Page 107 of Reign
“Why warn me?”
Arseniy looks away for a second, toward nothing I can see. When he speaks, his voice is lower. Less polished. Older.
“Because I had five years,” he says. “Five years to sit with my own sins and watch them come back around to take what I thought was a life I wanted.”
He laughs once under his breath, but there’s no humor in it. “I didn’t love my wife.”
I’d always suspected it without ever naming it. Arseniy did many things well, but tenderness with her had never looked natural on him. Dutiful. Respectful. Careful, maybe. But never alive.
“She was chosen for me,” he continues. “Good blood. Good family. Good politics. A wife who fit what was expected on paper and in public. I did my duty. I married her. I gave her respect and protection. Everything a Dragovich husband is supposed to give, but it still wasn’t love.”
He rubs a hand over his mouth, and I see, for the first time in years, the crack underneath the controlled face. Not weakness, but honesty too long buried to come out clean.
“But I loved the child,” he says.
The words hit like a punch I don’t defend against.
I knew that already, maybe, in the abstract. Knew it the way one knows all fathers or near-fathers carry some claim to what hasn’t even arrived yet. But hearing him say it aloud is different.It takes the old choice I made and strips away every strategic layer until the body is visible underneath.
I killed what he loved.
Necessary. Treasonous. Structurally justified. All the clean words still exist, and none of them protect me from the shape of that truth in his mouth.
Arseniy’s eyes lift back to mine. “I may never forgive you for that.”
There it is.
Not shouted or dramatic. Just laid down in the center of the room where both of us can look at it and stop pretending time softened anything important.
I hold his gaze and nod once because there is nothing else to do with a truth like that.
Then he says, “But I understand.”
For one second, I genuinely don’t know what to do with my face.
The words don’t fit. Not after everything. Not after the silence, the exile, the weight of what sits between us every time his name even enters the house. But he says them and means them, and the meaning is worse than absolution because it doesn’t erase the act. It just reaches across it and says, ‘I know what built the hand that did it.’
Arseniy leans forward, elbows on knees again, all the old gravity in him returned. “Duty is not a choice,” he says.
The old family line.
The Dragovich way.
I hear it in my father’s voice, in tutors’ voices, in my own voice from years ago when I still thought repeating something enough might make it holy instead of only useful.
Duty is not a choice.
Duty is not a feeling.
Duty is not fairness, mercy, or desire.
It is structure.
It is sacrifice with better tailoring.
It is the knife passed hand to hand, so no one individual has to feel too responsible for the blood.
“And that makes it all right?”
