The Crown's Game (The Crown's Game, #1)(86)
Vika threw her arms wide in front of her, and the wind flung open the doors and windows of the Zakrevsky house. She circled her pinkie over her grimy troops so they would understand her commands, and then they flung themselves headlong inside, rushing into the dining room and the parlor, the kitchen in the basement, and the bedrooms upstairs belonging to Nikolai and the countess.
“Destroy and infest everything,” Vika said. The rats tore into the pantry, gnawing apart too-precious croissants and breaking garish cups and saucers and countless wineglasses. The cats shredded the upholstery and sharpened their claws on baroque table legs.
And the moths flitted and crawled their way into Nikolai’s armoire and began to eat holes in all his clothes. He would have nothing but rags left. A surge of wicked delight jolted through Vika. How will you feel, Nikolai, without your dandy armor?
But as soon as she thought it, she realized he wasn’t inside. She couldn’t feel the invisible string between them.
And then she remembered that tugging between them, that feeling that even though Nikolai was her opponent, he was also her other half. She remembered when she’d touched his sleeve at the masquerade, and how everything terrible between them had fallen away, leaving only the warm silk of his magic.
She remembered how Nikolai had looked at her when she lay vulnerable and faint on his bed. As if he’d wanted to kiss her. And how much she’d wanted him to.
Suddenly, the intoxication of Vika’s fury collapsed. She felt the weight of the wrongness in her hands, which were still raised to the sky, and on her shoulders, in her gut, in her bones. It wasn’t Nikolai’s fault that Sergei was dead. Nikolai was as unwilling a participant in the Game as Vika was.
What am I doing?
Vika dropped her arms to her sides.
The crashing in the house suddenly ceased. The frantic energy around the Zakrevsky house stilled. The rats streamed down the front steps, confused, followed by the cats and a billow of moths. They disappeared into the dark interstices from which they’d come, as quickly as they’d arrived.
Vika waved a hand limply, and the windows and doors flapped shut. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. Then she ran, as far away as she could, from Ekaterinsky Canal.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Nikolai staggered home, his head throbbing from drinking too much at the tavern last night, and from sleeping in a filthy alley in Sennaya Square afterward. He had also gotten into a fistfight with someone, for some forgotten slight, and he had a black eye and swollen knuckles to show for it. At least he’d refrained from using magic in the brawl.
He climbed the steps to the Zakrevsky house, wanting nothing but a hot bath to wash the last twelve hours away, only to find the front door unlocked.
Nikolai pushed it open and stepped into the foyer.
Galina’s Persian rug had been reduced to tufts of red yarn. Chairs were broken and tables were overturned. The chandelier—imported from Venice—hung askew and was missing half its crystals.
And one of Nikolai’s top hats lay halfway up the stairwell, trampled and holey, as if it had been nibbled through by vampire moths. Nikolai squeezed his eyes shut. “As if things couldn’t get any worse.”
And then his scar flared. The dull ache of it had been there since he woke, but he hadn’t processed it through the skull-splitting headache and the black eye and the disoriented, clumsy walk back to Ekaterinsky Canal.
But now, Nikolai clutched his collar as he sagged against the gouged wall. If his scar was burning, then it wasn’t an ordinary band of burglars who had been here. It was Vika.
Why this? And why now?
It wasn’t the torn clothes and smashed vases that distressed him. Not really, anyhow. Nikolai had begun his life with nothing, and he could start afresh with nothing again. But after everything that’s passed between Vika and me . . .
Nikolai shook his head. It was still a vicious game. And that reality ate away at him from the inside like turpentine.
The grandfather clock chimed, its pendulum swinging behind a cracked pane of glass. That clock was a Zakrevsky heirloom.
Galina would be hysterical over the damage. And she would likely blame Renata and the rest of the servants for not stopping the vandals.
I cannot let that happen.
Nikolai leaned his aching head against the wall. He allowed himself one more moment of despair. And then he snapped his fingers and began the painstaking process of trying to clean and mend what Vika had destroyed.
He could not fix everything.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
The tsar had spent several days on horseback with his generals, inspecting the troops on the Crimean Peninsula. He had left Elizabeth to recover in Taganrog, a quaint town along the Sea of Azov, while he traveled here to get a handle on the fighting with the Ottomans. Now, having had more than enough of the harsh realities of war—the injured soldiers and constant threat of attack here reminded him again of the suffering his country had endured during Napoleon’s onslaught—the tsar finally galloped back to camp for one more night’s rest in his tent before he returned to Taganrog.
The stable boys led his horse away, and the guards outside his tent saluted. The tsar nodded to them and ducked into his tent, which contained not only a sumptuous mattress piled high with silk pillows and throws, but also an intricately brocaded armchair and footrest, a cherrywood desk, and a dining table inlaid with oyster shells.