolling through with enough force that something overhead gives with a metallic crack. The bag tears free of the hook and goes flying sideways, crashing into the wall and then down to the floor with a heavy, dead sound.
I stand there bent over with my hands on my thighs, sweat dripping off my jaw and onto the rubber floor, lungs dragging air in hard enough to hurt.
