Page 3 of Bred By the Tsar

I don't look up when the door opens. I let her stand on the threshold of my study and absorb the size of the room, the dark, the man who hasn't bothered to lift his head for her. Let her understand the arrangement.

"Your Majesty," she says. "You wanted to see me?"

The voice is younger than I expected. Warmer. American.

"You're the girl my mother hired," I say to the papers. "Hazel."

"Yes, sir."

And I look up.

I have been told, by men who survived it, that there is a particular silence on a battlefield in the half-second after the round is fired and before anyone understands they've been hit. The body knows before the mind does. The body always knows first.

She is small and unremarkable and dressed in clothes that have been good once, a long time ago, on someone else. Brown hair coming loose. A face with nothing arranged about it at all, no court training, no calculation, just a girl looking back at a man she's been taught to be afraid of and being afraid of him correctly and refusing, some stubborn flicker of her, to look away.

And the thing I have been certain for three years that I do not possess, the ability to love, comes awake in my chest all at once, fully formed, like it has been there the whole time, waiting, and only needed her to walk into the room and switch on the light.

But it isn't only my chest.

It's lower, and it's faster, and there is nothing civilised in it at all. One look at this half-starved orphan in someone else's good clothes and I am hard behind the desk, so fast it leaves me light-headed, the whole animal of me voting before I've had a single thought I'd admit to. Three years of nothing, and now this: instant, brutal, my hands already deciding what they'd do to her if the desk weren't in the way.

I want to put her over it and learn what sound she makes.

I want it with a violence that would empty the room if it ever reached my face.

Oh, I think. There it is.

I do not move. Forty-two years of governing my own face are worth something, and they are worth this — my expression gives away nothing. I am grateful, distantly, for the heavy desk between us, because my face still obeys me and the rest of me has plainly stopped taking orders. Every plan I walked into this room holding quietly dies, and I feel them go, one after another, the way you feel snow stop.

She doesn't know. How could she? She's still standing very straight, waiting to be dismissed, twisting the hem of her sleeve between two fingers.

"Sit," I say.

She sits.

I study her openly now, because everything in this house is mine to study, and I watch the colour come up her throat under the attention and I find I want to follow it with my hand. The severance in the drawer has become an absurd object. A document for a different man, who walked into this study an hour ago and is not coming back.

"My mother tells me the last three nannies were unsatisfactory," I say. “How would you be different?”

"I wouldn't know, sir. I only met your children three hours ago."

"And?"

A breath. Then, with a small lift of her chin, the steadiness winning out over the fear: "And your daughter is testing me to see how fast I'll leave, and your son climbed into my lap before I learned his name. They're not difficult, Your Majesty. They're grieving. There's a difference, and the last three probably couldn't tell."

The room is very quiet.

No one speaks to me like this. No one has spoken to me like this in twenty years, plainly, as though I am a man in a room and not an institution with a pulse. My mother sends me trained women who know which truths a Tsar is allowed to hear. This girl has been in my house for only an afternoon and has already told me something true about my own children that I did not know and needed to.

Her insolence does something to me. Makes my blood like fire. Makes me hard.

I stand.

There's no hiding what she's done to me, and I don't try. Let her see what she walked into. Her eyes drop — once, helpless, a single flick down the front of me to the unmistakable proof of what one look at her has done — and then snap back up to my face, colour flooding up her throat, mortified that she looked at all. I take the small caught sound of her breath and put it somewhere safe, to bring out later.

She tenses as I come around the desk — good instinct — but she holds.

I cross to her. I don't hurry. Hurrying is for men who fear they'll be refused, and I have never in my life been refused, and I will not be refused this. I stop close enough, I reach down, and I take the loose strand of hair that's fallen against her cheek between my finger and thumb. I tuck it back behind her ear.