Page 43 of Empire
Inside, there’s a gun, cash, a ledger, and a sealed folio tied with a black ribbon. I should shut it, but some rotten, panicked part of me has been looking for a reason since my father mentioned details slipping out of Vieri orbit—details only I should know.
I take the folio, knowing this will either confirm my suspicions or justify my actions.
I find route manifests, notes in Mikhail’s hand, and references to council discussions that should have stayed on the Italian side of the table. I read enough to understand the shape of it and not enough to make myself sick with the full detail.
That’s another lie—I understand more than enough. The leak, the timing, the way certain things only ever start moving after it lands in my hands, and I spend a night in his bed.
My first instinct is still denial. Not because the evidence is weak. Because I love him still, and that’s the humiliation of it.
Even with his family’s work in my hands, even with the shape of his treachery starting to sharpen under my fingers, my mind jumps to explanations that let him stay innocent.
Then I read one line too many, and the denial cracks.
I remember picking up the phone and calling my father to meet me, knowing he was in the small town below, waiting for me. I remember driving into the town with my hands locked so tight around the steering wheel that my knuckles hurt. I remember the look of pride on his face when I handed over the folio, and he took pictures of each page.
He doesn’t smile—that would cheapen his victory.
“You understand now,” he says.
No. I understand that I’m a bigger fool than he’s always believed. I understand that Ruslan has been playing me since we met, and even though I know he truly loves me, he never stopped betraying me.
Before I leave, my father informs me that my sister’s marriage to Moretti is dead because I have proven myself useful.
Useful. I hate that word so much, I almost choke on it.
And still, because my sister’s bruises are yellowing beneath the powder, because she looked at me with wide, terrified eyes when she kissed me goodbye, because I am too much my father’s son in all the ways I wish I weren’t, I say nothing that matters.
Now I wait in Ruslan’s villa, knowing I’ve condemned him. All I can think is that the house remembers.
It remembers me opening the safe. It remembers me leaving. It remembers me coming back, placing the folio where itbelonged, and standing in the kitchen with my hands braced on the wooden table where he claimed me this morning.
When I finally hear his car on the drive, my whole body goes rigid. Headlights sweep once across the shutters, the engine cuts out, footsteps on gravel, and the front door opening and closing.
The familiar quiet violence of him moving through the house, shrugging off his coat, setting down his keys, and noticing at once that something’s wrong.
I’m standing with my back against the counter, a glass of water in my hand that I haven’t really been drinking from. When I got back, I scrubbed myself raw in the bath and changed into one of his shirts, because apparently there’s no end to the humiliation I’m willing to pile on this night.
The sleeves are rolled, the top buttons are undone, and the whole thing makes me look like I belong to him in a way that, under any other circumstances, would’ve sent heat straight through my blood.
Now, it just feels cruel.
Ruslan takes one look at my face and says, “What happened?”
Straight for the jugular. No game, no smirk. The private summons has stripped him, too, I think. He looks harder now than when he left.
“Nothing,” I lie.
His expression turns flat. “Bullshit.”
My laugh is cold and brief. “You really do only have one word when you don’t like an answer.”
“I have plenty of words.” He steps further into the room, cold blue eyes fixed on mine. “Most of them get ruder from there.”
That almost gets me. Normally, I would snap at that, then he’d smirk and say something filthy before we slip into familiar territory. Tonight, it just deepens the ache in my chest. “I’m tired.”
“You’re also lying.”
“I’m also tired.”
