Page 179 of Reign
I can’t lie here anymore, so I slide carefully out of bed instead.
The mattress dips as I shift my weight, and I freeze when Nikolaj’s fingers tighten slightly in the sheet. He doesn’t wake. His breathing stays deep, though not easy, never easy anymore.
I take one breath, then another, and finally stand. The cool tile meets my bare feet. My body protests immediately, a hot pull through my side and down my ribs, but pain has become background noise by now. I’ve been trained in worse things than walking while hurt.
I pick up the shirt from the chair and pull it on because I suddenly feel too exposed in my own skin. It’s one of Nikolaj’s, black and too large on me, smelling faintly of him and the laundry soap stocked in the villa. The fabric hangs loose over my shoulders, brushing the healing dressings beneath. I don’t button it. I don’t have the patience for buttons right now.
Then I leave the bedroom quietly and walk into the living room overlooking the sea.
I stand in front of the glass and finally let the sound out, pressing both hands over my mouth, bending slightly as the sob tears through me, sharp enough to rip at my stitches.
My shoulders shake. My breath catches and fails, then catches and fails again. The living room blurs, and the ocean disappears behind tears.
I try to keep it quiet because he needs sleep, because he needs one night where my return doesn’t cost him something else,because I have already taken enough from him, and I can’t take even this.
But grief has its own language, and guilt speaks it fluently.
I sob into my hands and hate myself with a clarity so cold it feels almost peaceful.
I did all this for us.
That’s the thought that keeps circling, desperate and useless. I gave up Rome. The title. The public name. The chair at the head of tables men killed to sit near.
I’m free. For the first time in my life, I’m free, but all I can feel is the shape of the wound I left in him to get here.
My knees weaken, but I refuse to sit because sitting feels too close to collapsing, and collapsing feels too close to asking the room to forgive me. I deserve the pain in my side. I deserve the rawness in my throat. I deserve the way my hands shake when I drag them down my face.
I deserve the memory of Nikolaj screaming at me on the beach, tears on his face, voice broken open as he asked for the month back. He wanted the one thing I can’t give him—time untouched by the lie.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper to the sea, and it isn’t enough. It will never be enough. “I’m so sorry, my love.”
My reflection stares back faintly over the sea. I look awful. Pale. Thinner. Eyes swollen already, jaw unshaven, shirt hanging loose over bandages, and a body that still feels like it belongs partly to a hospital bed and partly to the explosion. I look alive in the least convincing way possible.
A sound cuts through the villa behind me.
It’s quiet at first, rough and strangled, and for half a second, I think I imagined it through my own crying.
Then it comes again.
“No,” Nikolaj says from the bedroom, voice thick with sleep and panic. “No, no, no.”
I turn so fast, pain rips through my side, and nearly takes me down. I don’t care. I push away from the glass and move, stumbling once against the edge of the sofa, then forcing my body down the hall because the sound that follows is not sleep-mumbling anymore.
It is terror.
“Vincenzo!” Nikolaj shouts, and there is nothing controlled in it. No Pakhan. No Blade. No pride. Just raw panic, tearing my name out of him like he’s back in the car and hearing the line go dead.
“I’m here,” I call, my voice breaking as I reach the bedroom doorway. “Nikolaj, I’m here.”
He is half upright in the bed, the sheets twisted around his hips, eyes wide and wild in the dark. His hair is a wreck, chest heaving, one hand dragging over the empty space beside him while the other is already reaching for a weapon that isn’t there.
He looks frantic enough to kill anything that moves and terrified enough to die from the lack of me in the bed.
The second he sees me, everything in his face breaks open. He doesn’t speak, he runs, and I barely have time to brace before he pulls me into his arms with a force that steals the breath out of me.
Pain flashes white along my ribs, but I bury the sound against his shoulder because I would rather split every stitch I have than make him let go right now.
His arms lock around me, one hand at the back of my head, the other spread wide across my back, holding me so tightly it feels less like an embrace than a man trying to fuse reality into place before it can betray him again.
