by Kari Gregg
Eyebrow arching, Nick reached for his sandwich. “Regardless. If I’m ever crowned and thereby free to convey titles, I’ll certainly take everyone’s feelings into consideration.”
“You are days away from stepping down from the throne unless matters change.” Across the table, Belia harrumphed. “May I suggest we concentrate on the memorial and meeting with other elders sympathetic to our cause?”
“Yes. Let’s.” Stiff as cordwood, Benjic retook his seat and sneered at his laptop. “You’re due in the cathedral near the Winter Palace this afternoon to go over staging for the memorial.”
“Some elders—primarily extremists—plan to boycott the practice walk-through and the funeral as a mark of protest.” Harr leaned forward. “Most won’t, though. My sire arranged a meeting with them after. Many are friendly to retaining you as emperor in some form, and the others are persuadable if assurances are given your rule would be shared equally between the crown and leaders chosen by the people.”
“The same arrangement my parents struggled to negotiate to divert the rebellion in the first place.” Under the table, Nick threaded his fingers in Arit’s free hand. The tight smile he flashed the elders gave no indication of his mate’s distress, though.
“They were betrayed.” The small hairs on Arit’s arms stood on end. “By some of the same elders professing support for Nick.”
Benjic’s shoulders rose and fell in a diffident shrug. “I never claimed the game wasn’t dangerous.”
Arit turned to Nick. “Your adopted brother, Rolan? And your human? They are on their way to the capitol?”
“Cell phone reception is notoriously spotty in the outer territories, but I think Benjic managed to get a text through to him and Lydia.” Nick sighed. “If not, the news reporting the day of the state funeral and abdication ceremony will have reached them by now. They’ll be here. I expect them or a call from one of them any time.”
He hoped so. Because, although Arit had brought as many of the lodge’s staff from the Urals as he could, and Nick’s security team added several extra men to that number, the ones protecting Nick who Arit trusted were too few to guarantee history wouldn’t repeat by giving the tribes another dead emperor. Nick needed Rolan, Lydia, and every other friend whose loyalty was beyond question he could get.
Beneath the table, out of sight of their audience, Arit squeezed his mate’s hand in his grasp. “Okay.”
Chapter Twelve
Eton and Olina had been many things. Religious wasn’t one of them, so the cathedral near the Winter Palace was just another opulent venue to Nick, one he wasn’t and had never been familiar with as a child. Walking through the Hall of Kings to the nave before he and other dignitaries practiced the order of events for the first state funeral in a generation, he’d appreciated the artistry of frescoes illustrating various points in the empire’s history and the gleaming statuary of gods and goddesses revered by the individual tribes. He gasped at the architecture. High-vaulted ceilings created an echo effect, a rainbow of colors shining against marble floors from stained-glass windows towering above them.
Crews worked in the nave, dusting and polishing benches until the wood shone. Standing candelabras waited to be buffed. The tang of cleaners fought with the old wispy aroma of incense worshippers had burned in offering so frequently the scent lingered in the decorative tapestries, oak, and plaster.
“On Sunday, you’ll be guided after the parade to a private chapel in the southern wing of the transept.” Deban, hands clasped with Elder Belia’s, smiled. “The northern wing fell into disrepair before the war, and poor economic conditions since has prevented us from spending on restoration of imperial landmarks.”
“If funds are left in the Wallach Trust after we’ve invested in education and job growth, we’ll save what we can.” Nick hoped. “Prepare a list of the buildings and monuments most in need of repair.”
“Already done.” Deban tapped on his phone. “Sending the file to you.”
Walking next to him, Arit snorted.
“Jobs and education first, I agree,” Nick said. “Infrastructure in the outer territories should be updated before we sink a solitary coin into historic places, too. Roads are crumbling. Many bridges are dangerously obsolete. Internet and cell phone service outside the cities are a joke.”
Leading him from the nave into the transept, Belia frowned. “The Wallach Trust won’t supply enough capital.”
“Perhaps tax monies squandered on lavish parties, parades, and televised extravaganzas would be better spent on improving the future of the tribes?”
“Bread and circuses,” Arit muttered.
Nick grinned at him. “Exactly.”
