I lean back in the chair and look at my cousin properly—at the man who has stood at my side through blood, coups, executions, bad nights and worse mornings, and the slow evolution of me turning into something Russia’s underground feared more than God.
Then I nod toward the door. “Get out.”
Kai blanches but doesn’t move. “Nikolaj—”
“Now.”
His gaze lingers on me for one beat longer, reading the hollow emotion on my face that I don’t bother to hide because there’s no point anymore. Then he nods once. “If you need—”
“I won’t,” I cut him off.
Resigned acknowledgment flickers in his eyes then, knowing this is a line I’ll hold even if it kills me. Then he turns and leaves without another word, closing the door softly behind him.
The second I’m alone, the room changes. This is important, so I do not reach for alcohol to help numb me. Instead, I sit very still and look at the files until the urge to throw them into the fireplace passes.
The instinct for destruction over understanding almost surprises me—to burn it all, and whatever it would reveal stays unmade. But that’s the old cowardice everyone around me has been practicing for eight years while calling it protection. I am done being protected from my own fucking past.
I reach for the first folder, knowing Kai placed them this way for a reason.
The cover is stamped INTERNAL INCIDENT REVIEW–RESTRICTED ACCESS. Beneath that, in smaller print, VINTERMOOR ACADEMY / EAST-NORTH TENSION SUMMARY / TERM 1 & 2
Our names appear six lines down.
Vieri, Vincenzo
Dragovich, Nikolaj
Even seeing our names together on paper does something ugly to my pulse before I open it.
The first page speaks of an incident that occurred within the first hour of our first lesson together. Emotions were high, and we pulled daggers on each other before the professor intervened. We were given warnings afterward.
That gets a chuckle out of me. We couldn’t even exist for an hour at the same table without violence.
The second paragraph details a fight simulation someone set up between us in the second period, which went as well as anyone would have expected. We pulled weapons on each other again and got a first warning in the shape of a brand from Headmistress Mavre.
My hand automatically goes to the round, jagged scar on the inside of my wrist. I remember it briefly but didn’t realize this was the reason.
The next few pages are timeline summaries of noted hostilities between East and North Wing heirs. Escalation patterns, reports of physical altercations, damaged property, and disciplinary interventions. There were deaths on both sides; more notably, a cousin of Vincenzo whom I attacked after they tried to ambush me. The language is sterile and institutional, trying to reduce blood, ego, and obsession into bullet points and timestamps.
Then I hit the first picture titled BATTLE SIMULATION ARC.
We’re both in tactical gear, but I’m straddling Vincenzo in the middle of what looks like a bunker. It’s just the two of us—bloodied and covered in dust, but my face is so close to his that from this angle, we appear to be kissing.
I know that grin on my face, or I knew it once. I’ve seen echoes of it in flashes, in dreams, in those tiny moments where instinctoutran memory. Seeing it on my own face in a still image is like being slapped by a ghost.
“What the fuck,” I whisper, and the sound of my own voice startles me.
I grit my teeth and move on to the next report.
East-North Feud. That’s the word they use every time. Feud, conflict, hostility, and retaliatory patterns. Weeks of it. Reports of us lunging across tables, baiting each other in classes, forcing protocol breaches just to get near enough to start something.
I breathe out slowly and reach for the second folder.
This one is thinner, with a black tab featuring the Dragovich crest in the middle and my name—Arseniy’s script—underneath. I know his handwriting the way soldiers know the sound of an incoming shell. I open it, and every muscle in my body goes rigid.
REPROGRAMMING PROTOCOL.
The words sit there in clean block letters, and for a second, the room changes around me. The office disappears, and all I can hear is the rush of blood in my ears and some half-memory of fluorescent lights and a room that smelled like bleach and sweat.
