Page 90 of Reign
The line changes something in his face. Not pity, he’s too good at respecting violence to insult me with pity. Just understanding, plain, painful, and older than either of us has any right to be.
“You don’t have to do that part alone anymore,” he says.
My chest tightens so hard I nearly look away. “That’s a dangerous thing to promise,” I tell him.
He lifts one hand to my face, thumb brushing the last damp from my temple that might be shower water or sweat or both. “I know.”
And because he does know, because he says it with eyes open to the whole ugly shape of me and not some prettier version he’s invented to make this easier, I let myself believe him for one impossible second.
Then I kiss him, because I’ve had enough death for one night and his mouth is the only thing in the room that still tastes like life.
twenty-five
Ruslan
ThevillainKolomnais quieter than it ever used to be.
That ought to feel like peace at my age. Men spend half their lives saying they want quiet, then the quiet arrives, and they realize too late that what they actually want is to be spared their own thoughts.
I sit on the same terrace where I once let Salvatore Vieri make me believe in futures I had no fucking business touching, and the silence here presses on me harder now than gunfire ever did. It sits in the garden below, in the black branches moving against the evening sky, in the old stone under my boots, in the spaces where laughter and argument and footsteps used to be.
The house behind me is lit only in two rooms because I don’t need the rest anymore. One old man rattling around a villa built for stolen weekends and impossible things doesn’t require much electricity.
The cold gets into my bones faster these days.
Not enough to keep me inside, but enough to make itself known. It sits behind my left eye too, that old ache, a subtle pressure at first, then sharper if I ignore it. Some days I tell myself it’s age, some days I tell myself it’s the scar. Some days, I don’t bother lying about what I know.
Some wounds keep their own calendar. They throb when memory gets too close and pulse in bad weather. They remind a man where the knife entered, even when the skin itself has long since healed into something the mirror can live with.
I lift the glass and knock back another mouthful of vodka. It burns going down, but not enough. Nothing burns enough anymore unless it comes with a name.
Tonight, the pain is low and stubborn, like a nail being slowly pressed into bone. The irony is that today is the 16th of February, a day I hate and love more than any other day—the date that once sealed my exile. Salvatore’s birthday.
I pour more vodka and drink again.
The garden below is a dark blur of winter-stiff shrubs and old stone borders. I used to have a gardener out here twice a week. Then once a week. Then every two weeks. Then I told him to leave half of it alone because there’s something more honest about a place going slightly to ruin when the people inside it have done the same.
The olive trees are still there, though wrong for this part of the world and stubborn enough to survive anyway, dragged all the way here years ago because some younger, more arrogant version of me couldn’t bear to lose every trace of the coast.
Salvatore laughed when I first told him that if I can’t have Italy, I’ll make Russia accommodate me. He said that sounds exactly like the kind of territorial bullshit I’d come up with, then kissed me in the kitchen with his hands still smelling like basil because he’d been cooking something slow on the stove, and I can’t stop staring at him in my house.
My house.
Our terrace.
Our last night.
It’s all still here if I’m drunk enough and the light goes strange at the right time.
I close my eyes and lean my head back against the chair.
Nikolaj has turned into something worse than I ever was in my prime.
That should probably shame me more than it does. Maybe I’m too tired for shame. Maybe I spent it all decades ago. Maybe there’s only so much of a man left by the time his children start becoming the final proof of all the ways he failed.
My youngest son is ruthless in a way that doesn’t bother pretending to be strategic. I used to think he was all fury and edge, and that time would teach him restraint. Instead, time handed him more power and less mercy.
He took what Arseniy and I built and sharpened it until even the family started looking at him with the same caution they once reserved for me.
