I take the box out and set it on my desk, then lower myself into the chair and stare at it for a second before opening it.
The bullet rests where it always does, my name carved into the metal by a hand I could still recognize blind.
“It wasn’t for you to die by. I carved your name into it because if anyone could kill me, it’d be you.”
I run my thumb over the carved letters, and every year between then and now means nothing for one ugly, aching second.
Eight years.
Eight fucking years, and I still remember him with more clarity than I remember my wedding vows.
The last time I saw Nikolaj, he looked at me as though I were filth. That’s the cruel shape of it. Not even the loss—the disgust. The pure, instinctive revulsion on his face when he woke up after the ambush.
I had spent so long learning every version of his expressions that watching all of them vanish all at once should’ve killed me. Maybe it did. Maybe the part of me capable of living as anordinary man died right there, and all that remained was the one built to wear the title.
I let him go.
People romanticize ruin after the fact. They talk about love as though it’s always noble to burn down kingdoms for one person. That’s a lie told by people who have never sat with real power in their hands and understood what it costs.
There was no ending for us that didn’t come sharpened—not one. If I had chained him to me, if I had forced memory against a mind already broken by violence, we would’ve only ended in a prettier massacre.
He was Dragovich. I was Vieri. We were heir and enemy before we were anything softer. Whatever we had at Vintermoor lived in the narrow space between duty and desire, and even there it was doomed.
I close the velvet box and lean back in the chair, glass in hand, and I think about my father. He spends most of his time as a hermit now, secluded in the Vieri villa. He never leaves unless it’s to attend an important meeting.
I would have thought he’d be like a shadow once he handed me the crown, telling me what I’m doing wrong and why. But no, he just… left it all to me.
I became everything he wanted. Capo dei Capi. King of the Five Families. Ruthless. The man other men stand for when he enters a room. The man senators call privately and denounce publicly. The man whose signature moves money across borders and whose displeasure gets men buried in concrete or fed to rivers.
I unified a dying faction that was meant to fracture under my leadership. I took the title without begging for permission and kept it without mercy. I host, negotiate, threaten, and smile. I give orders that reshape cities and then attend charity galas in expensive tuxedos.
And not once has any of it felt like winning.
There’s a soft knock on the door, before Lucien steps inside without waiting for me to open. He’s one of the few people alive who can get away with that.
My cousin, my best friend, the closest thing I have to a brother, who didn’t expect a thing from me. Lucien moves through my spaces with an ease no one else has because he was here before I became king.
He’s dressed in charcoal and black, tie loosened, dark hair pushed back, expression stoic. He’s perfected the Vieri polish over the years, something needed to survive in rooms full of predators.
His gaze flicks to the tumbler in my hand, then to the open safe behind me, then back to me. “Comforting,” he says. “You with a drink and your ghosts.”
“You interrupted me to comment on my hobbies?”
“No,” he says, then he crosses the room and pours himself water from the cut crystal decanter at the sideboard. Lucien treats my office like it’s a family room instead of one belonging to an underworld monarch. “I interrupted you because I’ve got your answer.”
I set the tumbler down and watch him over steepled fingers. “Is that so?”
Lucien takes a sip of his water, then looks at me for a beat longer than necessary. He knows exactly which answer I care about. He also knows exactly what name he’s about to unleash into the room.
“Dragovich accepted.”
It’s strange, the body’s instincts for old catastrophes. My face stays calm, and my posture doesn’t change. Even my breathing remains steady, because I learned a long time ago that men notice the smallest shifts when they’re looking for weakness.
But underneath that control, something cold and ugly tears awake. Not hope; I killed that years ago. Not even fear, though there’s enough history there to breed it.
It’s recognition—violence of recognition. The name has lived under my skin for nearly a decade, buried so deep I can go weeks without speaking it and still feel its pulse when the darkness gets too still.
Nikolaj Dragovich accepted my invitation.
