Page 79 of Reign
Vincenzo reaches out and catches my wrist. “Listen to me,” he says, voice gone low and precise now, the one he uses when he wants me to actually hear him. “I know we can’t be seen together in public. Not like this. Not now. Not while everything around us is still made of dry wood and open flames. I know that.”
I nod once. Because yes. Obviously. Even in the middle of all this, even with his mouth on me and his name on my tongue and eight years of grief dissolving under my hands, I know that. The world outside this room is still the world.
“So, we don’t do it in public,” he says. “We do it privately.”
My brows pull together. “Meaning?”
“Meaning we find somewhere neutral. Somewhere between Moscow and Italy. Not yours and not mine. Somewhere no one would think to attach to either of us.”
I look at him. “Somewhere else.”
He nods once and starts fastening his cufflinks with the kind of careful concentration he uses when he’s trying to sound calm through something that matters too much.
I lean back against the dresser behind me, arms loose at my sides, and try not to let the relief show too obviously on my face. It probably does anyway.
“There’s an island,” I say.
The words come out almost lazily, but my mind is already moving.
His hands stop on the cufflink. “An… island.”
“I’ve been looking at buying one for a while.”
That gets a real laugh out of him, bright and startled and so familiar it almost knocks me sideways. “Of course you have.”
I ignore the tone because I’m already picturing it again. I saw it months ago in a private portfolio Kai put on my desk with other possible acquisition sites. Small enough not to attract attention, isolated enough to mean privacy, close enough to the right flight paths to be practical, far enough from the usual routes to keep the curious and the ambitious away.
It lodged in the back of my head and never fully left. At the time, I told myself it would make a useful bolt hole. A neutral meeting ground. A place to disappear when Moscow got too loud. Now the idea blooms into something more dangerous.
“It’s in the Adriatic,” I continue. “Far enough south to avoid the usual press traffic, far enough north that no one assumes it belongs to some tech billionaire or politician with taste problems. A villa and small cottage on the cliff, restricted airspace.”
Vincenzo stares at me for a second, then he laughs with that genuine disbelief he only ever gives me when I’ve said something so appallingly Nikolaj that even he needs a second to process the scale of it.
“You cannot buy a whole island,” he says.
I look at him flatly. “Why not?”
That only makes him laugh harder, which is a dangerous sound because it makes me want to cross the room and shut his mouth with mine instead of continuing what should probably count as an important discussion.
“Because,” he says, still smiling, “that’s not how normal men solve logistical problems.”
“I’m not a normal man.”
“That is painfully obvious.”
“Also,” I add, because now I’m already thinking, and once I start, I don’t stop, “it would be easier to secure. Private dock. Airstrip, if we wanted one. Enough distance from anything useful that no one would come sniffing without being invited.”
His eyes widen slightly. “You’re actually serious.”
“Yes.”
“Nikolaj.”
“What?”
He sputters for half a second, actually sputters, which I’m going to hold against him forever because it’s adorable and he knows it. “Because that’s— because people don’t just—Nikolaj, you can’t solve every problem by purchasing a landmass.”
“Again,” I say, completely serious, “why not? I have the money, the means, and the reason.”
