Page 54 of Empire
“There was a bullet in the chamber, and your name was etched into the brass.”
My lungs forget how to pull air; I close my eyes because I can’t bear the bitter horror on the boy’s face while he tells me this. Ruslan—terrible, stubborn Ruslan—sitting where we once believed in impossible futures, playing roulette with a bullet engraved with my name. Waiting for chance to decide whether loving me finally ends him.
When I open my eyes again, Nikolaj’s expression has changed: softer? No—emptier, as though handing me this horror cost him more than he planned. “That’s why I came,” he murmurs and folds his arms over his chest, a posture that is all Ruslan in the worst way. “I wanted to look at the man who could bring my father—the man who single-handedly dragged my family out of ruin—down to his knees.”
The honesty in it lands cleanly. I absorb it without flinching because I deserve worse than words can express. “And?” I breathe.
His gaze drags over me, unsparing. “I thought you’d look crueler.”
I laugh then, a short, broken sound with no life in it. “That’s disappointing.”
“No,” he says, and something like emotion breaks through the marble mask of his face. “It’s worse. Cruel would’ve been easier to understand. You look like someone buried along with him.”
For one humiliating second, I think I might break in front of him. Not loud or theatrically—I am still a Vieri. But there is a fracture line in me now that wasn’t there when he arrived. The boy has somehow found his thumb on it without even trying.
“I was,” I say before I can stop myself, and look into the fire because looking at him now feels too much like looking at judgment wearing my lover’s face in younger skin. “I just didn’t have the decency to lie down all the way.”
When Nikolaj finally speaks again, his voice is softer, and that somehow hurts more than anything else. “Then why didn’t you go after him? After all this time, why didn’t you go to him?”
There it is—the question I have asked myself in a thousand different forms for thirty years, handed back to me by the son of the man I failed.
I have spent years wondering if he hated me. I never doubted that he did. Hate is the easy half of a betrayal like ours. I wondered how love survives it. How it remains recognizable through exile, blood, silence, and the next generation of pain. I wondered whether he kept me because he couldn’t bear to let me go, or because not letting me go was the cruelest revenge available to a man who still had a heart against his own will.
Maybe the answer never mattered—he kept me, and I kept him. The method was merely detail.
“Cowardice wears many masks,” I eventually say.
That earns me the smallest shift of his mouth. Not a smile, just acknowledgment.
He rises after that and walks towards the door. I know a decision has been made inside him that he won’t explain to me tonight. Fair enough. Men like him and me are not built for easy disclosures. We circle what matters and leave the center alive whenever we can.
At the doorway, he pauses. I remain where I am in my chair by the fire, old and tired. “He won’t kill himself.”
The certainty in his tone startles me. “You sound very sure,” I say carefully.
He glances over his shoulder. “He’s too stubborn and too hateful.” There’s a pause, then he says softly, “and he’s still waiting at the villa, on that terrace, because he still loves you too much.”
The parlor smells the same when he closes the door, the rain still taps softly at the windows, and the whiskey waits where I leave it on the side table.
And yet the room is no longer the same one I was sitting in before Nikolaj walked through the door. Now I know this too: somewhere, in the same villa where we once became stupid enough to believe in another ending, Ruslan sits with my name carved into a bullet and chooses, at least for one more night, to keep breathing.
A fresh wave of horror moves through me then.
I get to my feet—bones complain, ghosts whisper, but the decision feels clean; terrifyingly so. If the man I ruined can still sit on that god-forsaken terrace counting heartbeats instead of bullets, then the least I can do is meet him there and let him decide whether to pour the whiskey or pull the trigger.
At the threshold, I hesitate, listening to the rain. It sounds like it did the night before everything went to hell. Behind me, the fire pops once, a last warning that ghosts travel light and follow fast.
With my mind made up, I walk toward my car without looking back, knowing my destination—because I finally realize there’s no one left alive to stop me.
