Page 93 of Reign
“I was wrong,” he says again, voice rougher now. “About all of it. About what silence bought, what duty justified, and what I could survive after.” His eyes do not leave mine. “I have spent over thirty years regretting my choices, Ruslan. Every one of them. Every single day.”
The cold seems to disappear. Or maybe I stop feeling it because all I can feel is the violence of my own heartbeat and the unbearable, horrible sincerity on his face.
I should make him get up. I should spit at him. I should tell him regret is cheap and thirty years too late, and I’m not some young fool on a terrace waiting for scraps of honesty from the man who cut me open and calls it love.
But all I can do is stand there like the world has ended properly at last.
Salvatore’s hands are open on his thighs. Empty. No weapons. Just old scars and fingers that used to unmake me with one touch. His cane lies abandoned to one side. His pride lies somewhere farther away.
“I loved you,” he says. “I love you still. And I chose wrong. I chose bloodline over you and lost everything anyway. Lucia. You. Myself. Every version of the life I told myself I was protecting.” He swallows hard enough to hurt. I can see it. “There is no day I have not woken up with that in me.”
I shut my eyes because hearing him say Lucia’s name nearly finishes me.
When I open them again, he’s still there.
Kneeling.
On my terrace.
Apologizing.
The shame of it hits me then, but not his. Mine. Because all these years, I’ve told myself he wouldn’t love me enough to come back here. Because legacy won and that’s the whole story, and if he truly regretted it, he’d have crossed the fucking sea on his knees years ago.
I take one step toward him, then another. By the third, I can see the dampness on his lashes he’d deny under torture. I’d help him lie if anyone else were here to see it, but they’re not.
“You stupid, cruel bastard,” I whisper.
His mouth twists, almost a smile, and nowhere near one. “Yes.”
“I hate you.”
“You should.”
“I should leave you there until your leg gives out entirely.”
“If that helps.”
It doesn’t, and that’s the problem. None of it helps.
I make a sound that is halfway to a laugh and nowhere near sane, then I drop to my knees in front of him so hard the impact jars up through bone. The cold stone bites instantly. My bad eye pulses, and my hands shake when they land on his face, and I don’t even try to hide it.
Salvatore inhales sharply. His own hands rise, hesitate an inch from my ribs, then stop as if he no longer assumes the right to touch me without invitation.
That undoes me worse than the apology.
“I’ve missed you,” I say, and my voice is gone completely now, wrecked and young and helpless in ways I haven’t been since exile. “Fuck, I’ve missed you.”
His face breaks. Not elegantly, or in some cinematic way worth respecting. It simply breaks the way old plaster does when it has carried too much dampness for too long and can no longer pretend to be a wall.
“Ruslan—”
I kiss him before he can say anything else.
The first contact is all grief. We’re sixty. He’s kneeling with a cane beside him, my face is wet, and I don’t know if it’s rain or something more humiliating. His mouth is cold from outside air and tastes faintly of whiskey. But the second he kisses me back, all that old hunger, grief, and recognition tears wide open inside me so fast it feels like a wound finally admitting what it is.
He makes a sound into my mouth that I feel all the way down in the places that never stop belonging to him. When we break apart, neither of us goes far. Foreheads pressed together, breath shared, and knees freezing on wet stone.
“I didn’t know if you’d come,” I say.
