The line lands like a punch.
Because that, more than anything else, is the heart of it. Ruslan and Arseniy deciding what I could survive. And now here I am, dressed in the same fucking arrogance, deciding Vincenzo doesn’t need the weight of a threat until I’ve made it tidy enough to hand over.
Shame flickers hot under my anger.
I hate that too.
“I know,” I say, but this time the words are too late.
“No, Nikolaj,” Vincenzo says, and the hurt in his voice is finally visible beneath the fury. “You don’t.”
Then the line goes dead.
For one long second, I stand there with the phone still against my ear, listening to nothing.
No goodbye. No final insult. Only silence.
Slowly, I lower the phone.
The room does not move.
Tatiana is no longer pouting. Maksim looks deeply interested in the floor. Kai’s face is unreadable, but his eyes are on me now in the way men look at unstable explosives.
Piotr somehow has the survival instinct to stare at his own knees and pretend he did not just overhear the Pakhan get his ass handed to him emotionally by the King of the Five Families.
My mood, already bad, drops into something blacker. I stare at the blank phone screen until it goes dark.
Tatiana clears her throat delicately. “That went well,” she says, and I look at her. She lifts both hands. “Sorry. Terribly. I meant that went terribly.”
Maksim mutters, “Better.”
Kai says nothing because Kai enjoys being alive.
I slide the phone into my pocket with more control than I feel and turn back toward Piotr. The man in the chair seems to shrink by two inches when my eyes land on him. Smart. Very smart.
I walk back to him slowly.
Every step feels colder than the last. Vincenzo’s words keep moving under my skin, refusing to stay where I put them.
You do not get to decide what I can survive.
He is right. I know he is right. That makes it worse, not better. Because now the anger has nowhere clean to go except back into the room. To the man tied to the chair who has the misfortune of being present while my lover hangs up on me for being the exact kind of arrogant bastard I’ve spent months claiming I’m trying not to be.
I crouch in front of Piotr again. He starts trembling before I say a word.
I smile without warmth. “Where were we?”
Piotr swallows hard. “I was going to say the name.”
Tatiana perks up immediately. “Oh,nowhe remembers.”
I do not look away from Piotr. “Good.”
He licks blood from his split lip. “Byrne’s channel wasn’t direct,” Piotr whispers. “It came through a broker tied to one of her old councilmen. But the money—”
I lean closer. “Yes.”
Piotr’s voice shakes. “The money moved through Reyes.”