Deban bit his lip. “As I said, the parade route through the capitol ends here, at the cathedral. You’ll be met at the entrance by a contingent of White Army veterans who will escort you to the Urals Chapel.” He ushered Nick and Arit through an arched doorway into a smaller, more private sanctuary with a shocking amount of gold leaf.
Nick widened his eyes, gritting his teeth to stifle a burst of laughter. Wealthy patrons traditionally outfitted and decorated chapels in the transept. Nick didn’t want to consider which family was responsible for this monstrosity. The benches were constructed of mahogany to match the raised pulpit, which was carved with bas reliefs of the saints accompanied by representations of their animal forms: wolves, mountain cats, bears, and falcons. The stylistic design might have been tasteful if the saints and beasts alike were not depicted in a hunt scene, ripping some poor elk to gory pieces. “It’s…” Nick struggled to find a tactful word. “…interesting.”
“Benjic felt you and Arit might appreciate waiting in his ancestral chapel while dignitaries attending the memorial are seated.”
Arit’s eyes rounded. “Benjic is religious?”
“I don’t believe he is.” Deban shrugged. “You can ask him once he finishes reviewing the itinerary with the media and directing placement of video cameras in the Hall of Kings, but I think this chapel was originally built by a high alpha from the Urals two centuries ago for the use of visitors from home. Benjic paid to maintain the chapel since the war, though. The southern wing of the transept was closed for public safety when many families abandoned those responsibilities.”
“Many families were dead,” Nick replied. “The purges were brutal.”
Belia winced. “War isn’t kind.”
“Neither is genocide. Which is what happened to loyalists and any humans unlucky enough to be captured in raids on the borderlands during the revolution: genocide.” The indignant outrage Nick kept a firm lid on slipped loose. “Isn’t that what the international court and neighboring countries ultimately judged the mass killings, torture, and rape? Genocide?”
“We are grateful for a quiet space for prayer and reflection.” Arit’s warm grasp on Nick’s biceps steadied Nick. “He will be more comfortable here instead of enduring public scrutiny while attendees stream into the cathedral for the service. I’m heartened some in the capitol have been compassionate and considerate of Nick during such a difficult time. Thank you.”
Sighing relief after Nick’s bristling attack, both Deban and his elder mate nodded. “The emperor, empress, crown prince, princes, and princesses died many winters ago, but without the closure of laying their remains to rest with their ancestors, we understand His Highness’s grief must be as fresh and new as the day his family was lost to him. None of us wish to prolong or add to his sorrow.”
Nick would not be pacified with smooth platitudes, no matter how well-meant. “Except the elders who refused to honor my bloodline or me by rejecting attendance at the memorial and would like nothing more than for me to crawl upon the funeral pyre of their bones to die alongside my murdered kin as I should’ve.”
Pulling Nick flush against his stolid body, Arit murmured Nick’s name in pained sympathy. “Obviously, the circumstances are harrowing for His Highness. We need a moment?”
“Of course,” elder Belia murmure
d.
“Lingering here while the nave fills is part of the funeral staging we’re practicing today.” Deban consulted his smartphone as he and Belia hurried to the chapel entrance. “Dignitaries or their stand-ins have begun filing into the cathedral by order of station and importance. White Army escorts will not return to the chapel for you for a while, but if His Highness needs longer than the procession into the nave demands, we are at his disposal.” He paused at the doorway. “Please. Take all the time he needs.”
When they were alone, Nick cursed under his breath.
“It’s okay.”
“No. It’s not all right. I’m not.” Nick pushed Arit away and clenched his hands at his sides. “Belia and Deban are allies I—we—desperately need. Yet I snapped at them. If I can’t be smarter than this, I’m not the leader they or the tribes deserve.”
“You are too hard on yourself. We rehearse burial rituals for laying to rest the family you loved and cruelly lost. Family you were never genuinely permitted to mourn. You stifled a lot of anger and pain to stay alive. You think I don’t realize it? That they don’t?” Arit shoved his hands into his pockets, his shoulders tense. “Natural for you to be distraught. No one blames you for it.”
Fury enervated Nick, rage and something else. Restless, he paced the chapel, feeding his anger because rage was easier to cope with than the grief threatening to swallow him whole.
