Page 46 of Reign
If he’d simply been cruel, if he’d decided the son he made had no right to his own history because power mattered more than personhood, then hating him would be clean.
But it isn’t clean. I know the shape of his damage and what Salvatore did to him. I know what losing him did, what being exiled and gutted by love did to the man who raised me.
Ruslan knew what it meant to love a Vieri and barely survive it. He saw his own disaster wearing my face and didn’t want to watch his son become a mirror. So no, I cannot hate him as much as I want. That might be the most annoying part.
Understanding is not forgiveness; I have learned that much. Understanding why a man places a hand over your mouth does not change the fact that you suffocated. Understanding why your father buried the past does not give you back the years spent walking over the grave without knowing what was beneath your feet.
I can understand Ruslan’s fear and can’t really hate him for wanting to spare me his pain. I can, however, be furious that he thought he had the right to do so. That is the distinction I’ve been living inside for months.
The irony is that Ruslan has become my confidant.
For most of my life, my father was not a man I confided in. He was authority, disappointment, strategy, tradition, and old Bratva cruelty dressed in the expensive coat of discipline.
Then I became Pakhan, he retired to Kolomna, to the modest villa he had kept since before the family’s exile from the Five Families. It’s a small, stubborn place that did not fit the scale of his name.
Nothing grand or marble enough to impress cowards. A villa with old walls, a garden he pretends not to care about, a terrace where he drinks vodka in winter, and four rooms. He went there after I took over, and slowly, insultingly, became easier to speak to once he no longer had a throne under him.
Maybe men become honest only after power stops needing them. Or maybe I only started listening once I had enough power not to fear what honesty could cost.
Either way, I find myself thinking of him more often now when the memories come back too sharply. He knows what it is to love the wrong man. He knows what it is to let politics turn a heart into a crime scene. He knows what it is to lose and keep living in a way that looks like strength from far away and misery up close.
I need to see him. Not Ruslan Dragovich, the retired Pakhan. Not the old wolf who still makes men twice my size lower their voices when he enters a room. Not the architect of half my damage and the keeper of secrets that shaped my life without permission.
My father.
The decision comes while I’m sitting in my office at Saint Helena with a half-open folder on my desk and a memory of Vincenzo’s mouth making it impossible to read anything else.
The document in front of me is about border taxation and weapons movement through a minor corridor in the north, nothing urgent enough to justify the three times I’ve read the same line without absorbing it.
A fire burns low in the hearth because the old stone never really warms. My phone sits face down beside the folder. I know if I turn it over, there will be no message from Vincenzo.
Obedient bastard.
My hand tightens around the pen until it creaks, then I throw it across the office. It hits the opposite wall and drops behind the side table with a pathetic little clatter.
A knock lands on the door almost immediately, and I know it’s Kai. The man can hear a mood change through stone.
“Enter,” I say.
He steps in, gaze moving first to me, then to the folder, then toward where the pen lays. “Difficult contract?”
“Fuck off.” I stand and button my jacket. “I’m going to Kolomna.”
Kai doesn’t ask why. That’s one of the reasons he’s still alive and trusted despite the lies he once helped perpetuate. His gaze does sharpen, though, enough to tell me he understands this isn’t routine.
“Now?”
“No, Kai, next spring,” I say, watching his lips twitch. “Yes, now.”
He nods. “I’ll arrange the car.”
“No convoy.”
His expression turns flat. “No.”
I look at him, but he simply looks back. This is the problem with competent men. They form opinions and then stand by them.
“I’m not arriving at my father’s villa like I’m invading a small country,” I say.
