Page 50 of Reign
His gaze lowers briefly to his own hands, then returns to me. “That is the tragedy of fathers,” he says. “We give what we think is protection, and by the time we learn what it really was, our sons have already named it harm.”
The line should feel manipulative. Instead, it just feels true in the worst possible way. That doesn’t fix anything; it makes it harder to hate the wound properly.
I look down at my glass. Empty again. He refills it without asking.
For a while, I let the quiet hold. Outside the kitchen window, the bare garden lies under frost, all dark stems and frozen earth. It is strangely peaceful in a way that makes violence seem vulgar by contrast.
I rub a hand over my face and suddenly feel tired down to the bone. “My memories are coming back.”
He nods and takes a sip of his vodka. “What have you remembered?”
I think of Vincenzo above me in the dream, head thrown back, pleasure carving him open while my younger self stared like an idiot and called him sin. I think of the library footage. The chapel. The bullet. The taste of him in the gym, present and past colliding until I couldn’t tell whether I was twenty or twenty-eight or both.
I think of the kitchen and the order I gave him that hurt us both because I needed time and hated needing it.
“Enough to bring love with it,” I say.
Ruslan gives another faint nod. “Enough is sometimes worse than all.”
I drink the vodka in one swallow and set the glass down. It burns clean, colder than memory. “I told Vincenzo to stay away,” I say.
He seems surprised at that. “Did you?”
“Yes.”
“And did he?” he asks, refilling my glass again.
“Yes,” I answer.
His mouth tightens. “Then he has either learned discipline or loves you very much.”
The vodka glass pauses halfway to my mouth. The words are too blunt, too early, too him. I drink anyway, letting the burn cut through the sudden pressure in my chest.
“I hate that he listened, and don’t know what to do with any of this,” I admit.
It is not a sentence I say often. Not to anyone. But my father is sitting across from me with his own heart buried somewhere between Kolomna and Salvatore Vieri’s name. If there is one place where ignorance can sit without being immediately murdered for weakness, maybe it is here.
He leans back and closes his eyes. “That is the first honest thing you have admitted tonight.”
“Fuck you.”
“There is the second.”
Despite myself, I almost smile.
He opens his eyes again. “You asked him for distance, but did you need it?”
I let out a long, bone-weary sigh. “Yes.”
“Then stop punishing yourself for needing it.”
I glare at him. “That easy?”
“No. But simple things are often hardest for stupid men.”
I huff something close to a laugh because there is no universe where Ruslan Dragovich becomes gentle without calling me stupid first. “I hate that you make sense.”
He returns my grin. “You always have because you simply preferred learning through damage,” he says, and his eyes hold mine across the small kitchen table.
