Page 172 of Reign
I squeeze my eyes shut.
No.
No, because I know that tone. I know the exact way my name bends in his mouth when he’s trying to get beneath my anger without making me feel handled. I know the breath before the final consonant. I know the softness he never gave anyone else the same way.
My body reacts before my mind can defend itself, a hard, brutal kick of hope through the ribs that I immediately hate.
“Fuck off,” I say, and my voice breaks on it. I shake my head once. “You’re not real.”
“I am,” the voice says.
“No, you’re not.”
“Nikolaj, please turn around,” it says, and the plea in his voice is worse than the voice itself.
I laugh once, sharp and ugly and almost hysterical. “Don’t. Don’t you fucking do that. Don’t use that voice.”
“It’s the only one I have.”
“No,” I snarl, still refusing to look, because the sand beneath me has become the only thing keeping me from falling through the world. “His voice died on the phone.”
A breath catches behind me, and my hands start shaking.
The ring slips, and I catch it against my palm so fast the edge bites into skin. That little pain is the first real thing I can trust. I grip it hard enough to hurt and force air into my lungs, but there isn’t enough. There hasn’t been enough for a month.
“Nikolaj,” Vincenzo says again, closer now. “Please. Look at me.”
I don’t move.
If I turn and it is an empty beach, I am finished.
If I turn and it is him, I might be finished anyway.
“Nikolaj,” Vincenzo says, and this time his voice cracks. “Mio re, turn around.”
The endearment destroys the last of my refusal.
Slowly, like my body has forgotten how movement works, I lift my head and turn.
forty
Nikolaj
Vincenzostandstenfeetaway on the sand, alive.
Alive.
The word doesn’t fit inside my skull.
He looks thinner. That’s the first thing I notice because my mind is trying to be practical to avoid losing itself entirely. His skin is paler beneath the tan, face sharper at the cheekbones, mouth tense, dark hair longer than when I last saw him, and swept back by the wind.
There’s a healing mark along one side of his jaw and a stiffness in the way he holds his left arm close to his ribs. He’s wearing dark trousers and a loose white shirt, the kind he liked on the island, sleeves rolled to his forearms, collar open at the throat.
No crown. No suit. No guards. No wife. No empire hanging off his shoulders like a noose.
Just him—alive and here, looking at me like I am the wound he made and the only place he wants to kneel.
The bourbon glass falls from my hand into the sand as I stare at him. For several seconds, the entire world is the distance between us and the impossible fact of his breathing.
