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enthralling words into the ears of Dmitri’s
co-conspirators and fix the prince’s mad ramblings into their minds as “truth.”
Then they’d all scurry away with the same preposterous tale of bravery and
shored-up masculinity.
    Dmitri drove his Romanov vehicle through St. Petersburg
unmolested by sentries and guards. The body rolled against the rear seats,
thudding with a vibration Dmitri heard as well as felt. Each time the tires
slid on the frozen cobblestones, or the inky night caused Dmitri to slow, he
compensated a bit more, one small inching of his fingers farther to the left or
to the right, to deal with the bulk he hauled.
    He gripped the steering wheel tighter, waiting for a
gnarled hand to reach over the seat back and take hold of his neck. Or a howl
to rip through the interior of his car—rasping and violent, shrill, like the
monk himself.
    Or for a healer’s touch to snake around his neck and
deal death, forcing Dmitri to taste his own guts.
    Dmitri stopped in a small stand of trees at the head of the
Petrovsky Bridge. The shores were even and offered good footing, the mud frozen
smooth and the slope flat. A narrow wood bridge above creaked in the winter
wind as it crossed over the Neva River. This part of the city lay blanketed by
both darkness and poverty.
    Dmitri glanced into the back seat. When a bullet was not
enough, he’d been told, extreme measures were needed. Freezing until limbs
broke off. Drowning. He’d carry the body down the bank
and dump the bastard below the ice.
    Incineration worked best, but there would be no
evidence. And in the spring, when the ice melted and all other evidence had
washed away, that Hessian tart needed to see the consequences of her handiwork.
    So did Dmitri’s cousin. The Tsarina wept and Nicholas
licked her tears from the floor.
    They destroyed his nation. His family. They’d birthed weakness and named it “Alexei.”
    Dmitri flung open his door. The night’s air slapped hard
and he tucked the edges of his scarf into the collar of his greatcoat. Christ’s
birthday had brought with it true cold this year—the kind that freeze mens’
feet into their boots and their hands into blackened claws.
    The cold prickled but Dmitri lowered the scarf and
sucked it in, fixing it to himself. He looked at the river, fixing that, too,
into his vision. Even in the darkest hour, the burning fire of the Motherland’s
crystal ice danced on the solid waters and through the stillness of the air.
    He, unlike the Hessian, would do what Russia needed.
    Dmitri yanked the body through the rear door of the
vehicle. His Shifter ability to change himself took time—considerable time,
since his morphing was much weaker than his healer’s touch—but he’d learned
early how to maximize his body’s potential. He’d kept himself small for a
Shifter male, concentrating his mass instead to increase his strength and
athleticism. Hoisting Rasputin onto his shoulder took little effort.
    The air smelled clean only because the cold made all
scents crystallize and drop to the ice. The monk flopped as Dmitri slid down
the slope, and the rustling of the rug combined with the scrape of his boot’s
heels in a whispered cacophony. The sensations of the world popped against
Dmitri’s face and burst on his tongue, a wild integration of perceptions that
could only happen in a place where nothing moved.
    If the monk breathed, Dmitri did not feel it, nor did it
fog the air. Perhaps the shot to the head had been enough.
    He dropped the bundle where the mud met the edge of the
ice. The carpet muffled the thud but moved too easily on the frozen ground. Dmitri
kicked at it again, angling the body into the river so it wouldn’t roll away.
    Snow swirled over the river’s surface as miniature
winter faeries full of twinkle and malice. Dmitri stared, his gaze following
the only movement in the stillness. He heard the sparkle, felt the slight brush
to his cheek of the breeze, as the little whirlwind moved