Page 94 of Reign
His thumb brushes once under my eye, over the scar. “I didn’t know if I was allowed. But then I realized the only thing stopping me was my own fear.”
I close my eyes. “You stubborn man.”
He laughs softly then, and the sound of it after all this time is so achingly familiar, I have to grip him harder just to stay upright.
We don’t speak for a long moment. There is too much to say, too much history, blood, absence, and old mistakes stacked between us like bodies.
We cannot climb over all of it in one night. We cannot undo exile on a terrace just because two old fools still know how to kiss each other and mean it.
But silence between us has always done as much damage as any blade. So, eventually I speak because if I don’t, I know we’ll both start trying to bury this and skip the harder thing.
“I’m not forgiving you tonight,” I tell him quietly. “I may not forgive you at all.”
“I know that too.”
I frown at that. “Then why are you here?”
“Because you were alone with a gun.” His answer comes immediately. “And I heard my name was on the bullet.”
That. More than the apology, more than the kneeling, more than the confession of thirty years of regret. That is the sentence that finally makes something in me give way completely.
Of course, the bastard would still choose to cross every ocean of pride, grief, and shame between us because he can’t bear me dying with his name in the chamber.
“That boy needs to mind his own business,” I laugh, and then I’m crying in the same breath, because age strips men of dignity in exactly the ways youth promises it never will.
Salvatore cups the back of my head and lets me be ugly against him.
“Cuore mio,” he murmurs, and the old endearment in his mouth after all these years is too fucking much. “I’m here. I’m here now.”
I pull him into me and bury my face against his shoulder like I’m trying to climb back into a version of time where none of this has happened yet, and all we have to do is make it through the night. But the night has already taken thirty years.
Eventually, the cold forces movement back into us. Salvatore’s leg is trembling under him, and my own knees feel half-dead. I reach for the cane and hand it to him without a word, then help him up because I can’t bear to watch him struggle to his feet while pretending not to care. He leans on me more thanhe wants to. I say nothing about it. We’ve both earned the humiliation of being mortal in front of each other.
The revolver still lies on the terrace stones where I dropped it. Salvatore looks at it once, then at me.
“Give it to me,” he says. I stare at him as he holds out his hand—no command in the gesture, just quiet certainty. “Give it to me, Ruslan.”
Something old and instinctive in me wants to refuse just because I hate being handled. Then I look at his face and realize this is the line. The first real choice in front of us after everything.
Gun or him. Performance or surrender. Death or this.
So, I hand him the revolver, and his fingers close around it. He opens the cylinder, finds the engraved round, and for one second just looks at it. My name on his mouth for decades, his name on my bullet. The whole fucking pathetic thing.
Then he pockets the round and sets the empty gun on the table.
“No more Russian Roulette,” he says.
I bark out a laugh. “You really are late to start issuing orders.”
“Then consider it a request.”
“It sounds like an order.”
“It always did with me.”
That actually gets a real smile out of me, thin and wrecked though it is.
The villa smells exactly the same when we walk inside. Stone and old wood and whatever faint herbs the kitchen walls have been holding onto for thirty years. The sitting room is dim, lit only by the lamp near the sofa and the low fire I left banked in the grate.
