Page 16 of Reign
The years have put weight on him in all the ways that matter, broadening him through the shoulders and chest until the old athletic leanness has hardened into something denser and more dangerous.
At twenty, he had looked built for speed and impact, a young predator who was all long muscles and arrogant grace, made tostalk hallways in black uniform and scandalize God with every filthy thing that came out of his mouth.
At twenty-eight, he looks built to end wars. There is nothing unfinished about him now. The strength in him has settled and thickened until it reads less like youth and more like inevitability. Now the danger in him is quieter. More expensive and more absolute.
I close my eyes, and I see him again.
More beautiful in a way that feels nearly cruel. A jagged scar over one eye, making him look not ruined but mythic, the kind of man painters in older centuries would’ve called war-touched, and priests would’ve denounced on sight.
A mouth made for violence and sin. Hands marked in black ink. Shoulders built to bear empires or break them. A face I once knew in candlelight and secrecy now sharpened by age into something haunting enough to follow me straight into the bottle.
And God help me, the worst part isn’t that I still want him. It’s that seeing what time has made of him only convinces me I always will.
“You looked at me differently,” I say, taking another drink. “What do you remember?”
The bourbon is almost half gone. I look at the bottle, then give up and slide off the bed, letting my body sink down until I’m on the floor with my back against the base. I stretch my legs out in front of me, bottle resting against my thigh.
It feels more honest down here—less like a king and more like the twenty-something-year-old version of me who watched the door close behind Nikolaj and didn’t leave until morning.
I tip my head back and stare at the ceiling. “Congratulations,” I mutter. “King of the Five Families, and still pathetic over one man.”
One man.
That’s not even true, and that’s what makes it worse because I don’t just love one man. I love a ghost. I love a version of him that no longer exists anywhere except inside of me.
The Nikolaj I carry isn’t the Pakhan in a black suit giving me measured threats across a boardroom table. He isn’t feared across Russian sectors and whispered about now with equal parts terror and devotion, whose men would burn cities down at his nod, and whose younger sister became a blade in heels with the same lethal eyes as his.
He isn’t even the last Nikolaj I actually saw—the one who woke in my bed with all the love gone from his face.
The man I love is the one in between all those things, and the only one I remember in full. The boy with blood on his mouth and blasphemy in his soul. The one I kneeled to in front of my saint, and the one I would have given all of this up for. The boy who fought me as if the world might end and kissed me like he wanted to drag us both into hell before duty could separate us. The one who carved my name into a bullet because he loved me so violently that even his tenderness came in the shape of a threat.
I’m in love with a dead language no one else speaks.
I love him more now, I realize, than I did back then when we were stupid enough to think we could win against our bloodlines. Back when it was desperate, young, and needy. Now, it’s heavy and exhausted, and threaded through everything I am. My love for him has roots in every decision I make, even if it looks nothing like love.
Maybe that’s why the loneliness never leaves. Loneliness implies absence, and what I have is worse than absence. I have presence without return, and memory with no witness. I have eight years of carrying something too alive to bury, and too impossible to share.
I can see the exact faultlines between the man he became and the one I lost.
Only me.
Only fucking me.
The tears hit without much warning. My vision blurs, and I blink hard, annoyed at myself on instinct. Kings do not sit on hotel room floors crying over men they cannot have. Kings drink, fuck, fight, negotiate, repeat. They do not let grief drag them down eight years after the fact.
Except I am not grieving a breakup or an affair that burned out. I am grieving a phantom limb. Someone cut off half of me and sent it back to its homeland with new orders and new scars, and I’ve been stumbling around ever since, trying to convince the world I walk fine.
My chest tightens until my next breath comes out shaky. I press the heel of my hand against my sternum as if I can push it all back, but it doesn’t work. A harsh sound leaves my throat—somewhere between a laugh and a sob—and then the tears spill over properly.
“Fuck,” I whisper, dragging my hand over my face. “How can you still do this to me without even trying?”
I fold forward, elbows on my knees, as my shoulders shake and the tears come faster now. I broke once when he left my room in the East Wing, and I break again now. The awful part is that it feels exactly the same—down to the way my body tries to curl in on itself, and my heart keeps insisting that he’s the other half of it, no matter how many times I tell it that half is gone.
“I love you, even if you don’t ever remember. Even if all you ever feel when you look at me is confusion and contempt.”
I love the missing half of myself. I love a man who looked at me today as though the truth was moving under his skin and he didn’t know whether to trust it. And tomorrow I’ll put on the suit again, knot the tie, smooth the mask back into place, andpretend I’m a king instead of a man kneeling in the ruins of the only thing he ever wanted to keep.
Tonight, though, there’s no one here to perform for.
