Outside, Saint Helena remains cold and quiet and full of men waiting for orders from a Pakhan who has spent two days pretending he is still made of iron.
On the floor of my bedroom, with Vincenzo’s ring in my hand and my sister holding me through the first honest wreckage, I finally stop pretending.
Not forever, maybe not even for long. But for tonight, I let myself be only what the world has made me and what love has broken me into.
A man.
A husband.
A blade with no sheath.
And a heart that does not understand why it is still beating when his has supposedly stopped.
thirty-eight
Nikolaj
Amonthlater,Ilearnedthere is a special kind of silence that comes after a man stops waiting for the phone to ring.
At first, there is noise. There is too much of it. Reports, footsteps, doors opening, men saying my name carefully, the constant scrape of violence against consequence.
There are names to extract, bank trails to follow, and people to cut loose from their own lies. There is Tatiana appearing in doorways with blood under her nails and fury in her eyes, asking whether I want someone alive or whether death will satisfy me this time.
There is Kai standing beside me with a tablet, giving me data in the same voice he might use for weather, because if he sounds like he feels anything, I might break his neck for making grief visible in the room.
There is Maksim keeping his jokes behind his teeth, which is the loudest proof of mourning he has ever given anyone.
Then there is Arseniy, somehow always there and never too close, wearing guilt like another coat and saying nothing unless silence becomes more dangerous than words.
Then, slowly, the noise thins.
Not because the work is finished—it never is. Revenge doesn’t finish; it breeds. Every name leads to two more, every confession opens another hallway, every corpse leaves behind men stupid enough to mistake grief for weakness.
But after the first weeks, people begin adjusting to the shape of loss around me. They learn where not to stand. They learn which questions I answer and which ones I punish. They learn that saying Vincenzo’s name in front of me is no longer enough to make me react, which scares them more than rage ever did.
That is how I know I’m dead inside. Rage would mean there is still heat left.
Vincenzo is dead.
That sentence still doesn’t sound real.
I don’t say it often. Not out loud. Out loud, words become things people can hear, and people who hear things often believe they have the right to respond.
I don’t want responses. I don’t want pity. I don’t want Kai’s careful looks, Maksim’s angry silences, or Arseniy’s haunted presence in the corners of rooms he has no right to haunt after five years of absence.
I don’t want Ruslan’s voice through the phone, the one time he called and said nothing for so long I nearly hung up before he finally rasped, “I’m so sorry, Nikolaj,” like the words had teeth coming out.
I don’t want anything.
That’s the problem.
For a month, I’ve lived without wanting.
Not revenge, not really. Revenge is movement, and I’ve ordered plenty of that. Men have vanished. Accounts havefrozen. Families have fractured under pressure I applied with surgical boredom.
Byrne’s remaining loyalists are being hunted. Reyes’s lines are collapsing. I thought revenge would give me something. It didn’t; it was just another kind of paperwork.
Vincenzo’s ring sits on my desk. Not in a box or hidden away. Not kept somewhere safe like a memory too fragile for daylight. It rests beside my laptop, black metal and a thin line of gold, clean now because Kai had the blood polished out of the grooves when I stopped noticing it was still there. I hated him for that. Then I kept it on the desk anyway.
