Page 177 of Reign
I laugh once, broken and vicious. “You have no idea how badly I want to believe you.”
“I’ll spend the rest of my life making you believe me,” Vincenzo says.
The rest of my life—the line lands too hard.
Because he has one.
He has a life.
He is alive.
My knees nearly give.
Vincenzo sees it and steps in, but I catch him first, both hands fisting in the front of his shirt. For one second, I just hold the fabric, breathing like I’ve been running for a month and only just reached air. He stands completely still under my grip, letting me decide whether the next movement is violence or surrender.
I don’t know which one it is when I drag him into me.
The embrace is brutal. It is not tender at first; it is impact. Punishment and proof. My arms close around him so hard he grunts, and the sound sends panic through me until I loosen by a fraction and then tighten again because I can’t help it.
He is warm against me. Thin. Shaking. Alive. His heart beats against my chest, fast and real and impossible, and the moment I feel it, the sob that rips out of me has no dignity left at all.
Vincenzo’s arms come around me at once. “I’m sorry,” he says into my shoulder, over and over now, voice breaking fully. “I’m sorry, Nikolaj. I’m so sorry.”
I bury my face in his neck and shake apart. Not the same way as before. Not the grief on the floor at Saint Helena. This is something worse and better, rage and relief tearing through the same door at once.
I’m crying because he’s alive. I’m crying because he let me think he wasn’t. I’m crying because his name is Dragovich now, and because for one month I said goodnight to a ring like it could answer me.
Vincenzo’s hand returns to my cheek, softer now, and I let it stay.
“You’re really here,” I say, and the words are barely a sound. “You’re alive.”
“Yes.”
“You’re mine.”
His eyes close like the word is a mercy he doesn’t deserve. “Yes,” Vincenzo whispers. “I’m yours.”
I look at the sea behind him, then the villa above the beach, glowing warm in the last of the sunset. The house that served as a mausoleum for a week. The island that was supposed to be ours but became mine alone. The place where I came to disappear because I thought that was the closest thing to being with him I had left.
I press the ring into his palm and close his fingers around it with my own. “Put it back on,” I say.
Vincenzo looks at me, tears sliding down his face. “Nikolaj.”
“Not because I forgive you,” I say, voice ruined. “Because you were never allowed to die wearing it and leave me with a ghost.”
He looks down at the ring in his hand, then back at me. “I love you,” he says.
I close my eyes because that still hurts.
“I love you too,” I say, and the words come out like a wound reopening. “And right now, I fucking hate you for making that matter this much.”
Vincenzo nods, crying openly now. “I know. I hear you, my love, and I am so sorry.”
I don’t tell him to stop saying it. I just stand there with his hand trapped between mine, the ring waiting to return to the living, and the sea moving around Isle Lucia like it always knew the dead were liars if they loved hard enough to come home.
forty-one
Vincenzo
