Nicolas’s POV
The rooftop was mine.
The wind was sharp up here. Late afternoon, the sun already dropping behind the skyline, throwing long shadows across the rooftop gravel. I could see the whole eastern wing from this angle. The courtyard. The training grounds. The edge of the gardens where the wall curved toward the old gatehouse.
I had a glass in my hand.
Whiskey. Neat. Third one. Not that I was counting.
The city sprawled out below in every direction. Ten million lives. Forty-two packs. A war on the eastern border that Roman kept sending updates about and that I kept not reading because my head was sowhere else entirely and had been for hours.
The file was in my jacket pocket.
Andrei’s file. The one he’d set on my desk with that careful, easy look of his that ant *you’re not going to like this.* The dical records. The injury reports. The dates that lined up with dates I already knew—dates that corresponded to Maxim’s visits, Maxim’s moods, Maxim’s particular brand of cruelty that he’d apparently docunted himself through sheer carelessness.
I’d read it six tis now.
Six tis, and each ti the anger had gotten worse instead of better, which wasn’t how it usually worked. Usually anger peaked and then flattened and I could use it. Could point it at sothing. Could walk into a room and do what needed doing and walk out the other side with blood on my hands and a clear head.
This wasn’t flattening.
This was sitting in my chest like sothing with teeth.
---
I took a drink.
Set the glass on the ledge.
Picked it back up.
The problem wasn’t the file. The problem wasn’t even Maxim, rotting in his cell two floors below the east wing, probably still running that mouth of his at walls that didn’t care.
The problem was her.
The problem was always her.
I couldn’t figure it out. That was the thing that was eating alive, the thing I’d been standing up here trying to solve for—I checked my watch—forty-seven minutes. I couldn’t figure out what she wanted. What she was thinking. What was going on behind those blue eyes that looked at sotis like I was the only solid thing in the room and other tis like I was the thing she needed to escape from.
She’d kissed .
Last night. She’d walked across that room and put her arms around and kissed like it ant sothing, and I’d felt—
I took another drink.
I’d felt sothing I didn’t have a word for, which was the problem, because I had words for everything. That was the job. You nad things and you controlled them and you moved on. But whatever had happened when her mouth found mine—whatever that thing was that had cracked open in my chest like sothing breaking in reverse—
I didn’t have a word for it.
And now she was going to see Maxim.
---
Movent below.
My eyes caught it before my brain processed it—the courtyard, the stone path that led from the main residence toward the east wing. A figure. Small. Moving with that particular walk I’d learned to identify from three floors up and two hundred yards away.
The dark gray cloak. Hood pulled up. Shoulders drawn in, the way she always held herself, like she was trying to take up less space than physics allowed.
Irina.
Walking toward the east substructure.
Walking toward *him.*
I watched her cross the courtyard. Watched the way she paused at the entrance—just a beat, barely perceptible—before she pulled the heavy door open and disappeared inside.
My hand tightened around the glass.
*She asked to see him.*
I knew that. I’d said yes. I’d arranged it. I’d looked at her face this morning when she’d said *I have things to say to them* and I’d seen sothing in her eyes that was new—sothing that hadn’t been there before, sothing with edges—and I’d thought: *Good. Let her say it. Let her stand in front of the man who broke her and say whatever she needs to say and then it’s done.*
That was the plan.
That was what I’d told myself.
But watching her walk through that door—watching her go *toward* him, voluntarily, after everything—
The glass cracked.
I looked down.
Hairline fracture running up from the base. My hand was white-knuckled around it. I could feel the pressure points where my fingers had compressed too hard, the crystal protesting.
I didn’t ease up.
*What does she need to say to him?*
The thought was acid.
*What could she possibly need to say to that man that she hasn’t already said by being here? By staying? By letting —*
The glass shattered.
Whiskey and crystal fragnts scattered across the ledge, across my hand. Blood welled up from two cuts on my palm—shallow, already closing. I didn’t feel them.
I stared at my hand.
At the blood mixing with whiskey on the stone.
*She kissed last night,* I thought. *She held onto like I was the only thing keeping her upright. She said my na like it was the only word she knew.*
*And now she’s walking into his cell.*
I wiped my hand on my trousers. Old habit. The cuts had already sealed—one of the few perks of being what I was. The blood stayed, though. It always stayed.
