Page 51 of Reign
“What if I go back to him and destroy everything again?” I ask.
“Then make certain it is your choice this time,” he answers without hesitation.
I look at him—old, dangerous, and sorry in ways he cannot say plainly, the man who hid my past and the man who understands it better than anyone else alive. For the first time, I see both without needing one to erase the other.
“That’s your advice?”
“It is the only advice I can give right now.” His voice lowers. “If you choose him, choose with your eyes open. Not out of memory alone, out of guilt, or because the body remembers whatthe mind lost. Not because old wounds ache for familiar hands. Choose him because the man you are now wants the man he is now, knowing exactly what that will cost.”
My chest goes tight. “And if I don’t?”
“Then don’t.” He shrugs his shoulders. “But do not spend the next thirty years haunting a small house because you were too proud or too frightened to know the difference.”
That lands like a fucking bullet.
We don’t speak after that. The villa holds the quiet differently than Saint Helena—less like a fortress, more like a place where old grief has been allowed to sit in chairs and become part of the furniture.
I think of Vincenzo leaving my kitchen five months ago because I asked him to. I think of the look on his face: hurt, obedient, and so unbearably full of love that I had almost called him back before the door shut. I think of every memory that has returned since then, every fragment adding weight to a truth I have spent months trying to examine without drowning in it.
The man Iwaschose him.
The man Iamstill wants him.
That is the problem.
That is also the answer.
I understand, suddenly, why my father came here after surrendering power. Not because it is humble, though it is by our standards. Not because it is safe, though it is safer than most places simply because everyone knows better than to disturb him.
He came here because this was where his life existed before exile, before Salvatore became loss, before the family became something he had to harden himself to survive. This modest house is not retirement; it is punishment, shrine, and shelter all at once.
I wonder whether I will ever have a place like that. I wonder whether mine would smell like Vincenzo’s cigarettes and coffee in my kitchen.
That thought is dangerous enough that I stand.
Ruslan watches me but does not comment. “I should go,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
His brows lift slightly, and I realize too late how strange the words sound between us.
“Careful,” he says with a small smile. “Gratitude at this hour can be mistaken for emotional collapse.”
“Don’t ruin it, Papa.”
He smiles faintly at the old endearment. “I would not dare.”
I return his smile, then I turn toward the door, but his voice stops me before I leave the room.
“Nikolaj.”
I turn around, and he looks at me for a long moment, and for once, there is no Pakhan in either of us. No throne. No family. No old empire. Just a father and a son standing in the doorway of a modest villa where too many ghosts have been invited to stay.
“I am sorry,” he says. “I wronged you, even if I had reasons. Even if I believed them to be good. Even if part of me would make the same choice again in that moment, because fear makes a tyrant of every father.”
The room seems to tilt slightly around that. My father has apologized in his life through money, war, silence, and practical concessions. Very rarely through words.
