Page 31 of Reign
At some point, weapons appear.
My heart gives one hard, brutal thud when I see it—a shift so sudden and yet so practiced that it makes my skin go cold. There’s a heartbeat stare-down that ends with both of us dropping steel as if bullets are nothing compared to whatever charge flares when our mouths crash again.
We’re on each other like starving animals, rutting through clothes, swearing and bleeding and chasing orgasms like it’s a goddamn religion.
I should be repulsed that I ever let an enemy get that close, that I rubbed against him like a fucking dog in heat right there in a public library. Yet every brutal kiss on the footage looks like inevitability, every threat like a promise we both knew would get broken a hundred times over before we figured out how to survive each other.
“We were always a slow-motion bullet,” I whisper, and the words come out before I know where they came from.
I close that video and sit in absolute silence for a full minute, hearing nothing but my own pulse and the whisper of the ventilation system.
The next video is tagged CHARITY BALL / MASKED EVENT / RESTRICTED CAMERAS.
The ballroom appears first—masks, formalwear, candlelight. The camera catches the edge of the crowd and part of a drinks station. Vincenzo is in black, wearing a mask, shoulders squared, talking to a woman next to him.
Then I see my younger self cutting through the crowd toward him and knocking the glass out of his hand before he can lift it to his mouth.
Poison—the file notes confirm it.Attempted poisoning intercepted by Dragovich heir. Suspected source undetermined. Internal inquiry buried by mutual family request.
The next clip finds us on the balcony outside, but the footage is too grainy for me to see what’s going on. We’re arguing, but I can’t really tell what about, so I stop the clip.
The next folder on my desk contains almost nothing about our supposed feud, just that it stopped abruptly after the masked ball—but there are stills and hallway reports that prove otherwise.
That’s what finally destroys any lingering illusion I might have had that whatever happened between us was brief or accidental. It’s not one or two incidents or an isolated lapse in judgment.
It was weeks.
Repeated unauthorized entry by both subjects.
No security challenge issued per senior orders.
Pattern suggests covert meetings.
Staff are instructed not to interfere unless violence is audible.
One handwritten annotation states:Nothing audible. Usually leave separately before dawn. Once, not at all.
We were sneaking into each other’s rooms for weeks, and everyone knew.
I reach for the last folder, already knowing what it is. It’s darker than the rest, marked after the ambush with a red internal flag.
The first few pages are medical. Dragna assault. Severe physical trauma. Multiple cranial impacts. Possible memory destabilization. Subject semi-conscious upon retrieval. Family extraction requested. Restricted handling only.
Then I see the attached stills, and I stop.
I’m on the ground, half-curled and bloodied, barely even recognizable. But even still, the image captures how bad it was: one side of my face is ruined with blood, my clothes are torn, and there’s too much blood on the floor.
The next few stills are Vincenzo running into the frame—no hesitation, no backups, no armed detail or theatrical caution. Just him arriving at speed, dropping down hard to his knees beside me, hands on me, immediately checking my pulse. His mouth is moving, and his face in the still is the worst part. It’s terror, fury, and grief all at once. Stripped raw enough to be nearly unrecognizable as the composed king he later becomes.
I swallow and turn to the next page. Another still where he’s hauling me up and fucking carrying me bridal style, and the last still is Vincenzo going through what seems like a secret passage with me in his arms. There are notes attached to the images from the archive analyst.
Vieri heir retrieved subject before Dragna clean-up team returned to the scene.
Vieri heir transported subject to secured East Wing location.
Subject remained in Vieri heir’s room prior to family extraction.
I stare at the page until the words stop behaving like language.
