Ruby Fever (Hidden Legacy, #6)(57)

“The praelia had a glowing katana,” Alessandro said. “It did nothing. Toward the end of the fight, he ran out of juice and his sword disappeared. Buller grabbed him by the throat, and the mage pulled out a knife and tried to force it through the armor. He was pushing it in and it looked like it hit home, because Buller went berserk and stomped the guy to death.”

“Nice find,” Leon said and left.

It was just Arabella, Alessandro, and me.

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

“How much time did I have left when you revived me?” she asked.

“Twelve minutes,” I told her. “You were the first one Halle detoxified.”

Arabella gave me a brooding look.

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

“I’m tired of bad shit happening.”

“Me too.”

She sighed and pushed to her feet. “I’m going to go . . . do things.”

She left the room and shut the door behind her. Alessandro and I looked at each other.

“Explain the Cousin Sasha thing to me, please. How are you involved with the Imperium?”

He sighed. “How much do you remember about the change of the Russian dynasty?”

“Not that much. In 1916, the power balance in the First World War shifted in favor of Russia. The German Empire suffered heavy casualties and decided to assassinate Czar Nicholas II. I think they bombed his family’s motorcade during Easter. Only Anastasia and Alexei survived because they were not in the two front cars.”

“That’s right.” Alessandro nodded. “The murder created a vacuum. Alexei was too young and too sick to take the throne. The Imperium was in the middle of a war and required a strong hand. They offered the crown to a half-dozen people, but everyone refused.”

I had no idea the Russians had to play musical chairs with the throne of the largest empire on the European Continent. The history textbooks I’d read glossed over that part. Of course, in Texas the history of Texas took up more space in the textbook than the entirety of the rest of Western Civilization combined.

“What happened then?” I asked.

“Russia scrambled to find someone who was both suitable and willing to accept the crown. They chose Michael Berezin, who’d spearheaded the Russian offensive against the German Empire. Michael Berezin became Michael I, and his entire family rallied around him to make sure he survived. The country depended on it. They faced a war from the outside and civil unrest from the inside. Communists were still agitating the workers in large cities. They were mostly failing because by killing Nicholas II, Germany made him into a martyr. The Russians wanted a new monarch and they wanted payback.”

“That explains volumes about how Konstantin thinks. Family against the world.”

“Exactly. Michael I had a younger brother, Boris. He was an antistasi mage, like his mother, and a Communist sympathizer. He thought that Russia would be better off without the monarchy, so he conspired with his Communist cell to assassinate his brother. The Okhrana, the Imperial secret police, had planted an operative in the cell to keep an eye on him. The plot was exposed.”

“Plots often are.”

“Michael I couldn’t bear to kill his baby brother, so Boris was stripped of his titles and holdings and exiled instead. He ended up in the UK, where he bought a false identity, and married into a merchant family, the Winstons, who were willing to look past wobbly birth certificates and passports to add an upper-range Significant to their gene pool.”

“Your mother’s family.”

He nodded. “My great-grandfather was a very bitter man. He spent his life trying to regain his titles and status.”

“I thought you said he was a Communist.”

“That was before he became poor.” Alessandro laughed softly. “My grandfather was obsessed with titles as well, which is why my mother ended up in an arranged marriage to my father.”

His mother was a lower-level Significant antistasi. He’d told me before that she had the magic, but not the power or the training to use it.

“My maternal grandfather arranged that marriage for the title, my mother went along with it because she liked my father and wanted to escape her family, my father thought she was beautiful and they would make powerful children, and my paternal grandfather got a dowry out of it. Everyone benefited.”

His eyes were dark. Eleven years after his parents walked down the aisle, Arkan murdered Marcello Sagredo, and Alessandro’s life would never be the same.

I stood up and wrapped my arms around him. He sighed, quietly exhaling tension.

“Does the Imperium want you back?” I asked.

“It’s not me I worry about. Konstantin is dangerous.”

“I know. I will be careful.”

His phone chimed. He took it out of his pocket and looked at it. “Arkan pulled Sanders out of Alaska.”

Sanders was bad news. Of all the Primes in Arkan’s arsenal, he gave me the biggest dollop of anxiety.

Alessandro got up and kissed me. “I have to make a call.”

“I have to let a Russian prince know exactly where he stands.”

He held up his hand. We gave each other a quiet high five and headed out of the conference room, he to his office and I to the front door.

Konstantin sat on a stone bench outside our office building, exactly where I asked him to be after the meeting. A line of our guard dogs stretched from him. They approached one by one, led by their handlers, so they could memorize his scent. I wanted him properly tagged before he and Alessandro went out.