Page 102 of Reign
For a few seconds, all I hear is my own breathing and the faint rattle of the chain still swinging overhead.
Then a voice behind me says, “You always did break things instead of thinking.”
Everything in me goes still, then I straighten slowly and turn.
Arseniy stands in the doorway.
He’s older than the last time I saw him close enough to matter—older in the real ways, not just the calendar kind. Harder through the face, but leaner.
His hair is darker than mine, grown longer than he used to wear it. There’s a scar on his jaw I don’t remember. His coat is still on, black and severe, boots damp with melted snow. He looks like a man who came straight here instead of hesitating anywhere sensible along the way.
For one stupid second, I think I’m still half in my head, and the gym finally decided to spit out one more ghost. Then I see his gaze drop to my split knuckles, the sweat, the bag on the floor, and he goes colder.
My heart does one hard, ugly kick—then the anger finds it.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I say.
His gaze drags over me once, taking in the sweat and the bag on the floor once more. The look he gives me after that is so familiar it makes my teeth hurt. Old contempt with a thread of reluctant understanding under it. His specialty.
“I heard,” he says. “About your memories.”
I wipe the back of my hand across my mouth and taste salt and copper. “Word travels.”
“With you, it always did,” he says, stepping farther into the room.
The years between us slam into the space, making the gym feel smaller.
I should say something sharper, but all I can do is look at him and feel too many things at once. Anger, yes; always that. Yet, underneath it is something more dangerous because now I know too much and not enough.
I know he knew about Vincenzo. I know he tried to reprogram me, isolate me, wrench me back into the family line when I’d already slipped too deep. I know he failed. I know I killed what mattered most to him later and called it necessity. I know his silence all these years was never simple.
He studies my face with the same mercilessness he always used when he wanted to know whether I was lying, weak, or about to do something catastrophic. “How much came back?”
“Enough to know that you carved duty into my chest because I loved the enemy, yet you couldn’t take it when I reminded you of the old family motto.”
The old challenge lands. The fact that even now, grown and blooded and sitting on separate ruined altars, we still know exactly how to bare our teeth at each other in the language that came before actual violence.
Arseniy takes another step. “I heard about the shipments, too.”
Of course he did.
“I’m flattered,” I say. “Did exile make you sentimental or just nosy?”
His eyes flash. “Watch your fucking mouth.”
I laugh once, short and ugly. “You’re no longer my handler, brother.”
That does it.
He comes at me with no warning beyond the shift of his shoulders, the old speed still there under the years. I barely get my guard up before his fist catches me hard along the cheekboneand turns my head with the force of it. Pain sparks bright. I answer with a hook to his ribs that lands solid enough to make him grunt, then he’s on me fully, and the gym becomes a blur of impact and old rage given back its body.
This isn’t a clean fight; it was never going to be.
We’re too full of history for clean.
Arseniy fights like he always did—efficient, brutal, no wasted motion, every strike chosen for damage rather than spectacle. He never enjoyed the chaos of it the way I used to. He treated fighting as a duty, which, in some ways, made him more terrifying because there was no play in him once he committed.
I’m better than I was at twenty. Stronger, meaner, less likely to get baited by emotion into stupid openings. But he is still Arseniy. He taught me half the things I know about putting men down fast and making sure they stay there.
