Page 132 of Reign
I glare at her.
She mouths,“You’re in trouble.”
I turn away from her before I do something unbrotherly. “A month, give or take,” I say.
The silence on the other end is worse than shouting.
Then Vincenzo speaks very softly. “A month. Give or take.”
“It wasn’t confirmed.”
“Itisconfirmed now,” Vincenzo says. “Helena Byrne’s name is moving through the channel, and one of my remaining clean sources flagged a payment trail tied to a bounty structure. I called you immediately because that is what one does when someone has put a price on the head of the man they love.”
The wordsman they loveland in the room like a match dropped into oil.
My chest tightens at the words despite the absolute disaster of their timing. Vincenzo said it like a fact. Then the rest of what he said catches up, and guilt—that unwelcome little bastard—sharpens under my ribs.
“I was handling it,” I say.
Vincenzo laughs once, and there is nothing amused in it. “Were you.”
“Yes.”
“By not telling me.”
“I didn’t have enough to tell you.”
“That’s bullshit,” Vincenzo snaps.
I close my eyes briefly. “Careful.”
“No,” Vincenzo says, his voice rising now, still controlled but only barely. “Do not‘careful’ me from whatever room you’re standing in while acting as if this is some minor inconvenience. Someone inside the Five Families has put a bounty on your head, and you have known for weeks.”
“I knew there was movement.”
“You knew there was a threat.”
“I always have threats.”
“That is not an answer, Nikolaj,” Vincenzo says.
“It is the only answer that makes sense.”
“No, it is the answer of a man who has spent too long being surrounded by people who treat danger as weather,” Vincenzo says. “This is not weather. This is a direct move against you, and potentially against the two of us.”
The wordushits harder than it should.
I look down at my bloodied knuckles and flex my hand once. The split skin pulls. “I didn’t want to bring you into it until I knew where it was coming from.”
Vincenzo goes quiet for one dangerous second. “Bring me into it.”
I know immediately that I’ve fucked up.
Not because the words are untrue. Because they are precisely the kind of words that make a man like Vincenzo hearseparationwhere I meantprotection.
I can kill a room full of traitors without blinking, but apparently, one sentence to the man I love can still step on a hidden mine before I see the wire.
“Nikolaj,” Vincenzo says. “This is already mine.”
