Page 154 of Reign
Kai reaches for me. “Nikolaj—”
“No!”
I hit redial with shaking fingers. It rings twice, then fails. I try again. Fail. Again. Fail. My hands are shaking so hard the phone nearly slips out of my grip.
Then I make a sound I have never heard from myself before, something gutted and furious and hysterical, and slam my fist into the back of the front seat.
“Drive!” I roar.
“Nikolaj,” Kai says, voice urgent, “listen to me. We don’t know—”
“I heard an explosion!”
“I know.”
“I heard it, Kai!”
“I know,” he says again, sharper now, trying to cut through the panic before it consumes the whole vehicle. “The line dropped. That does not confirm he’s dead.”
“Don’t say that word.”
“Nikolaj—”
“Don’t you fucking say that word in this car.”
Kai’s jaw tightens. He shifts closer, not touching now because he’s smart enough to know I might break his wrist if he does. “Then stay useful.”
The words hit like a slap.
I turn on him, vision blurred with rage and something worse. “What?”
“Stay useful,” he repeats, eyes locked on mine, calm in that brutal way he gets when emotion will kill faster than bullets. “If Vieri is alive, he needs you useful. Not hysterical. Not blind. Not tearing through our own men before we arrive because your head has gone somewhere it can’t help him. Breathe. Think. Command. Be the Pakhan.”
I want to hit him. For one long, vicious second, I actually consider it. Then Vincenzo’s voice echoes in my head, the same line I told him.
No matter what happens, we’ll always have Isle Lucia.
I drag in a breath that feels like swallowing glass.
It doesn’t work, so I take another.
My hands are still shaking. My heart is still trying to beat its way out of my chest. The phone is still dead in my lap. But a thin, vicious thread of control starts to wrap around the panic because Kai is right, and I hate him for it.
“Maksim,” I say, voice hoarse. “Status.”
Maksim has his phone pressed to one ear in the front, his other hand gripping the wheel as the car takes another turn.
“Multiple reports of an explosion at the summit venue, lower east service wing. Fire suppression activated. Local emergency response en route. Our first team is thirty seconds from breach.”
“Vieri extraction.”
“Signal lost with two of his inner team.”
My stomach turns. “Byrne’s people?”
“Unknown.”
“Kai,” I say, not looking away from the windshield. “Pull every camera in a three-block radius. Traffic, hotel, private, body cams if anyone’s stupid enough to have them live. I want thermal if we can get it.”
