Page 137 of Reign
I have survived eight years of silence once already. I have lived inside the damage other people caused when they decided what truth he could survive, what love he could remember, what pain should be buried for his own good.
I watched the man I love walk out of my life because everyone around him folded secrecy over him and called it mercy. I know exactly how ugly protection looks when it’s really control wearing a better suit.
And then he did it to me.
Not with the same intent, I know that. I am not being deliberately unfair, despite how badly I want the luxury.
Nikolaj did not withhold the threat because he wanted to erase me from my own life or because he thought I was weak in the obvious sense. He did it because men have wanted him dead since before we knew each other. Because I told him Lucien was tearing rot through my house and decided, in some arrogant, protective corner of his skull, that he would handle his own problem until it was clean enough to bring to me.
That might be understandable.
It is also unforgivable at the moment.
So, I called for a summit. Not the grand, public kind with formal invitations and seating charts designed to insult three heads at once while appearing neutral. This is smaller.Emergency sessions. Private calls. Pressure applied in the right places.
Helena Byrne is summoned under the pretense of clarification, not accusation. Stefano Reyes receives nothing so polite. The men tied to his routes start losing access before he knows which doors have closed.
I ordered a freeze on two accounts Lucien used to move deniable funds and arranged for three of his intermediaries to be picked up before dawn.
I sent Marie and Arabella to Monaco for the night and placed both women under additional protection without telling Arabella why. Her face has only just begun to look human again, and I refuse to give this mess another woman to chew through for sport.
And yes, while I make these plans and more I will not mention, while I build a net around the threat to Nikolaj and call it strategy, I am fully aware of the hypocrisy.
I do not call him.
I do not text.
I do not tell him I’ve moved pieces in three territories.
I do not tell him everything I discovered because I am still angry, and I want him to feel the silence he chose.
Because I am petty and wounded and much less noble than anyone who bows their head when I walk into a room would ever suspect.
And because some part of me is afraid that if I call him and hear his voice again while that fear is still raw in me, I will forgive him before I’m done being furious.
I step out before the driver circles around. My body aches with the day in small, annoying ways. Shoulders are tight from sitting too long. My head is beginning to throb behind my eyes because I’ve had too much coffee and not enough food.
Inside, the villa is quieter than usual without Arabella here. I loosen my tie as I walk, dragging the knot down with one hand, then unbutton my cuffs in the corridor because I can already feel the phantom heat of the shower waiting.
The bedroom door is open a few inches, which is wrong. I know it instantly. Not wrong enough for danger, perhaps, but wrong enough to sharpen the edges of me.
My security doesn’t leave doors like that. Staff don’t enter this room without explicit permission.
I push the door open and find Nikolaj sitting on my bed.
The sight of him hits so violently that for one second, I forget to be angry.
He sits on the edge of the mattress like he’s been there long enough to hate every minute of it, elbows braced on his knees, hands clasped loosely between them.
He’s dressed in black, of course, because apparently, the man would rather die than approach emotional vulnerability in a color. A long coat lies discarded beside him. His hair is a little disordered, not from carelessness but from fingers dragged through it too many times.
There is a bruise along his cheekbone that wasn’t there when I last saw him, or maybe it was only beginning then. His knuckles are split. His mouth is set hard, but his eyes—
God.
His eyes are what stop me.
Nikolaj looks worried.
