Page 34 of Reign
I block, absorb, and return a shot straight to his mouth. “And yet you still had to take off your shirt to distract me before starting.”
He laughs through the hit and kicks for the back of my knee, but I sidestep, catch his wrist, and slam him shoulder-first into the nearest padded wall. It barely slows him down. He twists out of my grip and drives a fist into my abdomen hard enough to force the breath out of me in one ugly burst.
We’re matched blow for blow in the old, infuriating way, and that’s what gets me more than the sight of him half naked in my gym. It’s the rhythm of it; the familiarity. I know how he fights and what to expect from him.
The slight drop of his shoulder before he throws left, the way he’ll take a hit if it means getting closer to where he prefers to do damage. And he knows me too, or enough of me to move like the old map is still in his muscles even if his conscious mind had to claw the route back from fractured memory.
He takes another shot to the jaw, and this time I see it properly—that grin.
Not the Pakhan’s cold, terrible version. Not even the smug little baring of teeth he gave us at the summit. This is the old thing—the boyish, infuriating, smug grin from youth. The one that always used to show up in the middle of our worst fights, the one that always used to get my blood pumping for all the wrong reasons.
My heart trips over itself. “Oh, there’s my Bratva stray,” I say before I can stop myself.
His eyes flash dangerously at that. “Shut the fuck up.”
He lunges on the next breath, overcommits just enough, and I take the opening because I’m still me and some habits survive heartbreak out of sheer meanness.
I catch him around the waist, use his momentum, and send both of us crashing down onto the mats hard enough to jar myteeth. But I roll with it, come up on top, pin his wrist to the floor above his head, and get one knee between his thighs before he can buck me off.
He goes still beneath me for one terrible second. Sweat, heat, breath, and old memory slam together so violently that the gym might as well be my bedroom at Vintermoor.
I force a smirk. “You forget your place, Dragovich.”
The words leave my mouth out of pure instinct; old taunt, older pattern, and Nikolaj’s mouth curves up into that grin again.
“Pretty sure I’m exactly where I want to be.”
We both blanch. It happens at the same time as the recognition of it. Not just the line itself, though there’s something horribly familiar in the cadence. It’s the position of our bodies, my hands on his wrists, his hips under mine—the exact sickening coalescence of present into past.
My grip slackens for one fatal heartbeat, but that’s all he needs.
Nikolaj twists us violently, using my own surprise against me, and the world flips as my back hits the mat. He comes over me in one smooth movement, forearm across my throat, thighs bracketing my hips, and one hand planted beside my head while he catches his breath.
I stare up at him and know I should be more alarmed than I am, but the smell of clove cigarettes makes that fucking hard.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
His chest rises and falls hard above me. Up close like this, he looks even more devastating. Mouth bloodied from my fist, scar over his eye making him look feral and rugged, pupils blown wider than pure violence explains.
“To see something,” he asks.
“And how exactly did you get in?”
His mouth twitches. “Your guards are shit.”
I roll my eyes. “As you’ve mentioned.”
“I like consistency.”
“I’m glad one of us is enjoying the break-in.”
That earns me the smallest exhale of something that might have been laughter in another life. Then I remember the question. “What did you come to see?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, his gaze drags over my face in a way that makes the air between us thicken. It’s not a casual look or a tactical check; it’s hungrier. I feel the shift in him before I fully understand it. The violence is still there, but it’s changed in temperature. His ice-blue eyes go dark and molten in a way I haven’t seen in years and have never once survived intact.
“Nikolaj…?” I breathe when his arm lifts from my throat, only to be replaced by his hand.
He grips the side of my neck and under my jaw with enough force to make my pulse jump against his palm, then he uses it to drag me up toward him. The move is so sudden, so intimate, so violently familiar, that by the time I understand what’s happening, his mouth is already on mine.
