Page 134 of Reign
I turn my head slowly and look at him. He goes silent instantly.
Vincenzo hears the movement. “Are you interrogating someone right now?” he asks.
I pause.
“Nikolaj,” Vincenzo says. “Are you in the middle of an interrogation?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“Whether you’re going to yell at me more if I say yes.”
Vincenzo lets out a sound that’s half disbelief, half fury. “Unbelievable.”
“I answered your call.”
“You should havemadethe call,” Vincenzo says. “That is the point.”
I drag a hand over the back of my neck and turn farther away from the room, staring at the stone wall as if it might offer advice. It does not. “I know.”
Vincenzo hears the apology trying to form and doesn’t let it save me. “No, you don’t. If you knew, I wouldn’t be standing here feeling like I had to chase down the safety of the man I love through spies and bank trails.”
There it is again.The man I love.
It hits differently the second time. Worse. Better. I don’t know. The whole room feels too small for those words, for blood, for the fact that Vincenzo is angry because he is afraid, and I am angry because being loved this openly still catches in me like a blade.
My voice lowers despite myself. “You’re scared.”
“Of course I’m scared,” Vincenzo snaps. “Someone wants you dead.”
“People always want me dead.”
“I don’t care about always,” Vincenzo says. “I care aboutnow.”
For one brief, stupid second, the whole argument could turn. I feel it. The edge where I could step back, admit it, tell him I should have called, tell him Arseniy warned me, and I didn’t want to hand him another problem while Lucien was already eating holes through his house. I could give him the part of me beneath the arrogance and let the fight become something else.
But Piotr picks that exact moment to cough blood onto the floor.
The sound jerks me back into the room. Back into the work. Back into Helena Byrne, the bounty, and the fact that whatever I feel for Vincenzo does not change the fact that there are bodies and names and decisions waiting on me right now.
“I have this under control,” I say.
Vincenzo goes silent, and I know, instantly, that I’ve chosen the wrong sentence again.
When he speaks, his voice is cold enough to frost the line. “Then by all means, Pakhan, handle it.”
“Vincenzo,” I say, but his name comes out sharper because I hear him stepping back behind title and distance, and I hate it.
“No,” Vincenzo says. “You wanted to keep this to yourself. Keep it.”
“That is not what I want.”
“It’s what you chose.”
My temper snaps fully then, hard enough to make my own voice dangerous. “I chose not to drag you into another war when your own house is still bleeding from Lucien.”
“You do not get to decide what I can survive,” Vincenzo says.
