Did I love you?
I hadn’t planned to ask that question. How could I? Nothing had pointed to us being anything other than enemies before. I went to his room for answers, and maybe for violence if he pushed wrong. It should have made things easier and confirmed what I’ve told myself since I woke up in his bed at Vintermoor and looked at him with nothing but revulsion.
Instead, he couldn’t even answer me. I don’t understand why that matters so much. It doesn’t make sense—nothing about this makes sense.
The elevator doors slide open into the private lobby, and we move as a unit toward the exit where the cars are waiting. It’s colder than I expected when we step outside. The smellof exhaust mixes with expensive cologne, wet pavement, and cigarette smoke curling from the valet line.
The convoy is already positioned, engines idling as they wait for Maksim to give the command. Kai is beside me, saying something about the revised schedules.
“If we leave now, we’ll clear the city before the traffic thickens. From there, it’s forty minutes to the private terminal. We’ve rotated the route twice already, and our people checked the—”
I stop listening the second I see him.
Vincenzo stands near the valet podium, one hand in his trouser pocket and a cigarette between two fingers of the other. He exudes old-money elegance in a charcoal suit underneath a black overcoat, slicked-back hair, and appears calm and composed. Completely different from the drunken wreck I pinned beneath me last night.
Capo de Capi. King of the Five Families. The man I should want dead on principle.
Smoke drifts from his mouth as he turns his head, and his eyes meet mine. It lasts less than a second; maybe not even that long. Just one clean line of sight between us across polished stone and valet attendants. But it’s enough.
Something low in my gut pulls so hard it feels like want sharpened into violence. Not abstract attraction or the kind of admiration a man feels when he sees another man built well, dressed well, and carrying himself with the kind of lethal ease that reads across any room.
This is visceral.
The kind of attraction that pisses me off because it arrives with recognition attached, with that same old sick certainty that I know him in places my conscious mind cannot access.
Did I love you?
The answer is already under my skin, and I fucking hate him for that. His expression hits me harder now in daylight than itdid in the dark. It’s a look so stripped down and broken that I want to look away—but I can’t.
Why? Why the hell does it do that to me?
He flicks the ash off his cigarette with the barest movement of his fingers. I catch the line of the cut at his throat even from here. He didn’t even bother to cover it. The mark of my impatience, and proof that some part of me still wanted to see if he would bleed the same as everyone else.
The spell breaks when Lucien steps up next to him and whispers something in his ear. I don’t bother to stay and watch, already moving to the main car by the time Kai realizes I’ve stopped listening.
Maksim opens the rear door of the SUV, and I slide in first, with Kai following me into the back seat. Then he circles around to the driver’s side, and the engine hums deeper when he puts it into gear, pulling away from the curb with smooth precision.
Kai picks up right where he left off, because of course he does. “—secondary route to the airfield in case there’s media spillover from the summit, though I doubt anyone’s stupid enough to leak before the next round. Reyes wants another call this evening. Byrne asked for updated numbers on the port access, and King—”
“What happened between Vincenzo and me at Vintermoor?”
Maksim’s hands jerk on the wheel, and the SUV swerves for a second before he corrects it instantly, muttering a curse in Russian under his breath. The silence drops so heavily, it feels manufactured.
Kai turns his head slowly to look at me, and for the first time in a very long time, I see him genuinely caught off guard. Dumbfounded isn’t a word I’d ever use for Kai casually. He’s too disciplined with his own responses, too practiced at swallowing a reaction before it reaches the surface. But rightnow, something in his face has gone unguarded by a fraction, and that fraction might as well be a confession.
There it is.
There’s the fucking corpse under the floorboards.
That is how I know I’m right. Not about the specifics; I still don’t have those. I have dreams and complicated emotions about a man I should hate, who, for all intents and purposes, is my enemy. But I’m right about the fact that somethingdidhappen between Vincenzo and me. Something far bigger than carefully scrubbed reports and clipped phrases Ruslan throws at me.
The fact that Maksim swerved is one thing—he’s always more emotional than his brother could ever be. But the way Kai is looking at me tells me more than any files ever could.
I hold his stare, but he recovers quickly. The shock drains from his face, replaced by caution so immediate it would be impressive if it didn’t make me want to put my fist through the window.
“Where is this coming from?” he asks, and that’s his mistake. Not denial or ‘nothing happened,’ just an attempt to move the conversation elsewhere.
I smile without humor. “That’s what you’ve got?”
