Page 170 of Reign
“This island belongs to you and Vincenzo,” Salvatore said as he stood near the kitchen island with one hand around the head of his cane and the other in Ruslan’s grip like they were both still learning how to let people witness contact. “It always did, even if you forced the purchase through like a madman with too much money and no respect for logistics.”
Ruslan looked at me from beside him and said, “We are going back to the villa in Kolomna.”
“Your villa,” I said.
“Our villa,” Salvatore corrected quietly.
That word had landed strangely.
Our.
For them. After thirty years. I should’ve felt bitter; some part of me did, probably. I envied them so violently for one hard second that I had to look away.
They get to leave together. They get to go back to an old house and try to turn regret into a final life. They get gray hair and bad joints and apologies that arrived late, but still breathing. They get to touch each other in daylight and say, “our villa,” as if time had not eaten half of them first.
But I was happy for them too. That’s the fucked-up part about grief. It doesn’t always make a man mean in clean ways. Sometimes it makes room for tenderness you don’t know what to do with.
I looked at Ruslan and Salvatore and wanted to hate them for having what I didn’t, but I couldn’t. Not fully.
Not when I’d seen my father alone on that terrace in Kolomna with a gun and Salvatore’s name on the bullet.
Not when I understood now that getting someone back after believing them lost does not erase the death you already lived through, but it does give the body a place to put its next breath.
“Go,” I told them.
Ruslan watched me for a long moment before he said, “You should not be alone here.”
I looked at him and almost smiled because if anyone alive understood the appeal of isolation as self-destruction, it was the man in front of me. “You don’t get to say that to me.”
Ruslan’s jaw flexed. “No. I suppose I don’t.”
They left that afternoon.
Salvatore hugged me before he boarded the helicopter. It was brief, stiff, and awkward because Vieri men and Dragovich men were all apparently designed by the same emotionally constipated architect.
Still, he held my shoulder afterward and said, “He loved you beyond sense, Nikolaj.”
I looked at him and said, “I know.”
Ruslan kissed my forehead like I was a boy, and I let him because the week had already stripped me of whatever pride would’ve once made that impossible.
Then they were gone.
Now it’s just me.
Me and an island I bought for the love of my life, because I thought enough money, enough distance, enough sea between us and the world might finally give us somewhere no one could touch.
Me and a villa built for two men who only got one weekend inside it. Me and the cottage down the hill emptied of old lovers who had at least earned the right to leave together.
Me and the ring. Always the ring.
Now, I sit on the beach at sunset, with a glass of bourbon and the ring turning slowly between my fingers.
The sand is cool beneath me, though the air still holds the last warmth of the day. The sky burns itself down in layers of orange, rose, and purple over the water, obscene in its beauty. I hate it a little for that.
I roll the ring over my knuckles and catch it against my palm. Black metal. Gold line. My thumb moves over the inside engraving so often that I think I could read it by touch if my eyes were gone.
Vincenzo is everywhere here.
