Page 86 of Reign
I look at Lucien again. If he wakes before I’m ready to decide whether he gets to keep all his teeth, this will get more irritating than necessary.
“He also knew better,” I say. “That’s the problem. If I can’t trust him with my wife, how can I trust him with my empire?”
Arabella presses her mouth together and gives one small nod. She understands enough of my world to know this isn’t about moral betrayal alone. Lucien didn’t just sleep with my wife. He crossed a professional line that exists specifically because men in our circles are not permitted to let private appetites compromise structural loyalty.
Whatever the emotional excuse, whatever the loneliness, whatever convenience or vodka or bad judgment pulled him into this bed, the act itself proves something ugly and useful all at once: he can be reached where I thought he was disciplined.
I don’t yet know what I’m going to do with that.
She watches me with the kind of dazed disbelief usually reserved for miracles or nervous breakdowns. “You would really let Marie move in and be our surrogate?”
“If she agrees.”
“She would,” Arabella says immediately, then has the grace to look embarrassed by the speed of it.
That almost gets a smile out of me. “Good.”
She studies the marks on my throat again. “Does your… person know?”
The phrasing is almost quaint. It makes something old and tired in me soften just slightly. “Yes.”
“Do they love you?”
The answer is so immediate it doesn’t even feel like a thought. “Yes.”
Her face shifts with that, becoming more wistful. “Then maybe there’s hope for both of us.”
I don’t answer because hope has never been a language I trust enough to speak aloud. Not where Nikolaj is concerned, not yet. Maybe not ever. But the thought of him still sits warm under my skin, and I know Arabella sees that too.
Then, with the ghost of her old sharpness returning, she says, “Marie will think this is some kind of elaborate trap.”
I chuckle at that. “She’s not wrong to.”
“And if I tell her you suggested she move in and carry your child, she might actually faint.”
“That would at least simplify the conversation.”
Arabella smiles through the remnants of tears. Small, fragile, and more genuine than anything I’ve seen from her in months.
Maybe years.
“I married a monster,” she says softly. “And somehow that’s the kindest thing anyone’s offered me in a very long time.”
That lands somewhere I don’t intend to inspect too closely.
We sit in the wreckage of our marriage a little longer after that—my wife on the bed, her lover unconscious on the floor, and me somewhere between husband, co-conspirator, and executioner, trying on friendship like an unfamiliar suit.
It should feel absurd. It does. It also feels more honest than most of the lives we’ve been living.
Eventually, I stand and retrieve the gun from the dresser. Arabella stiffens before she realizes I’m only re-holstering it. “I’ll have Lucien moved,” I say.
She blanches. “Please don’t be too cruel.”
I arch a brow. “Arabella. He slept with the Capo dei Capi’s wife. In his marriage bed.”
She opens her mouth, closes it, and then has the grace to look guilty. “Fair.”
I nod once and walk, but at the door, I pause and look back.