I braced both hands on the ledge and looked out over the courtyard.
Empty now. Just stone and shadow and the place where she’d been standing thirty seconds ago.
The jealousy was irrational.
I knew it was irrational. She wasn’t going down there because she missed him. She wasn’t going down there because she wanted him. She’d flinched at his na for three weeks. She’d gone white and rigid in my office when he’d walked in. She’d run—not toward him, Andrei had been right about that, she’d run *from* the situation—and the idea that she harbored anything for Maxim other than terror was—
Irrational.
And I didn’t care.
Because rational didn’t describe what happened in my chest when I watched her walk toward a building that contained him. Rational didn’t cover the specific, grinding heat that sat behind my ribs when I thought about them in the sa room. The sa *air.*
He’d touched her for a year.
That thought.
That one specific thought.
I’d been avoiding it. Circling it. Reading the file six tis and never quite letting myself *land* on it, because landing on it ant picturing it, and picturing it ant—
My fingers dug into the stone ledge.
The stone cracked under my grip. A chunk broke off and fell, spinning, into the courtyard below.
*He touched her.*
For a *year.*
Every bruise in that file. Every date. Every gap where the docuntation stopped because whoever was supposed to be keeping records had decided it wasn’t worth noting anymore. Every single mark on her body that I’d traced with my own hands in the dark—the ones she flinched away from, the ones she let find, the ones she didn’t explain because she’d run out of ways to explain things that shouldn’t need explaining.
*He did that.*
And she was down there. Right now. In a room with him.
Saying things she needed to say.
I pushed off the ledge.
Paced. Three steps one direction, three steps back. The rooftop gravel grinding under my shoes.
*Let her do this.*
That was Andrei’s voice in my head. Reasonable. asured. *She needs to face him. She needs to close the door on her own terms. You can’t do it for her.*
I knew that.
I *knew* that.
But knowing it and standing here while she—
I stopped pacing.
Looked at the east wing.
Sowhere in there—two floors down, behind stone and iron—she was standing in front of a man who’d spent twelve months systematically destroying her. And I was up here. On a rooftop. Bleeding into my own whiskey like a—
*Like a what?*
I didn’t finish the thought.
---
My phone buzzed.
I looked at it. Roman.
*Eastern border update. Kossarov pulled back from the river crossing. Andrei wants to know if you’re coming down for the briefing or if you’re "still on the roof being dramatic."*
I put the phone in my pocket.
Looked at the east wing one more ti.
She was still in there.
The thing in my chest had teeth and it was biting down and I let it. I stood there and I let it and I thought about Maxim’s face. That smug, practiced face. The face that had looked at her in my office and called her a *thing.* The face I hadn’t broken yet because I was being *strategic,* because Roman said we needed information first, because Andrei said *let the process work.*
The process.
*Fuck* the process.
I was going to take my ti with him. That was the decision forming now, clear and cold and inevitable, the way real decisions always ford. Not the quick kind. Not the rciful kind. The kind that happened over days. Weeks. The kind where every morning he’d wake up and know exactly what was coming and have nothing he could do about it.
I’d done it before. To n who’d betrayed . To n who’d threatened what was mine.
But this was different.
This was going to be *art.*
Because she was mine. And he’d touched her. And he was going to understand—really, deeply, in the marrow of his bones—what that cost.
I picked a shard of glass off the ledge. Turned it in my fingers. Watched it catch the last of the light.
Below, in the courtyard, the east wing door opened.
A small figure stepped out.
Gray cloak. Hood up. That walk.
She paused in the courtyard. Just for a mont. Looked up.
Not at . She couldn’t have seen from there—too high, too far, the angle wrong. She was just looking up. At the sky. At the air. Breathing.
Then she turned and walked back toward the main building.
Sothing about the way she walked was different.
I couldn’t have nad it if I’d tried. Sa cloak, sa slight fra, sa careful steps. But sothing in the line of her shoulders. Sothing in the way her head was held.
Not higher, exactly.
Just—*level.*
I watched her until she disappeared through the main entrance.
Then I looked at the shard of glass in my hand. At the blood drying on my palm. At the broken remains of a whiskey glass scattered across the ledge of a building I owned, in a city I controlled, in a kingdom I’d killed my own blood to rule.
"Maxim," I said.
To no one. To the wind.
"I’m going to make you wish you’d never been born."
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