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“Goodbye,” I sobbed, my voice nearly rendered mute by my difficulty in moving my mouth.
Then before I could really notice what was happening, Ivan had yanked me away and drawn me through the door of the limo, naked in the cold night air.
“Wait!” I yelled. “Please!”
My master didn’t wait. He slammed the limo door shut and pulled me further, toward an enormous statue of a general or a king on a rearing horse.
All I could think was that one way or another the jig was truly up. I started to speak to Ivan in quiet, rapid Russian.
“Gospodin, Belkonov was going to kidnap me. Your men think you’re giving me to him to show him that you don’t care about me. I heard Misha and Grisha talking about it.”
Ivan broke his stride very slightly, as if he had started to make hurried calculations in his head: what did it mean that I actually could speak fluent Russian? Was I lying about what I had overheard Misha and Grisha saying?
Then he kept going, drawing me even further. My extremities began to go numb, and I hoped desperately that someone—Ivan or whoever awaited us—had made plans to cover me up, so that I didn’t make all of this moot by dying of exposure. At the same time, I found myself admiring just how convincing that part would make the little scene for Anatoly and any other observer via a bug in the limo’s passenger compartment.
Antonov took his whore, whipped and naked, to the river in the freezing cold and just dumped her right into the water.
I shivered violently: if Ivan had intended to get rid of me, he wouldn’t even need a gun. A few minutes in the water at the bottom of the embankment, completely unable to climb up because of the steepness of the bank, and I would be another naked corpse in a city that sometimes seemed full of them.
We reached the corner of the statue’s pedestal. I saw someone there, wearing a heavy coat and holding another open and ready. Despite everything I had seen and experienced in the last few months, and the love and joy I had unexpectedly and—I couldn’t help thinking—perversely found in Ivan’s masterful touch and careful mind, that coat seemed like the most wonderful thing I had ever felt against my skin, as the unknown man wrapped it around me. Lined with fur, it banished the chill almost immediately.
“Get her out of here,” Ivan said to him. “Wait until the limo is gone.”
“Gospodin,” I begged, “wait.” I turned to the dark-haired, bearded man who had just wrapped me in the coat. I wondered suddenly if he were the same man who had activated me at Devushkin’s palace, just the night before—before everything had gone, it seemed, terribly wrong. My heart seemed literally to rise into my throat.
“Seven alpha six,” I said to him. “You have to help me.”
I had a moment of sheer terror as I waited to learn whether the man who had wrapped me in the lovely coat had the slightest idea what I meant. He frowned at me severely, an expression that I thought could have meant either utter confusion or furious calculation.
“What?” Ivan said from behind me in English, demonstrating in a way I found distractingly endearing that his mind hadn’t quite kept up. “Heather, what’s going on? Do I have to use the wand to make you go with him?”
The bearded man frowned for one second longer, and it felt like the longest second of my life. Then he nodded quickly.
I turned back to Ivan. I wanted to fall gracefully and submissively to my knees in front of him, but I had to keep the coat around me with my self-hugging arms. I felt sure I would simply fall over if I tried to kneel that way. I had to settle for looking up into his gorgeous, puzzled-but-still-absolutely-dominant face, my arms clasped across my chest in an ancient attitude of prayer.
“Gospodin,” I said, speaking softly and rapidly, “I love you.”
I couldn’t help casting a tiny glance over at the man I felt certain must be a Pretorian Guardsman. I felt certain also that the hand he had in his pocket held a gun, and that he had just readied it somehow—releasing a safety catch, or cocking it, or whatever they did in the movies when you hear that ominous clicking sound.
I looked at the Guardsman right after I saidGospodin, though. My eyes had returned to Ivan when I said, in his own beautiful language—the tongue of my heritage—I love you.
For an instant, I saw disbelief in those cool blue eyes—even a suspicion that I had just lied to him. My heart felt like it would break. Mygospodin’s love for me—I could see that in his face, too, just beginning to come out from the wall behind which he had hidden it—had come to pass in the certainty that it could never be requited… that a girl whose obedience he could secure with the touch of a silver wand could never feel for her criminal master the same affection he felt for her.
“I…” he started.
“We don’t have time for this,” the Guardsman interrupted. “Heather, do you have a plan? If not I have orders…”
My attention remained fixed on Ivan. His brow, open with love for me only for a moment, had closed again in confusion and the beginnings of hostility.
“I do,” I said.
I didn’t, but I kept talking, hoping beyond hope that something would come to me even as I spoke, or maybe that something or someone would come to my rescue if I just kept the Guard agent from killing Ivan for long enough.
“Gospodin, you have to listen to me. I can help you…wecan help you make things better, for… for everybody.”
I glanced over at the agent again. His eyes narrowed. I thought furiously.
Ivan looked from me to the Guardsman.
