My gaze drifts down the slope of his back, where he turned partly toward me after, too tired to fully choose a position and trusting me enough not to need one. His back is all cut lines and muscles and old scars, the broad planes of him shifting subtly with each slow breath.
Ink spreads over him in ways that make something possessive in me sit up a little straighter. I trace none of it with my hands because I don’t want to wake him, but my eyes drag over every familiar and new detail anyway.
There’s his own work, older pieces I remember from Vintermoor, and newer ones I don’t, all black and precise and chosen with the same ruthless eye he uses for everything else. And beneath all of it, under the memory of the evening and the wreckage in the sheets, I remember another piece.
My name.
Not Nikolaj in the language the world calls me by now. Not Dragovich. My name in Cyrillic, inked over his heart, as if he took the language of my blood and carved me there years ago while I was busy forgetting the shape of his mouth.
I still haven’t recovered from it. I don’t think I will. The sight of it nearly put me on my knees all over again, even after what already happened when I actually did end up there for him.
All this fucking time, this man loved me while I became Pakhan, while I tore my way through Moscow and Saint Helena and every other territory foolish enough to mistake my emptiness for mercy, while I sat at the head of tables and built an empire on a hole in my own life I couldn’t name.
All this time, he carried me under his skin and over his heart, while playing king beside a wife, a title, and an empire that called him whole because it didn’t know what had been taken.
The thought is enough to make my chest ache.
I slide one hand more securely over the line of his waist and hold him closer, just a fraction, enough to feel the full length of him settle deeper against me. He makes a soft sound in his sleep, nothing more than a breath with feeling in it, and shifts until his hand spreads more fully over my chest. Right over my heart.
That nearly fucking ends me.
It’s such an unguarded move, so instinctive. No calculation and no performance. I look down at his hand, and that’s when I notice the bare ring finger.
I think back to the ballroom and realize I didn’t see one there either. I saw the hand at Arabella’s waist, and how well he playedhis role because he knew I was watching and wanted to get under my skin. I saw the forehead kiss, the careful body language, and all the expensive grace that made me want to put my fist through crystal. But I did not see a wedding ring.
I study his hand over my heart like the answer might be written there in the tendons and long fingers and the soft slackness of sleep.
My heart feels too full for one body. That’s the only way to put it. Full enough to hurt. Full enough to be terrifying. I am not a man built for this much feeling without consequence.
Love, I know. Obsession, I know even better. Want, grief, possession, rage, devotion sharpened into violence, all of those live within me comfortably enough.
But this quiet fullness, this almost disbelieving tenderness that comes from simply lying here with him breathing slowly against me, that part catches me wrong. Like I swallowed light and now don’t know what the fuck to do with my hands.
I think, not for the first time, about how this can possibly work.
Kings come with eyes on them. Expectations. Structures. Entire networks of men who live and die depending on how we move and what we choose and who we let too close.
Add to that the fact that we are both men, and suddenly the list of things that could get us killed starts reading like a schedule. Even though the Dragovich Bratva has men use their bodies as weapons when needed, no one would accept two kings as their leaders.
Our families might be more complicated now than they were then, our worlds more modern on the surface, but power is old in all the ways that matter. It does not like its lines crossed. It does not like weakness made visible.
And if what existed between us at Vintermoor was enough to set half the adults around us into panic and cover-up, what thefuck happens now if it resurfaces in the open while we’re both sitting on thrones built from other people’s fear?
They’ll kill us. One way or another, if we misstep badly enough, if we let the wrong people see too much too fast, something will come for us.
And here I am, lying in a hotel bed with his hand over my heart, thinking about none of that with the seriousness it deserves because I’m too busy being a fucking sap about the way he breathes in his sleep.
My phone buzzes once on the bedside table. The sound is soft enough not to wake him, but I go still immediately, eyes dropping to his face to make sure. Vincenzo only nestles slightly closer against me, lashes unmoving, mouth still parted in sleep.
Carefully, I reach past him and take the phone off the table. It’s Kai. The man has the timing of a priest at a brothel door.
I open the message one-handed, angling the brightness down so it doesn’t spill onto the bed. The text is blunt in the way Kai’s texts always are when he’s already decided the information matters too much for ceremony.
Kai: No one saw Vieri come in. Floor secure. Separate note—Vieri’s wife appears to be sleeping with Lucien.
I stare at the screen for a second, then I look down at Vincenzo again, then back at the screen. Lucien—his second, his cousin, and his best friend. The one who always looked at me like he knew far too much and preferred pretending not to.
A dark, humorless smile pulls at my mouth.
