Page 283 of Reign

No.

I won’t examine them. I won’t give them shape. I refuse to acknowledge why holding her like this feels less like possession and more like finally having something in my life exactly where it belongs.

But the words stay lodged behind my teeth. Demanding to be spoken.

I look down at her—flushed, trembling, marked by my hands and my ropes—and the feeling only grows. A vicious, bone-deep certainty that I want every version of this woman she has shown me and every one she still keeps hidden.

I want to keep her.

Protect her.

Wake up beside her.

Hear that vicious mouth argue with me every day.

Every single day.

The thought is far more dangerous than anything we have done in this room.

I stay over her for another moment, my mouth against the damp skin at the back of her neck, holding her while neither of us speaks.

Then I carefully ease out of her and begin unfastening the straps around her wrists.

Chapter 42

Elena

For twelve days, I’ve woken up in Luciano’s bed.

I haven’t regretted a single one of them.

My dresses hang beside his suits now. My earrings sit beneath his watches. My perfume bottles have colonized one side of his bathroom counter, and my shoes have claimed an entire wall of his closet.

He had more shelves installed after severely underestimating how many pairs I own.

He didn’t complain.

He examined the finished wall, looked at the remaining boxes, and said, “You’ll need more.”

Which was both correct and deeply unsettling.

I love seeing my things beside his.

Something warm and embarrassingly hopeful moves through me every time I open the closet and see evidence of us everywhere. His black shirts beside my purple dresses. His watches above my jewelry. My ridiculous heels occupying space in a room that once belonged entirely to him.

It makes me feel like I belong here.

Like we aren’t pretending. My presence has been worked into the structure of his life. He expects my things to stay beside his. He makes room before I can ask for it.

It feels right.

I hate how optimistic that sounds.

Another week of this and I’ll start believing in one of those ridiculous fairy tales where the dangerous man falls hopelessly in love and builds the girl a library.

This morning, I wake alone.

His side of the bed is still warm, which means he hasn’t been gone long. I stretch beneath the blankets and consider staying exactly where he left me until he returns.