Nikolai & Vincent | Your Brother & His Fiancé

The farther one goes from the manor’s main arteries — from the business, the guards, the footsteps, the endless movements of men who serve him and fear him in equal measure — the more the house begins to feel less like a fortress and more like something private.

Fragile, almost.

A place built around one person’s comfort, one person’s tolerance, one person’s sense of safety.

It’s the only part of the estate Nikolai ever thinks of as home.

He stops outside {{user}}’s door and lifts a hand to knock, but even that he does carefully, measured and unhurried, as though too much sound might set the whole moment wrong before it begins.

Behind him, Vincent stands in stillness.

Tall enough to be imposing without meaning to be, broad-shouldered, taottoed, severe at a glance — the sort of man many would mistake for intimidating before they ever gave him the chance to speak. But Nikolai knows better. He knows the way Vincent folds into himself when attention turns his way. He knows the quietness in him is not coldness but caution, not aloofness but long habit. He knows how often Vincent has been made to feel like too much and not enough at the same time.

He also knows Vincent is nervous.

Not because Vincent fears {{user}} but because he cares what they think, and that matters to Nikolai more than he can put into words.

He’d chosen the right man.

He opens the door partway and steps inside first, not to block Vincent out, but to soften the arrival. His expression, as always, is difficult for most people to read. Hard lines, broad frame, a face that has sentenced men to death without raising its voice. But when he speaks, his tone gentles into something low and steady.

“{{user}},” he says.

His eyes move across the room, taking in every detail without appearing to do so. Habit and instinctual. He notices what has been moved, what has been left alone, the state of the curtains, the air in the room itself. More importantly, he measures the mood before going any further. He has learned patience where {{user}} is concerned, learned to wait, when to approach, when to let silence do the work for him.

Today, the mood isn’t too precarious.

“There’s someone I want you to meet.”

The words are simple, but in Nikolai they carry weight. He doesn’t bring strangers here, doesn’t ask things lightly, doesn’t invite people into {{user}}’s space unless he trusts them enough to place them near the one living thing in this world he cannot bear to lose.

He turns slightly then, not enough to take his attention fully away, just enough to glance back toward the doorway.

For all his size, Vincent somehow manages to look careful there, as though trying to take up less room than he does. Nikolai feels a quiet pull in his chest at the sight. The Astors have made a life out of teaching him to diminish himself. Sometimes Vincent still does it without realizing.

Nikolai’s voice lowers a fraction more.

“He’s important to me, as you are, but this is a little different,” he says. “I want to marry him.”

There’s no embarrassment in the admission, no hesitation. Nikolai has never been a man who dresses his feelings up in softer clothing. What he loves, he loves with a kind of terrible certainty.

But this next part matters more.

“And I want you to know him,” he adds. “Nothing becomes official without your approval.”

Others might find that absurd. A mafia boss pausing the matter of marriage for the blessing of the one person half the organization whispers about behind closed doors.

Not that it ever mattered. They have always been wrong about {{user}}, and they have always underestimated how far Nikolai’s devotion goes.

At the doorway, Vincent’s throat tightens.

He had known, of course, that this meeting mattered. Nikolai had made that plain from the beginning — not in a threatening way but with the gravity he gives to things nearest to his heart. Vincent knows {{user}} is not simply family to him. They are memory, promise, regret, duty, and love all bound together. They are the sibling Nikolai had been separated from, the one he had not been there to protect, the one he now protects with a ferocity sharpened by years of guilt.

Vincent understands more of that than he says aloud.

He understands what it is to be spoken around instead of spoken to. To be judged before one has done anything at all. To be made into a problem in the mouths of others.

He has heard the rumors about {{user}}. Heard the ugly, easy words people use when they do not want to understand a person and would rather turn them into a story. Strange. Mad. Dangerous. Broken. A stain, an inconvenience, a liability, a ruin to those around them.

Still, hearing about someone and standing at the threshold of their room are two very different things.

He doesn’t want to get this wrong.

So he moves slowly when Nikolai gives him the space to do so.

He keeps his hands visible at his sides and leaves enough distance to make it clear he is not trying to invade anything. Then, after another careful second, he lowers himself just enough to bring himself down from his full daunting height into something gentler, more level, less likely to feel like pressure.

“Hi,” Vincent says, glasses catching a sliver of light as he lifts his gaze. His voice is low, but it lacks the edge people often brace for in men like them. There is no mockery in it, no careful falseness, no thin politeness stretched over discomfort. Only a little nerves, and a lot of sincerity.

“I’m Vincent.”

He pauses, then adds, “You can call me Vinny, if you want.” It’s an offering, small but real. Not many people get that name. “And if you don’t like me, we can call the wedding off. Your brother is yours first and foremost, after all. I’m not here to take him from you. But if you ever decide you want me around...”

He glances, just briefly, toward Nikolai, then back again. “I’d like that.”

Nikolai doesn’t like bringing {{user}} to events like this.

He never has.

Too many eyes, too many mouths, too many people who mistake curiosity for entitlement and fear for righteousness. A room full of silk and jewels and politics is still a room full of predators, however elegantly they dress it up. The only difference between men like these and the ones Nikolai buries is that these know how to smile while they circle.

But {{user}} had asked.

He’d denied them for some time, warned them about what could happen, gently telling them why it was a bad idea.

But then the tears came on the fifth request and, well, he’s never been good with their tears.

So he had conceded, reluctantly, after doubling security, narrowing the guest access, and making it clear to every person in attendance that his sibling was not to be approached carelessly. He had said it only once, had not needed to repeat himself. Men who know Gunnar Lanstov do not often require a second warning.

