Page 57 of Devil’s Reign

My ears pop, and the room sways around me, but I force myself to stay still as I glare up at him. “Because you pulled me away!” I slap my hand against his chest and push him again. This time, he takes a step back.

“Those are just semantics, Melani. A deal’s a deal. You should have fought harder if you really wanted to know.”

The words land wrong. They’re too polished. Too ready on his lips. He knows something. He’s just twisting things because he doesn’t want to tell me.

A horrible thought wedges itself into my chest. Was I being naïve? Was he involved in Luciano’s disappearance after all? Bile rushes up my throat, and before I can think, my hand is swinging. I don’t even realize what I’ve done until his face snaps to the side and my palm stings.

I slapped him.

I stagger back, afraid I might do it again if I stay close. That’s not me. I’m not the type to get physical.

“I trusted you. But I guess the joke’s on me.” The anger drains out of me, and I realize too late it was the only thing holding back the rest.

For the first time, I let myself face the possibility I’ve been avoiding—that Luciano might be gone. Truly gone.

No. No. No. No.

But the thought forces its way in anyway. What if he’s dead? I hear myself ask it, but I hardly recognize my voice. It’s flat. Stripped bare. Weeks of dread compressed into four words.

Vanya doesn’t answer. He only stares at me, his jaw tightening, his eyes shifting away, and that silence hits harder than any confession.

My chest caves in on itself. Air disappears. My lungs lock up like the room has been vacuumed empty. I try to breathe, but nothing comes. When I finally manage to suck in a gulp, it’s too fast, too shallow. My heart slams against my ribs, beating so fast I can feel it in my throat, and the edges of my vision start to black out. The floor tilts. My ears ring. Sound fades into a dull, distant buzzing that swallows everything else. My hands claw at my chest, my throat, but it doesn’t help. Each breath is thin and useless, like pulling air through a straw, and my panic spikes higher, tighter, faster.

I see Vanya moving towards me, his lips forming words, but his voice is distant, warped, like it’s coming from underwater. Then his arms come around me, strong and steady, and before I can process it, he’s lifting me, holding me against his chest.

I should push him away. He’s the reason I’m like this, the reason I can’t breathe. But the second my face presses into the side of his neck, my body makes a completely different decision. I cling to him instead, desperate for something solid as the room keeps spinning and the tremors shaking through me only intensify. My nails dig into his shirt, his skin burning under my cheek, his heart hammering beneath it.

There’s movement. He’s walking, carrying me out of the office. Voices float around me—his men asking if I’m okay—but they blur into background noise. Vanya’s voice cuts through, rough and frustrated and, underneath it, almost helpless.

“I don’t know.”

That’s all he says before I hear the ding of the elevator and then a shift as he steps inside with me still clutched in his arms. A quiet hum surrounds us as I squeeze my eyes shut, still fighting for breath. My throat aches from gasping, my chest heaving, and no matter how hard I try, my body refuses to calm down.

Then the doors slide open and cool air washes over me. Crisp. Fresh. I suck it in greedily, the first full breath I’ve managed in what feels like forever.

Are we really outside? That elevator ride was too short for us to have reached ground level… and it’s too quiet.

Slowly, trembling, I lift my head from his neck. We’re standing on a rooftop balcony. The view stretches endlessly, buildings fanning out in every direction, the sky impossibly wide overhead.

I blink, stunned, because I didn’t even know this place had a rooftop.

His hand glides along my spine, and only then do I register he’s been rubbing slow circles up and down my back the whole time. The steady pressure grounds me, and I focus on it—the heat of his palm, the simple rhythm of the motion.

Bit by bit, my heartbeat eases, the ringing in my ears dulls, and each breath comes easier than the last. Even though my mind is still raw, my body finds a fragile calm in his arms.

The man who triggered this panic attack is the very one who carried me through it and steadied me until I could breathe again.

What the fuck do I do with that?

30

IVAN

My body deflates like a balloon as the color slowly but steadily returns to her face.

The terror strangling my throat finally loosens, and for the first time since she started gasping, my chest eases.

I’ve never been that scared in my life. Not even eight years ago when I thought I was about to watch my brother bleed out under Viktor’s hand. That memory still wakes me some nights, but this—this was worse. She couldn’t breathe, and it felt like the air had been ripped from my own lungs with hers.