He leads me the rest of the way up the steps toward the porch, toward the cottage, toward the two men standing in the doorway of a history I was never supposed to inherit like this.
My heart is still beating too fast, though for entirely different reasons than it was on the plane. Somewhere under the fury and confusion and disbelief sits something else, too. Dread, maybe. Or hope. I’m not ready to identify which.
As we reach the porch, Ruslan shifts just enough to make room. Salvatore’s gaze catches on me and stays there, carrying thirty years, apologies, and an entire vanished world in it. I don’t know what to do with that yet, so I do the only thing I can.
I look at all three of them and say, with complete, furious sincerity, “One of you is about thirty seconds from explaining everything before I start setting fire to expensive property.”
Nikolaj squeezes my hand once like a warning, then once more like reassurance.
Then he opens the cottage door and guides me inside.
thirty
Vincenzo
Thevillaisquieterthan it should be for a place that’s supposed to belong to us.
That’s my first thought once the explanations are over and the shock settles enough to leave behind its harder, stranger cousin. Not peace. I don’t think I’d recognize peace if it sat across from me at dinner and asked me to pass the salt.
This is something else. A lull. A stillness stretched over water and stone and old grief, as though the whole island is holding its breath while four men with too much history try to pretend the ground under them isn’t shifting.
Ruslan and Salvatore have the cottage, a place that looks like something built for old wounds, stiff joints, and quiet tea gone cold while two stubborn bastards learn how to sit in the same room without making every sentence a war crime.
The villa, on the other hand, is ours.
That should thrill me more simply than it does.
Nikolaj walked me through it after the terrace conversation dissolved and the older generation, with surprising dignity,realized there are only so many family revelations one evening can take before someone either starts drinking too hard or throwing furniture.
The villa sits higher on the rise than the cottage, with white stone, windows, and deep balconies facing the sea. It isn’t vulgar, that surprises me. I expected more overt excess from a man who solved long-distance romance by buying an island. But it is elegant in a way that hurts.
Open rooms. Pale wood. Old-world bones with modern lines threaded through them so carefully the two seem to have agreed on a truce. Every space looks built for breathing.
And I, apparently, do not know how to do that here.
Nikolaj is somewhere behind me now, moving around the kitchen with the easy purpose of a man who already occupies places physically before he’s earned them emotionally. He opened windows, found whiskey, and said something in Russian to one of the men from the staff team he brought over from the mainland.
There are footsteps, then a door closing somewhere farther down the hall. I stand in the center of the sitting room with my hands in my pockets and look out at the sea like it might explain why my chest suddenly feels too tight for a house this large.
The problem is not the island.
The problem is that we don’t have to sneak around here.
I know how to hide with Nikolaj.
What I do not know—what I realize with a kind of slow, devastating clarity while standing in the center of this sunlit, impossible villa—is how to just be with him where no one is coming.
Here, we could be free… and I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know how to be calm with him.
I know how to fight him. I know how to want him. I know how to push, retreat, provoke, seduce, and survive. I know howto kiss him in doorways and taste him with all the desperation of men too used to losing time. I know how to make room for him in my body, in my grief, in the ruined little sanctuary of my private thoughts.
But this—this open possibility of simply existing beside Nikolaj without someone else’s shadow at our backs—feels so heartbreakingly new that my entire body has decided suspicion is the safest response.
If this is what freedom looks like—sunlight, silence, his hand still warm where it left mine, a house that belongs to both of us—then I have to admit how little practice I have in anything except survival.
I hear him before I turn.
The sound is small: ice in a glass, bare feet, or maybe just light steps over the stone floor. Nikolaj does not announce himself when he doesn’t have to. He moves through rooms as if he belongs in them and lets everyone else catch up to the fact.
