Page 109 of Reign
I nod once. That tracks. Men don’t pay until they think the target is both worth removing and soft enough in one spot to be reached. If anyone’s sniffing around the line between Vincenzo and me, they’ve found the right spot, and they know it.
“You should tell him,” Arseniy says.
I look up sharply. “Vincenzo.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because if this turns into what I think it might, his side will start feeling the pressure too. And because if someone inside the Five Families is willing to place a quiet bounty on your head, there’s every chance the same someone is already watching him for signs they can use.”
The thought settles in me like poison.
Watching him.
Watching us.
My jaw tightens. “I’ll handle it.”
Arseniy gives me a look that says, “Handle it better than you handled the last thing you loved.” I don’t need him to say it aloud. The room is already full of enough old sins without the need to address this one properly.
He turns toward the door, then pauses with one hand on the frame.
I think that’s it. Warning delivered. Truth cracked open. Brother and brother, still too wrecked for anything soft. Then he says, without turning back, “For what it’s worth, I was wrong about him.”
I say nothing.
“He wasn’t making you weak,” Arseniy continues. “He was making you human. I just didn’t know the difference then.”
By the time I find anything to say, he’s already walking out. His boots echo once down the corridor beyond the gym, then disappear into the old quiet of Saint Helena like he was never here at all.
I stay where I am for a long time after that, blood drying on my hands, the bag still broken on the floor, my brother’s warning and confession circling my skull with equal force.
A bounty.
Suspicion.
Vincenzo.
And underneath all of it, the one thing I can no longer outrun, no matter how hard I hit something dumb enough to stand still for it.
I drag a hand down my face and exhale.
Then I reach for the phone on the bench and start deciding who dies first.
twenty-nine
Vincenzo
BythetimeIrealize something’s wrong with the flight plan, we’re already too far in the air for me to pretend it’s a minor clerical error.
I’m sitting in the cream leather seat of my private jet with one ankle over my knee, a glass of bourbon untouched at my elbow, and three separate sets of documents open on the table in front of me.
The original plan was simple enough by our standards. Fly east. Land in Russia. Nikolaj wanted me there, though he’d been deliberately vague about why, which in itself wasn’t unusual. Nikolaj and clarity have never had a stable relationship unless blood is already on the floor.
I expected some half-hostile reunion at one of his compounds, maybe Saint Helena, maybe one of the old safe houses, somewhere cold and severe where the walls are thicker than honesty, and every room feels like a test.
Instead, somewhere over open water, the route display on the side monitor updates and keeps updating, and none of the coordinates look even remotely Russian.
