The Last Emperor

by Kari Gregg

  Nick bent, tipping his jaw down. “Do it.”

  Stiffening his spine, Arit refused the nervous worry coiling in his belly and instead, smiling, he slipped the diadem onto Nick. He leaned to kiss the top of Nick’s head. “Rise, Your Majesty,” he said, affection and warmth for Nick surpassing his anxious concern, his fears—everything. “Rise and greet your people.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “The militia Rolan and Lydia brought from the Urals have been stationed at the exits and at each of the windows. Points of access to this part of the palace were boarded up or sealed with bricks after the war to discourage squatters, but until we’re certain all the traitors have been arrested, wisdom demands rigorous security. None of us can be too careful.” Benjic, flanked by soldiers on both sides, released the padlock shutting away the private rooms for the imperial family. He threaded the dusty chain through the handles, piling the chain on the floor in a mound of rusting iron links. He tugged on one of the doors, which didn’t budge. He frowned, at Nick or the stubborn door Arit didn’t know. “Are you sure?”

  Beside Arit, Nick stood tall, his muscles stiff as granite. Gray powder from plaster the mortars had disintegrated still dusted his golden hair, oddly contrasting the jeweled Founder’s Diadem Arit had placed on his head. A random tear in the cloak Nick had selected earlier in the morning to walk through the staging of the state funeral spilled gold threads. Grimy soot coated Nick from head to toe. His features remained a cool mask, though, calm. Regal. None save Arit would ever guess the emperor’s worry and turmoil.

  But Arit knew. The wound prickling his neck that Nick had torn into his flesh hadn’t scarred yet, but it would, just as Arit’s bite on Nick’s forearm would leave Arit’s mark. They still had a lot to learn about each other, a great deal to discover, but that would come in time. The physical demands of their mating had no less finished. The strong link forged between them made Nick an open window to Arit, who sensed his mate’s troubled mind clearly now.

  “He’s sure,” Arit told Benjic.

  Who sighed.

  His sire nevertheless gripped the handle with both hands and pulled, throwing his weight into the effort to crack the entrance of the imperial apartment. After decades of neglect and disuse, the doors had swollen shut, but Benjic’s determination won out. Sweat dotting his face, he managed to pry the suite open enough to squeeze through. “These rooms were ruined during the march on the Winter Palace.” He coughed on the cloud of dust he’d dislodged as two guards wriggled inside the suite to confirm no danger before Nick and Arit entered. “The stories are true, Your Majesty. Soldiers, peasants, and nobles alike ripped up the floorboards and tore at the walls searching for hidden treasure. The damage was…extensive.”

  “When my tour of the palace after I reached the capitol excluded the place I knew best as a boy, I assumed as much.” Nick curled his lush pink lips in wry acknowledgment. “The tribes are infamously secretive, especially about what happened during the revolution, but humans obtained photographs of the destruction before you sealed the border. You needn’t prepare me for what lies beyond these doors.”

  Maybe Nick knew in his head, but anxiety blossomed afresh inside Arit that his mate overestimated the emotional burden of seeing the ruin of his childhood home. He reached for Nick’s hand, threading his fingers through Nick’s. “Let’s get this over with. He needs to rest.”

  Benjic gulped, rocking from foot to foot. “A cleaning crew at least—”

  “No.” Nick turned his head to affix his stare, resolute and majestic as fuck, on the elder. “I don’t want a single stick of shattered wood cleared or the ruined walls patched and replastered. The suite is a time capsule of the revolution, and as such, its historical significance is incalculable. Arit and I will spend our first night together as Emperor and Imperial Consort in these ruins as a harsh reminder of what befalls a crown who forgets the peoples, but after, the suite will be resealed. Until archivists develop a plan to open it for public viewing, I don’t want a single mote of dust disturbed more than absolutely necessary.”

  A guard poked his head through the cracked doors, flashlight shining up to cast his features in eerie shadow. “We’ll need extra men in the cellars to guard this place—there’s a gaping hole in the dining room floor I could march an army through, but other than that, the rooms seem okay. From a security standpoint, I mean.”

  Nodding, Nick stepped forward.

  Arit pushed him gently aside to squirm through the opening first, and Nick let him, no small wonder since both their alpha instincts to protect and defend their mates had exploded to urgent attention after the bombing. Arit sucked in his breath. Ignored the scrape of something digging into his stomach as he wriggled, but the other soldier the Ural militia had provided aided Arit’s step over a jumble of splintered timber piled in front of the door on the other side. Thanking the soldier for his help, Arit accepted a second flashlight the man passed to him and swept the suite.

