Chapter 11: Twelve Ways to Die
The world tipped sideways. Nino’s grip on his neck, possessive and unyielding, guided rather than threw. Caius landed on the bed, the silken duvet swallowing the impact. Before he could twist, Nino’s weight followed, a heavy, welcome anchor pinning him down. One hand trapped both of Caius’s wrists above his head against the carved mahogany. The scent of bergamot and gunpowder was stronger here, layered with the salt-sweet smell of their sweat.
Nino loomed over him, his eyes black in the shadowed room. The playful Alpha was gone, stripped away by the rooftop, by the kiss, by the lie that tasted like lemon tart. What remained was something more primal, a leader confronting an unexpected equal. A threat he wanted to devour.
“Tell me,” Nino breathed, his mouth hovering a hair’s breadth from Caius’s lips. His other hand slid down, fingers splaying over the forming bruise on Caius’s ribs. The press was deliberate, a reminder of the damage he could cause. A question.
Caius stared up, his mind performing its familiar, cold calculus. He could dislocate his own thumb, slip the hold, drive his knee into Nino’s kidney, roll them. Seven seconds to disable. Three more to retrieve the ceramic blade taped under the headboard. He didn’t move. The ice in his veins was melting under this specific, searing heat.
“Tell you what?” Caius whispered.
Nino’s teeth grazed the line of his jaw, a sharp promise. “On the roof. You were reading me. You left openings, but your eyes… you were cataloguing. Weren’t you?”
Caius’s breath hitched as Nino’s mouth traveled down his throat, finding his racing pulse. The scrape of teeth against that vulnerable tendon made his hips jerk involuntarily.
“How many?” Nino growled against his skin.
“How many what?”
The hand on his ribs pressed harder, not enough to crack, enough to steal his air. “Do not play dumb with me now. It’s insulting. How many ways did you see to put me down?”
A shiver, uncontrollable and deep, wracked Caius. The truth was a weapon. Unleashing it here, in this bed, felt more intimate than any touch. It was the final surrender.
“Twelve,” Caius said, the word leaving him in a rush of exhaled confession.
Nino went utterly still. The only sound was their ragged breathing. He lifted his head, searching Caius’s face. The anger was still there, but beneath it, a fierce, dawning hunger. “Tell me the first one,” he commanded, his voice rough.
Caius turned his head, his lips brushing Nino’s ear. He could feel the Alpha’s heartbeat thundering through where their chests were pressed together. “When you went for my ribs. You dropped your right shoulder. I could have used the marble bench. A short, upward drive. To your temple.”
He demonstrated with a subtle shift of his own shoulder, mimicking the kinetic flow. A clinical, quiet kill. Nino’s body registered it, a slight tensing of muscle as he mentally replayed the moment, seeing the death he hadn’t seen.
“And the second?” Nino’s voice was lower now, a dark pull.
Caius’s own breath was coming faster, his body responding to the visceral, forbidden lecture. “When you had my arm. I could have broken your wrist. Taken your balance. Used the iron trellis.” He arched his back, a phantom pain flitting across his features as he visualized the move. “Shattered your larynx against the edge.”
Nino’s grip on his wrists tightened, but not in restraint. In a kind of frantic need. “The third.”
“The fountain.” Caius’s whisper grew more breathless, each lethal truth feeling like a strip of armor being peeled away. “A slip, a pull. Your head under the water. It would look like an accident. The red water… it would hide everything.”
A low moan escaped Nino, but it wasn’t fear. It was something else entirely. He buried his face in Caius’s neck, inhaling deeply as if the scent of his own potential murder was an aphrodisiac. “Good. Again.”
And so, Caius told him. In gasps and whispers, between Nino’s biting kisses and the slow, rocking friction of their bodies, he laid out the architecture of his own violence. The fourth was the shears, a swift entry below the sternum. The fifth, a dislocated knee followed by a stomp to the cervical spine. On and on, through the sixth, seventh, eighth, each method a stark, efficient lesson in biomechanical ruin.
By the tenth, Nino had released his wrists. His hands were everywhere instead, tracing the lines of muscle Caius would have used, as if memorizing the weapon his husband was. Caius’s own hands came up, tangling in Nino’s hair, not pushing him away, but holding him close to the source of the terrible, beautiful truth.
“Eleven,” Caius panted, his eyes glazed, lost in the dual realities of memory and sensation. “When you kissed me… in the kitchen. A headbutt to the nose. Drive the splintered bone into the brain.”
Nino let out a choked laugh against his collarbone. “You thought about killing me when I was kissing you?”
“Yes.”
“Fuck.” Nino captured his mouth again, the kiss brutal and thankful. “And twelve? The last one, piccolino. Give it to me.”
Caius went quiet for a moment, his body stilling beneath Nino’s. This one was different. It wasn’t from the rooftop. It was from here, from this moment, from a place so dark and quiet inside him he rarely acknowledged it.
“The twelfth,” he said, his voice suddenly clear and soft, “is a pill. Odorless, tasteless. Dissolves in whiskey. It induces a cardiac event that mimics natural causes. It’s in my cosmetic case. I’ve had it since the day I arrived.”
The air left the room.
Nino pushed himself up on his arms, looking down at Caius. All the heat, the fury, the arousal–it solidified into an expression of stunned, heartbreaking realization. He wasn’t looking at a skilled fighter. He was looking at a living, breathing protocol. A creature of contingency plans and silent exits.
“You were never a prisoner,” Nino said, the words dawning on him with awful clarity. “You were always a loaded gun in my house. Pointed at my head.”
Caius didn’t deny it. He just watched, his face a beautiful, empty mask, waiting for the blow. For the rejection. For the fear.
It didn’t come.
Instead, Nino’s hands came up to cradle his face, his thumbs wiping away the wetness Caius hadn’t realized was there on his temples. “Where did they make you, Caius?” The question was a raw wound.
It was the wrong question. The dangerous one. The one that led back to gray rooms and Handlers and a life inscribed in blood-stained files. Caius’s walls, already cracked, shuddered. He shook his head, a minute, desperate movement.
Nino saw it. The flinch. The silent no. He didn’t press. He slid his grasp down, his fingers wrapping gently around Caius’s throat, a mirror of his earlier dominance, now offered as an understanding. A concession.
“The pill,” Nino said, his gaze unwavering. “Where is it now?”
“Second shelf. Behind the toner.”
“Tomorrow, you will take it, and you will put it in my hand.” He said it not as an order, but as a request. A transfer of power. A deliberate, conscious act of trust. “And then you will show me the first eleven. Slowly. On mats. So I can learn.”
The meaning crashed over Caius. Nino wasn’t disarming him. He was asking to be let into the arsenal. He was choosing to stand beside the loaded gun.
Caius’s composure, the icy heart he’d relied on for a lifetime, shattered. A sound escaped him, a broken, ragged thing that was part sob, part laugh. He pulled Nino down, crashing their mouths together in a kiss that tasted of salt and forgiveness and a future so terrifyingly bright he couldn’t look at it directly.
Later, when the city lights were just a dull glow through the velvet and their bodies were tangled and spent, Nino traced the bruise on Caius’s side, now vivid in the dark.
“The Thorn Circle,” Nino murmured, his voice sleepy but intent. “At the gala. You have a plan for them, too, don’t you?”
Caius, his head on Nino’s chest, listened to the steady heartbeat. He didn’t answer immediately. He just pressed closer, letting the rhythm soothe the last trembling edges of his soul.
“Yes,” he finally said, the word a vow in the dark. “I have a plan.”