Page 148 of Reign
And I have his ring on my hand to prove it.
I turn my face into his hair and close my eyes, letting him hold me so tightly it almost hurts.
“Still angry?” he murmurs against my neck after a while.
“Yes,” I say, because I promised honesty before control, and apparently that applies to both of us now.
His arms tighten. “Still mine?”
I look at the ring on my finger and feel my heart answer before my mouth does.
“Forever,” I say.
Nikolaj goes utterly still around me for one long, devastating second.
Then he kisses me again, like forever has finally learned how to answer back.
thirty-six
Nikolaj
I’vepacedapathinto the carpet by the time the second hour passes.
The hotel room is too clean for the kind of thoughts in my head. Too neutral. Too expensive. Too fucking calm.
The room service tray Maksim bullied me into ordering sits under silver lids near the table, cooling into something useless because the idea of eating while Vincenzo is in a room full of men deciding whether I remain a problem or become an ally makes my stomach feel full of broken glass.
Since I’m not yet a permanent member of the Five Families, he didn’t call me to the summit.
Having me in that room while he exposes Lucien’s rot and forces Byrne and Reyes to answer for their side of the sabotage would give his enemies a way to turn the whole thing into a Moscow power grab.
If I’m there, it becomes personal. If I’m there, someone can point at me and say Vieri is compromised by the DragovichPakhan before Vincenzo gets the chance to prove his house was framed.
I know all of that.
It doesn’t stop me from wanting to put my fist through the wall.
Kai stands near the desk with a tablet in his hand, tracking whatever quiet updates his people can pull from the perimeter without breaching Vincenzo’s security outright.
Maksim is sprawled in the armchair by the window, one ankle crossed over the other, a knife turning slowly between his fingers because the bastard claims it helps him think. He has been ‘thinking’ for two hours and fifteen minutes. If he flips that blade one more time, I’m going to take it and put it through the lamp.
“Stop pacing,” Maksim says.
I keep pacing. “Stop breathing.”
Maksim looks at Kai. “He’s pleasant.”
Kai does not glance up from the tablet. “He’s in love and excluded from a room where people may be plotting his death. Pleasant would be concerning.”
“That sounds like sympathy,” Maksim says.
Kai’s mouth barely moves. “It’s an assessment.”
I turn at the window and start back across the room. The city looks wrong from up here—too distant from the place where everything important is happening.
Vincenzo is fifteen minutes away by car. Ten, if the roads are cleared. Six, if I let Maksim drive as he did in Warsaw, which I will if I have to, and damn the bodies left behind.
Fifteen minutes feels like an ocean. Fifteen minutes feels like every year I lost and every door I never reached in time.
