Reign (Of Ruin and Royalty #2)

Chapter 1

one

Nikolaj

Blood always smells hotter underground.

Maybe that’s because there’s nowhere for it to go down here—no open air, no wind, no mercy. Just stone walls that hold every scream and every drop of it.

The place feels steeped in old death, as if the monastery above us wasn’t built to worship God at all, but to keep what men like me do beneath it.

Saint Helena is holy on paper. In reality, she’s just another corpse we hollowed out and rebuilt into a Bratva compound—all stone, steel, and sanctified rot. The monks are long gone, replaced by men in dark suits with guns tucked in their jackets and knives hidden in their boots.

I stand in the center of the execution chamber with my hands behind my back, while Pavel Sidorov kneels in front of me.

He’s forty-three years old, broad through the shoulders, and graying at the temples. A man who once thought being old enough meant he’d become untouchable.

There are tears on his face, snot on his lip, and fear rolling through him in waves so sharp, I can almost taste the salt of it. Two of my men were holding him upright earlier, but his knees caved in when Maksim laid the evidence on the table in front of us.

Ledger sheets. Shipment routes. Names. Offshore accounts. Dates. Messages from encrypted lines straight to a faction in Novosibirsk that’s been trying to test my borders for the last six months.

Pavel keeps saying there’s been a mistake. He keeps saying he has children and reminding me he has served the Dragovich name for twenty years. As though loyalty has a half-life that excuses betrayal once it expires.

I look at him and feel nothing.

“Kai,” I say, my voice low but carrying, “read it back to him.”

Kai stands to my left, immaculate in black. He’s been with me long enough to know I don’t ask for repetition unless I want a condemned man to hear every nail being driven into his coffin.

He picks up the final page from the steel table and reads it in the same cool tone a banker might use while discussing investment yields.

“Payment received in three installments. Information provided regarding eastern warehouse transfers, border clearances, and movement schedules for internal security rotation. Final message confirms willingness to continue cooperation in exchange for protection when leadership changes.”

Kai lowers the page and looks at Pavel. “Your words, not mine.”

Pavel breaks down, then lunges forward as far as the men holding him allow. “I was promised immunity!” he blurts. “They said there’d be a transition, said your father was losing control because there’s a division in the ranks, and if I got ahead of it—”

He stops because he hears himself too late. His mouth hangs open, his eyes go wild, and the silence that follows is almost comical.

I take one step toward him, and he recoils. “Say that again.”

“Pakhan, I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t call me that while you’re busy choking on another man’s cock. Say. That. Again.”

His gaze flickers toward the floor. “They said your father was losing control.”

I tilt my head. “And?”

“And that there would be… changes.”

There’s a small sound from the back of the room, something between a huff and a laugh. Maksim. He’s leaning against the wall with his arms folded, the scar at the corner of his mouth pulling even more and making him look fucking feral.

“N—Nikolaj,” Pavel manages finally. “I was loyal, I swear it. I’ve been with your family for years. Your father—”

“You’re not talking to my father; you’re talking to me.”

A few years ago, men said Ruslan Dragovich’s name with the kind of reverence that edges on worship. The man who dragged the Dragovich Bratva out of exile and made our name feared once more. They called him Pakhan and meant it.

Now they say mine with their heads bowed and their palms sweating because the world has changed, and so have the rules.

Ruslan has power. I am power.

“You swore your blood belonged to this family, and that you understood what the word loyalty meant in our house.”

I crouch in front of Pavel until we’re at eye level. He smells rank up close—sweat, panic, and the stale arrogance of a man who really thought he could survive playing both sides.

I study his face and watch the moment he realizes I’m not angry. That’s the moment he stops hoping; I’ve seen it often enough to know exactly when it lands.

“You made the mistake a lot of old men make,” I say, tilting my head to the side. “You thought I needed my father’s permission to become what I am.”

His mouth trembles. “Please.”

“I don’t give a fuck about your pleas.” I grip his jaw hard enough to keep his eyes on mine.

“You’ve been in my house, eating my food, taking money out of my accounts, hearing my name spoken with respect, and somehow you still thought I was standing in another man’s shadow.

That’s what will kill you today, Pavel.”

“Please, Niko—”

The use of my old nickname earns him the first real sign of anything from me, though it isn’t anger—it’s disgust.

