I look between them, between the cane, the hand on the wrist, the years in both their faces, and some part of me finally catches up enough to understand one thing at least.
This is not casual. This is not a reunion for politeness. Whatever sits between them has too much age and damage in it to be anything but real.
That does not mean I’m done being furious.
“You named the island after Lucia,” I say to Nikolaj, because my brain latches onto the detail again like it might be the one part of this I can still make sense of. “Then brought me here tofind our fathers behaving like a very old, very inconvenient love story on your porch.”
“That’s one way to phrase it,” he says.
“It’s the correct way.”
Ruslan finally rises from the chair with the slow care of a man who knows exactly how much his body resents unnecessary theatrics. Salvatore reaches for the cane, but Ruslan is already steady and offering his hand to help him up as well.
The ease of the movement guts me more than I’d like to admit. They’ve done that before—more than once. Enough that they don’t need to think about who moves first.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I mutter.
This time Nikolaj laughs outright.
I turn to face him again. “Stop enjoying this.”
He brings my knuckles to his mouth and kisses them once, as if that will somehow soften the fact that he has sprung parental emotional warfare on me without warning. It almost does, which is deeply humiliating.
“Come inside,” he says.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t agreed to—”
“You’re already here.”
“That is not the same thing as consent to whatever deranged family summit this is.”
His eyes spark. “You’ll thank me later.”
“I absolutely will not.”
He smiles like a man who knows I’m lying. On the porch, Salvatore says my name again, and I turn despite myself because some habits still sit too deep to ignore even when I’m furious with the man who shaped them.
There’s something fragile in his face now that wasn’t there a moment ago—honesty too old to be handled neatly. Ruslanremains at his side, close enough to touch and not pretending otherwise.
“Vincenzo,” my father says more quietly, “please.”
That one word does what force couldn’t, because my father is not a man who says please unless the world has already shifted under him enough to count as a small disaster.
I look at Nikolaj. He watches me with impossible patience by his standards, sunglasses forgotten in his hand, face open in a way that says he understands exactly how violent this feels and is asking me to step into it anyway.
“Tell me that you had a good reason for this.”
His expression turns gentle. “I did.”
“Better be spectacular.”
His mouth curves. “My island. My rules.”
I stare at him for one beat too long and then, because apparently this is my life now, I let him take my hand again.
