Page 52 of Empire
“But I’ll love you until I die.”
That one lands so hard, I see him physically absorb it, shoulders pulling tighter as if the words themselves hurt.
He takes a step toward me, hand reaching out. “Ruslan—”
“No.” I step back before he can say anything else. “That’s all you get. That’s all that’s left of me.”
The rain is getting heavier now. It runs off the awning in thin cold sheets. Somewhere in the city behind us, bells start ringing the hour. Time moving. History writing itself over our bones.
I look at him one last time and see everything at once.
The boy I first wanted because he’s beautiful and vicious and looks at me like he’d rather set the room on fire than let it own him.
The man I build stupid, impossible futures around in hidden houses and quiet mornings and beds that smell like us instead of war.
The heir who picks bloodline over me because our fathers are buried too deep inside us to ever fully outrun.
And finally, the man who hates what he was born into, and becomes it anyway.
I turn first because one of us has to, and because if he turns first, I really might follow him like the last idiot in a dead story, and I’ve already made a career of dying for him in ways that don’t leave a body.
I don’t look back, and he doesn’t follow.
That, more than anything, is how I know it’s over.
I learned that exile isn’t loud. It’s the sound of your own footsteps carrying you away from everything you build your name around. While the man you love stays standing in the wreckage because he chooses legacy over you and loses the very thing he thinks he’s saving anyway.
By the time I reach the gate, the silence has already started doing its work.
I look out at the road ahead, the wet black ribbon of it disappearing into a country that no longer belongs to us, and feel the exile settle in for real.
Not just the loss of territory or the money or the alliances or the name spoken differently in rooms we’ll never enter again.
The loss of him.
The loss of the version of me who believed love might be enough to make a different kind of ending.
It settles into the cut over my eye. Into the seat beside me in the waiting car, where my father should be and isn’t. Into the knowledge that one day, a son of my blood and a son of his will inherit this poison without ever consenting to it.
We’re not the end of this story. We’re only the first wound
Epilogue - Salvatore
WhenIfinish,theroom goes so quiet that for a moment I can hear the rain gathering in the guttering outside the parlor windows.
Nikolaj does not move. That, more than anything, tells me the story lands where it should.
He stands in the middle of my parlor now, with the fire throwing low gold over one side of his face, and for the first time since he walked in, he looks his age. Not young, exactly. Men like him are never permitted that luxury. But startled in a way that strips some of the cultivated brutality off him and leaves behind the son beneath it.
The son who came here with splinters of memory in his head, expecting some political answer about exile, territory, votes, bloodlines, and instead finding out that the whole fucking thing began with love.
I lean back in my chair and let the silence stretch because he deserves that much, at least. The space to feel the shape ofwhat I have just handed him—the shape of what his father and I became to each other.
Nikolaj’s mouth parts slightly, then shuts again. His eyes—so brutally his father’s that they still unsettle me in certain light—stay locked on mine.
He exhales once, and drags a hand over his jaw. “Fuck.”
It is, perhaps, the most appropriate response available.