From the doorway, Arit leaned and watched him with narrowed eyes.
A clock ticked somewhere, but time did not pass, not for Nick. He kicked a mahogany bench engraved in an overwrought style that might’ve been fashionable a century ago, but Nick sincerely doubted it. “I hate waiting,” he finally admitted. “I feel like I’ve been waiting my entire life. To mate a stranger to strengthen a doomed crown as a boy. For rescue after we were captured. To see if my wounds would end me while we fled or if my survival would be discovered in the years after.” He exhaled a choppy breath, fought to relax his taut muscles. “For the tribes to finally recognize how thoroughly the revolution had failed them.”
“And to properly bury the mother, father, brothers, and sisters you mourned no less fiercely for the necessity of hiding your grief.” Arit stood, pushing away from the doorjamb he’d propped himself against. “Is that why you cut your hair and kept it closely shorn? As the traditional mourning sigil? It was,” he said, voice low with wonder.
“Short hair helped me blend into the population in the lands of men.” Nick jerked his shoulder in grudging acknowledgment. “Mom and Dad would’ve made me chop it off before we reached the safety of the border if my hair hadn’t been cut already.”
Stumbling a step forward, his mate stared at him. “You did cut your hair. For them and their memory.”
“You’re such a romantic.” In Nick’s gut, acid roiled, sick and merciless. “Our killers took our hair as trophies. Even Elba’s—and she was hardly more than a baby, her hair more fuzz than fur.” As though absorbing the blow anew, Nick flinched. “Dad saw it. He told me what the rebels did to debase and desecrate us.” He reached for the locket at his throat, his hand covering it, as though he could protect Elba any more now than he could then. “You wanted to know about my necklace, its importance to me and why I refuse to ever be without it.”
Pale, features pinched, Arit slowly nodded. “I did.”
Swallowing the knot of anxiety lodged in his throat, Nick clutched the locket tightly in his grasp. “When Paul Goode dug me from the ground, he pried free a ringlet of my sister’s hair clenched in my fingers.”
When Nick glanced up, Arit had snapped his eyes shut. Arit’s tall frame stiffened, like cordwood. “The locket…”
Nausea searing his throat, Nick tightened his grasp on his necklace, ignoring the cheap metal cutting into his palm. “The wispy golden hair my dad saved for me was all I had left of her.” His eyes burned, tears he refused to shed wetly gathering. “Of them.
“It isn’t scheduled in the capitol’s precious itinerary, but when the funeral pyre is lit and I’ve finally fulfilled my oath to my sister, I’ll set down my burden by adding the locket to the fire.” The wounded noise slipping from Arit ate at the control Nick had carried inside him since he was a wounded eight-year-old. He stared at his mate, Nick’s gaze beseeching him. “Until I do, I cannot and won’t let go of the little I have of them. Her memory is with me, always.” He gulped, tapping the locket against his temple. “They beg me, every day, to make the horror and needlessness of their murders right. To earn the life I’ve been given.”
As though Arit couldn’t stand his separation from Nick a moment more, he marched to Nick and pulled him into his embrace. Nick looped his arms around his mate’s waist and shivered at the heat and strength of Arit pressing into him. Nick didn’t cry. He never cried, not since he’d woken with a shattered body, freezing with Paul Goode in the high passes of the Urals. Tears were wasted. Useless. Hysterical sobbing wouldn’t have brought his murdered family back to him or lessen the peril he’d faced every moment since he’d lost everything and everyone he’d ever cared about.
Hanging on to Arit felt amazing, though. As much as he’d loved his adopted parents, they were humans Nick had accepted were ultimately his responsibility to protect. His dad had saved him. If Paul Goode hadn’t dragged him from his shallow grave, Nick would have perished. Both Rosalind and Paul had also done everything in their power to keep Nick safe as he grew from a whelp to an adult, but Nick was born the son of an emperor. He realized what risks he took and what he owed the ones who shared those dangers alongside him.
Everything.
He owed the Goodes everything. Sacrificing to secure their protection was the least Nick could offer his human parents.
