Page 8 of Reign
I’m going to wear a suit worth more than most families make in a year.
I’m going to greet him as the King of the Five Families.
I’m going to sit across from him at a table full of polished enemies and talk business in a voice that never shakes.
I’m going to act as though the man seated opposite me isn’t the same one who once pinned me to chapel stone with murder in his eyes and want in his mouth, the same one who carved himself into me so thoroughly that I still reach for his absence when I’m too drunk to remember pride.
That’s what I’m going to do.
What I don’t know is what it’ll cost to stay that way.
“I’ll do my job,” I say.
“So will he,” he says. “That’s not what I asked.”
I turn fully then and lean one hip against the window ledge, facing him.
“What exactly would you like me to say, Lucien? That I’m going to throw him against the nearest wall and demand an apology from a man who doesn’t remember owing me one? That I’m going to drag eight years of blood and politics into the open because somewhere under all this fucking silk and ceremony I still miss the boy who loved me? There’s nothing to do except my job.”
The room goes quiet after that. Lucien’s face doesn’t change, but I know him well enough to see the sympathy he’s trying not to show too openly. I hate that look from anyone else. From him, I tolerate it because he’s earned the right.
“You really did love him,” he says finally, and he doesn’t make it a question.
My mouth curves, bitter and brief. “Don’t sound so surprised.”
“I’m not surprised.” He glances toward the desk where the velvet box now sits shut and unobtrusive among ledgers and coded files. “I’ve seen the evidence for years. I just think hearing that you’ll be seeing him again has forced you to admit the shape of it.”
Admit it.
As though I’ve ever stopped knowing it.
I look away first. “There are a lot of things I’ve admitted in private that I’d never be stupid enough to repeat in public.”
“And with me?”
“With you, I’m selective.”
That almost gets a smile out of him again. Instead, he exhales quietly and shifts the subject with the mercy of a man who knows when to stop pressing on a bruise.
“He’s not the same as he was at Vintermoor.”
“No one is.”
Lucien nods. “Reports say he’s worse than his father ever was. Worse than Arseniy, too, in some ways. He’s built his own following. Half the Russian sectors now answer directly to him. There are rumors that his father defers to him in closed rooms.”
“I’ve read the reports.”
“I know. I’m saying them out loud so you remember you’re not walking into a memory.”
That hits harder than I’d like, because he’s right.
Whatever version of Nikolaj lives in my head—whatever composite of the boy from Vintermoor and the man from myworst nights—still shares space under my skin, and that isn’t who’s coming to the summit.
The man who will be arriving is twenty-eight. Pakhan. A leader forged out of blood, trauma, and whatever was left of him after memory loss gutted the softer pieces.
The reports are consistent in the ways that matter: calm detachment, ruthlessness, and no remorse. His father’s fear was treated as fact, not rumor. A younger sister who serves as his assassin and his two cousins as his right-hand men. Men loyal beyond lineage, which is always more dangerous than inherited obedience.
He killed Arseniy’s pregnant wife in front of him after finding out she was a traitor feeding information to a rival Bratva sect. Then he killed that entire sect overnight. Arseniy abdicated soon after.
