Page 174 of Reign
That lands like another slap, and I stare at him. “You… what?”
“I signed half of the Five Families holdings under my direct control to King interests through quiet channels. The half I couldmove without collapsing the structure before the summit. The other half was signed back over to Salvatore. He should receive the papers within a week.”
For one long second, I have no words.
He left it.All of it.
Title, empire, chair, bloodline machinery, every room that had turned him into the King of the Five Families and kept him lonely enough to drink himself to sleep for eight years.
He gave half to Kieran King to buy death as a disguise and signed the other half back to his father, the old king, who should have had enough pain by now and apparently will receive the empire as an inheritance from a son who refused to remain a ghost in his own life.
“You left everything,” I say.
Vincenzo nods. “Yes.”
“For me.”
“Forus,” he says. “To have a future with you.”
The answer should soften something, but it doesn’t. Because under it, beneath the impossible miracle of his living body and the knowledge that he gave up the entire world he wore like armor, there is still the month I grieved.
I hold up the ring between us, and his eyes drop to it immediately. His face breaks, which only makes me angrier.
“I buried you with this in my hand,” I say.
His eyes lift back to mine, full of pain. “I know.”
“No, you fucking don’t,” I snap, and the scream finally tears out of me. “You don’t know. You weren’t there! You weren’t in that car when the line went dead. You weren’t there when they said the body was yours. You weren’t there when I held this and believed it was all I had left of my husband.”
His mouth trembles at the word. I keep going because if I stop, I’ll drown.
“You let me think you died,” I shout. “You let me hear you say goodbye. You let me lose you again. Again, Vincenzo! Do you understand that? I had you ripped out of me once by everyone else, and then you did it yourself.”
His face is wet now. I hope it hurts him. I hope every fucking word cuts.
“I came back here because I stopped being a person,” I say, voice cracking so badly I hate it. “I handed the family to Arseniy. I left Saint Helena. I sat on this fucking beach for a week trying to decide if I understood my father’s gun better than I understood my own life. I talked to the ocean because you weren’t here to talk back.”
“Nikolaj—”
“Don’t!” I shout, and he flinches. I am crying now. I realize it only because the world has gone blurry and my face is wet. The anger is no longer clean enough to hide it.
The tears come hot and humiliating, and I hate him for seeing them. Hate him. Love him. Want to put my hands on him and make sure he is real so badly that my bones ache with it.
“You ripped my heart out,” I say, each word shredded. “You left me to die with it still beating in my fucking hand.”
Vincenzo stands there and takes it.
That makes me furious, too.
He doesn’t defend himself fast enough. Doesn’t interrupt. Doesn’t tell me there was no other choice with the kind of polished certainty he could use to make murder sound reasonable. He stands there in the sand with tears on his face and lets me carve into him because he knows he earned the blade.
“Say something,” I snap.
His jaw tightens. “I deserve every word you’re saying.”
I laugh through the tears, and it sounds awful. “That’s what you have? Martyrdom?”
His eyes flash then, pain sharpening into temper at last. There he is; not dead, not a ghost, not some noble hallucination come to receive my grief. My Vincenzo, alive enough to get pissed off.