“This is the last thing you’ll ever understand,” I cut in. “I am not my father.”

I let go of his face and straighten up. Behind him, one of the guards hands me a knife. I look at it for a second, and Pavel starts crying harder when he sees it. Probably because a knife feels more personal than a gun.

He’s right. Bullets are efficient, but knives are intimate. A bullet says die, while a blade says I came close enough to look at you while you did.

I circle him once, slow enough for every second to stretch. Men who are new to this life sometimes think executions are loud. They imagine shouting, cursing, or spectacle.

Real power is quieter than that. Real power lets the condemned man supply the noise himself.

“You have two children,” I say, stopping behind him.

He sobs out a broken yes.

“And a wife who thinks you travel for business.”

“Yes.” He makes a wounded sound and twists in the guards’ grip, trying to look back at me. “Please, Pakhan. Mercy. I’ll disappear. I’ll leave Russia. I’ll never—”

I pull his hair back and slide the blade across the front of his throat before he can finish.

There’s no flourish to it, no dramatic motion. Just a clean, practiced cut and the immediate consequence of it.

His body jerks, and the sound he makes is wet, shocked, and brief.

Blood spills hot over his shirt and the floor in a dark rush.

The men holding him back let him drop, and we watch as he clutches at his neck with both hands, eyes bulging.

He tries to speak, but all that comes out is a gurgling noise and a torrent of blood gushing over his fingers.

I step back before it reaches my shoes, but I watch him until his body stops twitching. I always watch until the very end; anything less feels careless.

Maksim pushes off the wall and glances down at the corpse with open contempt. “Should’ve let me take him apart in front of the others. Could’ve been educational.”

“It was educational,” I say.

Kai takes the knife from my hand and passes me a folded cloth. I wipe my fingers even though the blood barely touched me. “They all know about the hearing tonight. By morning, they’ll see how it ended.”

Maksim grins. “Fair point.”

I hum low in my throat and glance back at the altar. We stripped it bare when we took this place, but sometimes I still see the outline of the cross in the stone where the metal used to hang.

The Dragovich crest sits there now. We didn’t erase God from this monastery—we replaced him.

Ruslan knows it, too. I see it in the way he looks at me now and how his jaw tightens when I speak, and my men move. He wanted a weapon. He sharpened me, honed me, then pointed me at his enemies.

He expected the blade to stay in his hand. Instead, I became something he can’t grip without bleeding.

The door at the far side opens, and Tatiana walks in. At twenty-one, my little sister already understands theater better than most men twice her age.

Long blond hair braided back off her face, sharp cheekbones, black tactical pants, a fitted long-sleeve shirt, and black stiletto boots. There’s a knife in a holster at each thigh, and another I know is at the base of her spine.

Tatiana Dragovich walks into a room looking like innocence and leaves it painted with somebody else’s insides. Men underestimate her once because she’s petite—they don’t get a second chance.

She looks at Pavel’s body for half a second, then lifts her gaze to me. “You started without me,” she pouts.

“He talked too much and pissed Kolya off,” Maksim says.

She clicks her tongue. “The fucker sold movement routes to Novosibirsk and tried to leverage Pappa’s old loyalties against you,” she says, then grins. “He didn’t know those men were loyal to you long before you took over as Pakhan.”

A smile finally touches my lips then. “Stupid moves by weaker men.”

Tatiana was never made to sit by windows and smile for alliances. Ruslan tried once, and he learned. She took to knives before heels, and to covert routes before ballroom manners. To the language of death before she ever learned how to fake sweetness.

She now runs our internal removals when the targets require precision rather than spectacle. Men twice her age lower their eyes when she walks by. Men three times her size stop laughing when they hear she’s been assigned to them.

If Arseniy was the shield and I am the blade, Tatiana is the venom they never expected.

“Do you want the body displayed or burned?” she asks.

“Displayed for an hour. Let the inner circle see what disloyalty costs, then burn him.”

Tatiana’s smile deepens. “Gladly,” she says, then turns and leaves as easily as she came, boots silent against the stone.

For a moment, I watch her as she leaves and think my father has every reason to fear his two youngest children.

I straighten my cuff and gesture to the corpse with two fingers, then walk out. Kai falls into step beside me, while Maksim peels off to oversee the display with the grim delight of a man given a favorite task.