Page 156 of Reign
“We find him,” he says.
I nod once, because if I speak, I might break again.
Then I tear free, step into smoke and sirens and chaos, and run toward the place where the line went dead.
“No, My King,” I say under my breath. “We’re not fucking done.”
thirty-seven
Nikolaj
Isitontheedgeof my bed at Saint Helena with my elbows on my knees, and both hands clenched into fists.
The room is too quiet.
That’s the first thing I notice, which is stupid because this room has always been quiet. It’s built into old stone and old discipline. The walls are thick. The windows are tall. The curtains are drawn, not because it’s night anymore but because I haven’t opened them since I came back.
Two days.
I’ve held myself together for two days.
I asked questions. I listened to the answers. I corrected sloppy wording. I threatened three men and meant every syllable. I kept breathing because it was still useful, and Kai said “useful” was all I needed to stay.
Useful.
What a small, insulting word for a man whose entire chest has been ripped open and left to echo.
My fists hurt from holding on too tightly to the only thing left in my palm.
I open my right hand slowly, and the ring sits there. It looks too small in my hand. Too quiet. Too whole. It should be impossible that something this delicate survived what the body didn’t.
That’s the kind of thought that keeps trying to form and keeps getting strangled before it finishes, because if I think the wordbodytoo clearly, something inside me starts losing shape.
They found him where he said he was.
East lower service corridor. The part of the wing that collapsed after the explosion. Smoke, concrete, twisted metal, bodies damaged past immediate recognition.
The emergency crews pulled survivors first. Then the dead. Then what was left of the dead. There was no dignity in it. No poetry. No grand final tableau. Just heat and dust and men with gloves trying to separate the person from the ruin.
One body was found near the place where Vincenzo’s phone signal died. Burned too badly for a face. Unrecognizable in the ways a man’s lover should never have to imagine.
But the body had this ring.
The one I put on his finger the night before he walked into that summit. The one he smiled at through tears. The one he called me husband with. The one he wore into a room full of men who would have killed us both if they understood what it meant.
DNA tests confirmed it. That’s what they said.
Confirmed.
A clean word. A clinical word. A word that belongs in reports and laboratories and cold conversations between men who can afford not to understand that confirmation can be an execution all by itself.
Kai stood in front of me when he delivered it. He didn’t sit. He didn’t soften it with anything useless. His face was pale, though.I remember that. Kai, who can watch men die and critique their posture, looked pale when he said, “The results came back.”
Maksim was behind him, silent for once, and I remember staring at both of them, thinkingthis is the part where the world changes, this is the exact second, remember it, Nikolaj, because whatever happens after this won’t be the same life.
Kai said, “The remains are a match.”
I remember waiting for something dramatic from myself. I think they did, too.