  The condition of the rooms in which he and Nick would spend the night was worse than Arit had imagined—and Arit had imagined destruction aplenty. Electrical wiring spilled from holes in the walls, one large enough for a man to step through to the room on the other side. More wire dangled from the ceiling, marking where a chandelier had once hung. What hadn’t been ripped away had been covered in graffiti, a portrait in one corner of the entry a skillful rendition of Eton Marisek’s bust. Arit’s gut churned at the sickening talent required to portray the last emperor’s brains spraying from the shot to his skull, and nausea washed over him at the notion Nick would see that.

  His nausea intensified as Arit realized Nick had already seen it—decades ago, when the imperial family had been executed. The murder of his father and much, much worse.

  He directed the flashlight beam away from pithy rebel slogans scrawled on the ragged walls and spray-painted aspersions against a dead princess’s virtue, sweeping instead the arched doorway to what must have been a sitting room, empty except for stray boards pried from gaps in the floor and trash piled against the pockmarked walls like drifting snow. A door hung crookedly from one hinge, only partially shutting away rooms deeper in the suite. The doors to a room Arit decided must have been a dining room was missing altogether, a two-legged chair leaning precariously on the doorjamb blocking off the space. Which was fortunate because Arit’s flashlight couldn’t penetrate the cavernous maw cut into the flooring.

  “The classroom and bedrooms have been torn up, too,” the soldier said and bounced on the balls of his feet to show Arit the ground didn’t rock or sway, “but what’s left seems sturdy enough.” He pointed his beam of light at the cock-eyed door. “Space free of debris to stretch out a sleeping bag is possible in two of the rooms through there and the hallway, if you’re willing to squeeze together.”

  Arit nodded. “He’s willing.” He pivoted to shine his flashlight through the door to find Nick. “The damage is terrible, but you knew it would be. Pass me the camping gear.”

  The dim light held by the soldier cast spooky shadows as Nick, stony and silent, shoved through the opening a lantern, their hastily packed bag of emergency supplies, and a sleeping bag borrowed from the Goddess knew where. Arit shouldered the backpack, hung the lantern from a carabiner hook dangling from it, and stuffed the sleeping bag under his arm. He steadied Nick when he climbed through to join Arit.

  Even Nick, trained since his birth to present a formidably blank mask of calm control, couldn’t hide his flinch or quell the pallid cast of his skin when he directed his own flashlight to sweep the devastation. Arit’s heart twisted at the desolation he sensed in Nick, the hurt old but fresh all at once.

  “I’m okay,” Nick said, though anyone could see he lied. Nick turned his head to speak through the stingy opening of the suite’s door. “Send no one for us tomorrow morning. We’ll come when we’re ready.”

  Benjic leaned forward, fist braced on the jamb. “If there’s further trouble?”

  “The people are drunk o
n victory.” Nick tipped his chin toward distant music blaring through the streets of the capitol. “They’ll celebrate for days, but if something happens, you’ll know where to find me.”

  Leaving their guard at the entrance, Arit and Nick walked around the damage and debris to the cock-eyed door. Arit held it open so Nick could crawl through, and Nick returned the favor. Darkness fell, heavy and evil, once Arit reached the hallway, Nick letting the door swing precariously shut behind them. Nick unlatched the lantern from Arit’s backpack, but the dim glow did little to dispel the gloom.

  “C’mon.”

  Arit followed Nick’s retreating back down the corridor. He stopped at a doorway blocked with broken crates, but rather than navigating around the blockade, Nick stopped. He hung the lantern from a rusty nail protruding from the wall and grabbed a shard of shattered wood, tossing it into another room on the opposite side of the hallway. Arit helped.

  “Careful,” he said, muscling the jagged pieces aside to create a path.

  When they’d cleared enough space, Arit stepped aside so Nick could precede him.

  “This is the nursery, where the youngest children were tutored.” Nick turned in slow circles in the center of the room, gray walls pock-marked with holes, floorboards creaking under his weight as he moved. “Toly, Catterin, and the older kids were tutored in the library, but I spent a lot of time here.”

  Assessing the room as a potential campsite for their haunted night, Arit shrugged out of the backpack, relieved the ache in his shoulders eased as he placed the pack on the ground. He tried to imagine what the place must have been like when Nick was a boy. If the light had been brighter, maybe he would’ve been able to identify some sign children had once played and learned here, but in the arc of light from the lantern he’d fetched from the hallway, Arit couldn’t see anything except plumbing exposed by sheets of missing wood paneling. “You don’t have to do this.” Arit grabbed Nick’s arm. “No one will think less of you for leaving this behind you.”