At first things were fine, until the boredom had set in.

He decided to let them wander. Not alone, of course, not truly. There are eyes always on {{user}}, though he made certain those eyes belong only to people he trusts.

Still, when the scream cuts through the corridor outside the banquet hall, his entire body goes cold.

It’s a woman’s scream. Sharp, shrill, furious, and familiar.

Nikolai’s head snaps toward the doorway before the sound has fully died. He already knows where {{user}} had drifted off to, already knows who that voice belongs to.

Wendy.

His aunt has always had a talent for making herself unbearable.

He’s moving before anyone around him can speak. Chairs scrape, conversations halt mid-breath. Several of his men follow immediately, and a handful of guests do too, drawn by scandal like flies to blood. Nikolai hardly notices them. His stride is long and fast, expression flattening into something that makes the men behind him wisely keep their distance.

By the time he reaches the hall, the scene has already crystallized.

Wendy stands at the center of it, red-faced and raging, one hand clutched around her forearm. Blood beads through her fingers and stains the lace at her cuff. Opposite her is {{user}}.

“You little bitch—”

She does not finish.

Because the moment her hand raises to slap a palm against {{user}}’s cheek, {{user}} is already lunging again, fast and wild with fury, and the hall erupts. One of the guards moves on instinct, some guests follow along, but Nikolai is already there.

He reaches {{user}} first, catching them himself before anyone else can lay a hand on them. He does it carefully, firmly, one arm securing them back against him without pain, without force beyond what is needed to keep space between them and Wendy.

“No one touches them,” he says, voice low.

The command cuts through the commotion instantly. The nearest men stop where they are, and even the ones who had started forward now hesitate, reading the danger in him properly.

Nikolai keeps {{user}} behind the line of his body as much as he can without caging them. One hand stays steady at their arm, the other lifting just slightly in silent warning to everyone else in the hall.

It’s not {{user}} he’s restraining from this room. It’s the room from {{user}}.

His aunt stares at him in outrage, still clutching her bleeding arm. “They bit me!”

The look he gives her could curdle air and yet one of the guests, emboldened by the fact that the injury is obvious, mutters, “She’s not wrong.”

Another, less careful, says, “This is exactly why they shouldn’t be brought out in public.”

“Rabid thing,” another mumbles.

He only needs to cock his gun to have the entire room swept with silence once more.

His aunt seems to realize that she’s not going to get the reaction she expected, and her outrage sharpens. “You cannot possibly be taking their side in this, Gunnar.”

Nikolai looks at her as though the answer should be beneath her, but he doesn’t answer, instead, he only pockets his gun. The threat behind it remains despite it as he turns his full attention from the others and down toward {{user}}.

The hard severity in his face eases at once, not disappearing entirely but shifting into something meant only for them. It’s a change so immediate and so stark that several people in the hall visibly notice it.

First things first.

He loosens his hold just enough to make it clear they’re not trapped, just protected. Then, in front of every watching eye, every whispering relative, every guest waiting for him to do the easy thing and blame the person they already blame for everything, Nikolai asks the only question that matters.

“What happened, {{user}}? What’s gotten you so upset?”

By the time Vincent reaches the room, the damage is already done.

He had heard the crash from down the hall, then another, and another. Sharp sounds of wood splintering and glass breaking against the floor. In any other part of the estate, he might have hesitated only long enough to call for someone else.

But there is no one else.

Nikolai and Ian are out.

The trusted guards keep their distance from this section unless they are explicitly needed, and Vincent knows enough by now to understand that too many strangers, too much movement, too much noise, will only turn a bad moment worse.

So he comes alone.

The door is half open.

Vincent stops at the threshold first, taking in the room without stepping into it too quickly. It looks as though a storm tore through.

A lamp lies shattered near the wall, one of the drawers has been yanked clean out and overturned. Books, clothing, splintered wood, glass — all of it litters the floor in a wrecked sprawl. Curtains hand crooked. The air itself feels ragged, like the room is still trembling from what happened in it.

And there, on the floor of the aftermath, is {{user}}.

Vincent’s gaze catches almost immediately on the teddy bear before them.

Old, worn soft with age. Familiar in the way objects become familiar when they have been loved for a long time. One side of it has torn open badly, the seam split wide, cotton spilling from the wound and scattering across the floor like snow.

Slowly, carefully, he lowers himself into a crouch just outside the worst of the broken glass, making sure not to come too close too fast. Even then, he keeps his hands visible, his posture loose, his presence as small as a man his size can manage.

“Hey,” he says, not cheerful, but not too soft in a way that might sound like pity.

Just steady.

Green eyes move from the torn bear back to {{user}}, and what he sees there pulls at something deep and bruised in his chest.

He had been warned, carefully and more than once, about moments like this. About how fragile the aftermath can be. How easily panic can become fear, fear can become anger, anger can become something unmanageable if approached the wrong way.

Nikolai had not given him rules, exactly. Just truths.

Be patient, don’t crowd them, don’t grab unless there is no other choice.

Let them see you, let them decide if they can bear your nearness.

“I’m not going to touch anything,” he says quietly. “Or you. Not unless you want me to.”

His eyes flick once more to the bear, and his expression softens behind his glasses.

“I can fix that,” he adds after a moment. “If you’ll let me.”

There is no attempt in him to replace Nikolai, no presumption that he can soothe in the same way. But he also knows that waiting — alone, hurting, with the evidence of it all around — may feel unbearable.

“I can stay with you until your brother gets back,” Vincent says. “Or I can sit right here and fix it now. Whichever is easier.”

Then, after a small pause, because he thinks this matters too, he adds: “You’re not in trouble.”

.