I wouldn't change a single thing about who he is or what he does or the world he's dragged me into. Not one thing. Not the blood. Not the war. Not the gun on the nightstand or the dead men's names or the particular loneliness of being married to the most dangerous man in Boston.
This is love. The real kind. The kind that looks at monsters and sees men and stays anyway.
He's asleep. His face is pressed against my neck, his breathing slow and even, his arms still holding me. The boy and the boss, asleep together in one body, trusting me enough to be unconscious.
I hold him while he sleeps. The city glows through the curtains. Somewhere Viktor Reznikov is planning his next move. Somewhere four families are mourning men who died in a war they didn't choose.
I know now. I would burn the world for this man.
And if Viktor Reznikov touches what's mine, I won't need Nico's permission. I won't need the Beretta on the nightstand or anyone's army or anyone's goddamn approval.
I'll handle it myself.
Chapter 22
Nico
Touch Her And Die
* * *
Six days since the safe house.
Six days since my mother prayed in a stranger's bedroom while four of my men went home in boxes. The war has settled into a state worse than violence: silence. Viktor quiet. Dmitri unreachable. The kind of calm that precedes the kind of storm that levels cities.
Tonight, we show them it didn't work.
Elysium, transformed for an alliance function. Every family represented. Greeks, Irish, the Romanos who fall in line when the wind blows our direction. Security tripled: Lex at the east entrance, Cormac working the bar with a glass of water and eyes that miss nothing, Declan roaming the perimeter, Stavros outside with three men and a clear sightline to every exit.
Siobhan is in a black dress. Not the green from the Ricci function. Black. Fitted. A neckline that follows her collarbone and stops just short of decent. She did her own makeup tonight and the result is devastating. War paint. She looks like a woman who's done being afraid, and the men in this room are recalibrating her in real time.
She catches me staring. "Eyes on the room, Mr. Konstantinos."
"I'd rather keep them on you."
"Later."
Our word. The one that means: I want you, I know you want me, and the waiting is half the pleasure. The promise embedded in a single syllable that has been keeping me half-hard since she walked out of the bedroom.
I scan the room and catalog what's wrong. She's unarmed. Formal event, no concealed carry. My rule. She's been at the range every morning for six days, her grouping tight at fifteen yards, the Beretta an extension of her hand in a way that makes me proud and terrified simultaneously. But tonight, the gun is on the nightstand and she's working the room with nothing but her mind and her spine and the training I can't strap to her thigh under a dress like that.
I note Elena's absence. Her chair at the Greek delegation table is empty. Alexandros Drakos sits where he always sits, but he's diminished. Subdued. A man carrying a daughter's choices like stones in his pockets. No one mentions Elena. The silence has weight.
Siobhan works the room beautifully. I watch her from across the floor and see what I saw eight months ago at the Ricci function: a woman who belongs in a room full of powerful men, not because she defers to them but because she outperforms them. She's talking to a Romano cousin about supply chain logistics and the cousin is nodding like he's taking notes.
A man approaches her. Mid-forties. Tailored charcoal suit. Warm smile that reaches his eyes in a way that suggests practice rather than sincerity, though you'd have to know the difference to catch it. Sergei Volkov. I've seen him at three previous functions. Import-export. Pleasant. Forgettable. The kind of man who moves through rooms without disturbing the air.
He brings Siobhan a drink. I watch from the bar. The conversation looks normal. Business. Pleasantries. She's gracious, professional, Ward Risk Advisory in every polished syllable. He says something that makes her smile. Not her real smile. The public one.
He leans closer. His hand touches her lower back. A social gesture. Appropriate. I've seen a hundred men do it at a hundred events and the jealousy it triggers is manageable because she's mine and everyone in this room knows it.
Then his hand shifts. Presses.
Her smile doesn't change. Her body does. A micro-stiffening in her shoulders. A fractional widening of her eyes. The kind of physical tells that only someone who's spent twenty-five days memorizing her body would catch.
Her eyes find mine across the room.
She doesn't scream. Doesn't signal. She looks at me with the steady focus of a woman who assessed her own surveillance photograph over breakfast, and I seeeverything. The angle of his arm. The pressure at her ribs. The small hard shape concealed between his body and hers.