For the first time in his wretched existence, he could lean on someone strong enough to shoulder his burdens with him, though. Physically, Arit was as fragile as the Ural mountain range from which he came—as solid and unmovable as granite. Tribal blood pumped as hot and strong in Arit’s veins as it ran inside Nick. When disaster came—and Nick was too much of a realist to deny disaster would inevitably come for him—Arit would fight at Nick’s side. He’d fight until his last breath for Nick, their future, and any children they made together. Arit was fearless, undaunted by who Nick was or what he would become. Arit was Nick’s equal in every way.
Gratitude filling the shattered cracks and empty spaces inside him, Nick angled his jaw to brush his lips over Arit’s stubbled cheek.
Arms slung around Nick’s shoulders, Arit tipped his mouth to claim Nick’s chaste kiss, but when Nick parted his lips to deepen it, Arit edged back. Eyes glimmering with concern, his mate glanced at the chapel’s arched doorway. “C’mon,” Arit said, guiding Nick toward the hallway outside. “Does your jacket have a hood? Put it up.”
Brows beetling, Nick yanked the hood of his cloak over his head and joined his mate staring down the eerily vacant corridor of the transept. Dignitaries, support staff, security, church personnel, and cleaning staff bustled in the distance where the southern wing met the nave nearest the Hall of Kings and continued on past barricades where the northern wing crumbled in indifferent neglect.
Arit removed one arm from Nick’s shoulders to flip up the collar of his leather coat. “No one cares about or will notice me,” he said, withdrawing a knit hat from a pocket. He jammed it on his head. “They’re on alert, desperate for their first glimpse of you. Pull the drawstring of the hood tight.”
“There isn’t a cord.” Nick blinked at him. “Benjic’s tailor designed the cloak. The hood is decorative, not genuinely functional.”
“Of course it is. City shifters…” Arit grimaced. “Fine. Hunch your shoulders. Try to appear shorter. Inconspicuous.”
“Seriously?” Nick glowered. “If you’re thinking about sneaking away, the media—”
“—are busy in the Hall of Kings with Benjic, arguing over camera placement for their live feeds.” Arit tugged Nick forward by Nick’s arm. “With the chaos of the elders and pol
itical elites arriving, now is probably our best shot of slipping past security. If we wait until the crowd thins, we’ll be too late.”
Nick dragged his feet, slowing Arit.
“What?” his mate asked. “Do you want to spend your evening trapped in Benjic’s chapel of ancestral tacky, festering in reminders of who and what you lost? No? Then let’s go.”
“I’m the crown prince. The last Marisek. We don’t sneak off,” Nick reminded himself—and his mate. “Even when running away is safer, we stay.”
“This time, you run.”
Picking up his pace to match Arit’s, Nick slouched. He drew up the hood as much as possible to conceal his face. “Where are we going anyway?”
“Someplace more private. Where you can breathe.” As they neared the transept’s junction with the nave, Arit nudged him closer to the wall where massive statues lining the corridor obscured their approach. Halting behind a free-standing bronze of Lyncus, the doomed lynx god of the north, Arit checked on guards lazily turning away the curious at the corner of the opposite wall. “Officials, support staff, and servants expect us to move together as a couple, not a single person—you’ll go first.” Spying a forgotten cleaning caddy in the shadows, he snatched it by the handle and shoved it at Nick. “Here. Keep your head down and slip through the barricades blocking the northern wing. That area of the cathedral is falling apart; no one will search for us there. I’ll be less than a minute behind you.”
Nick’s forehead grooved into a V. “This is stupid.”
“Yeah.” Arit waggled his eyebrows. “Be impulsive and unpredictable with me.” He nodded toward the crowd. “Go.”
Against his better judgment, Nick went. He slouched, pulling the hem of his coat around him to conceal the showy dress clothes specifically created to inspire and impress cynical capitol toadies during his visit. Instead of meeting the gazes of the workers rushing to and fro or acknowledging the power players who sailed through the bedlam, Nick stared at his feet, his grip on the handle of the caddy tight as he slinked toward the chest-high barricades on the other side of the junction. Veterans of the White Army stationed to guard the transept containing Benjic’s chapel side-eyed him when he passed, but they didn’t raise the alarm. They let him go. The milling crowd jostled Nick, but Arit was right. With his hood shadowing his face and the cleaners he dutifully carried, no one recognized him or cared.