  “No, I need to be here.” Nick looked at Arit over his shoulder, a sad grin curving his lips. “I have to show you something.”

  He shrugged off Arit’s grip and marched to a recessed cabinet, doors long gone. He stooped to a crouch and, reaching into the black depths, cleared dusty cobwebs. Arit crossed the room to join him, bracing a fist on the cabinet and leaning down. Nick shoved hard, and a panel in the back of the cabinet popped free.

  Tipping his head up, Nick grinned at him. “I think we can still fit.”

  Shock arrowed through Arit as his mate shuffled into the cabinet and through the opening the panel had disguised. “A secret passage?”

  “No.” Nick’s laughter filtered back to him. “We children discovered a gap in the studs and framing large enough to provide a hideout, away from the adults.”

  Bending, Arit squinted into the cramped space, hardly lit by the lantern or his flashlight. “You could have hidden.” He dropped to his knees to crawl with Nick.

  “When the rebels came for us? Possibly.” Arit’s mate carefully made his way forward, through decades’ worth of spiderwebs and mouse turds. “If the imperial family wasn’t where they expected, fully accounted for down to baby Elba, the soldiers would’ve torn the palace apart to find us, though.” He stopped and awkwardly pivoted. Sat in the filth. “Hiding would’ve changed nothing except perhaps costing us this.”

  Arit plunked down beside him. “What?”

  Nick shined the lantern on piece of wood.

  Squinting, Arit directed his own flashlight at the panel to examine it more closely.

  “A safe place for the imperial children’s final legacy,” Nick said.

  Minding the low strut threatening to bash his head, Arit wiggled for a better vantage point. The flashlight beam swept the panel at the right angle, and the engraving buried under a heavy layer of dust was finally discernible. He leaned forward, blew on the surface, and coughed through the cloud of dust before, frustrated, he finally used the arm of his shirt to wipe away the dirt.

  Names. The wood panel, almost certainly taken from the classroom, had been etched with names. Arit’s heart turned over at the seventh on the list—his mate’s. He traced his fingertip over the crudely scratched letters. “You did this?”

  Nick nodded. Reaching for the panel, Arit scooted to one side and helped him retrieve it. “Toly, Lyssandra, Catterin, Allena… We all took turns making our mark as the artillery from the rebels grew louder and louder.” He swallowed. “We weren’t sure they wouldn’t blow the palace to smithereens in the shelling and us with it, but—” He patted the wood. “Just in case.”

  “You hid the panel and then waited for them to capture you.”

  “We agreed if any of us survived the war and made it back, we would rescue this if we could. If the palace wasn’t still standing at war’s end, we made another epitaph.” He smiled at the wood. “Its twin is engraved in a tree beyond the formal gardens, a copse looking onto the ballroom. Rolan and I discovered it during the last gala event, before we arrived in the Urals. We children weren’t able to complete that list of names. This epitaph includes Elba, though.” Clutching the jagged piece of paneling to his chest, Nick told Arit how his brothers and sisters had guided their baby sister’s claws to etch her mark as the shelling drew near. “We wanted something to prove we existed and, at the end, we loved each other.”

  “You honored them. You never forgot.”

  “How could I? Elba’s cries when the bullets punched through me and into her… She was two, didn’t survive until her Saints Day to be formally recognized as a princess of the peoples.” He shuddered. “The sounds she made as she died will never leave me.”

  “The tribes will never forget her, either.” Grief for what his mate had suffered clogging his throat, Arit squeezed Nick’s thigh in quiet support. “We’ll name our first daughter after the sister you lost.”

  Nick laughed. “We’ve an empire to rebuild, elections to organize, a constitution to amend. We won’t have time for childbearing for many summers.”

  “You won’t have time to bear our children. As your consort and temporarily unemployed from my resort in the Urals, I’ll have time aplenty for starting the next generation of Mariseks. With the blessing of the Goddess, one of them will win the faith and confidence of the tribes like their father. Become the next emperor. Because there will be a next emperor.”

  “You have to meet my mom.” Chuckling damply, Nick rubbed his burning eyes. “She’s desperate for grandchildren.”

  “Then by all means, open the borders. Let the humans come, yours and others. Our future begins now.”

  THE END

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