Page 43 of My Wild Horse King

Alexei shakes his head. “I mean to see whether Gustav, once he has control, can restore me. I don’t want powers that only come with a kill switch.”

Of course he doesn’t. He wasn’t born to serve someone else, to bow to some other ruler. He was born to be a king.

“I, um, I need to get some air.” I push past him, and he doesn’t stop me. It takes me a moment, but I finally get down from this horribly tall building, through the elevator full of people I’ve never met, and escape into a street that’s teeming with more strangers.

I have no idea why anyone would choose to live in this place.

The streets smell like human urine and feces. There’s a smoky smell coming from all sides. It smells like tobacco sometimes, and like something else others, something I can’t place. Cars and buses crowd the streets, and trash rolls and squishes through any gaps. Construction structures crowd one side of the road. There are huge signs everywhere you look, all screaming for attention. It’s more annoying than the morass of peddlers in the town square in St. Petersburg when I was younger.

None of it helps me feel better. None of it helps me to process what just happened. I let go of something huge, and now the world’s crowding in on top of me to flood the gap, and I want to curl up into a ball here in the street and disappear.

Then I see a familiar face on the screen up ahead.

It’s Leonid.

The devil himself, in some ways, and a lost little boy in others. “—discovered some things about Aleksandr Lukashenko that were. . .disturbing. He certainly wasn’t a leader who had his people’s best interest in mind. Our first meeting did not go well, and when I pressed him about his plans for his people, he revealed an agenda I could not allow to come to pass.”

“You’re saying that you’re the white knight in this situation?” the man in a suit asks. “You’ve saved the citizens of Belarus?”

Leonid smiles.

I’d forgotten how beautiful his smile is. How compelling. It makes him dangerous in a way that few men are.

Devilishly good looking. It’s a phrase that takes on new meaning with him. “A leader’s first priority should always be making decisions that provide the most good for the most people, don’t you agree?”

The suit-guy frowns. “Well, I don’t know. Some ethical questions aren’t clear-cut. What if there was a train headed down a track, and if you didn’t stop it, it would hit someone who had become stuck and kill him. But if you delayed the train to save the man, thousands of passengers would be late, some of them to their detriment? Businesses might fail. Families might fall apart. Should the man die so the train keeps to its schedule?”

“People who come up with these scenarios should be shot,” Leonid says with a grin. “It would save us all a lot of time. The world isn’t as grey as people want to believe it is.” Leonid turns toward the screen. “I seek out the white and eliminate the black. That’s how you craft a better world. If the man was a good man, the delay would be worth it. If he was a bad man, the train should carry on.” He shrugs. “It’s that simple.”

“But how do you know whether people are good or bad?” the interviewer asks. “Aren’t most people somewhere in between?”

This time, when Leonid smiles, it’s beatific. “Oh, I can always tell, and they’re rarely as mixed a bag as you might think.”

I don’t even realize that I’m moving closer to the screen until a hand yanks me back, and I collapse against the person who just saved me. A very loud, very large, very dangerous bus rumbles past the spot I was standing, and I realize I would have been splattered into goo.

When I look up, the face I’m staring into is Gustav’s. I whisper his name, shocked that he was anywhere near. Shocked further that he would care whether a bus flattened me. Gustav had absolutely no reason to save me. “That was—that was a selfless act.”

He dumps me as fast as he grabbed me, and I sprawl forward, my right hand bracing against the concrete to prevent me from face-planting. “All I did was snatch you out of the way,” he says. “You’re fine, and so am I.”

He’s saying he sacrificed nothing, but I’m not so sure. He’s supposed to be preparing for his last presentation of the day, but he’s here, on the street, snatching me out of the path of a bus. In all the worry over Leonid and what he may or may not do, I hadn’t given much thought to what kind of person Gustav is. But maybe I was right to defend him. Maybe, deep down, he’s a good guy. “It’s in you, you know. The goodness, I mean.”

“Just don’t walk into roads without looking.” He stalks off to buy a coffee and then marches back upstairs without so much as looking at me. But it’s pointed. He’s looking everywherebutwhere I’m standing. Which means he feels bad that he was so gruff. He feels bad that he saved me as a reflex.

It’s exactly the kind of thing that shows me who he really is. He doesn’t want credit. He doesn’t want accolades, but when it comes down to it, he does the right thing.

Sitting through the last presentation in yet another antechamber for yet another board room is a little awkward, but it’s better than before, because instead of watching Alexei and Adriana interact with eyes of denial, I watch with insight. They only look at each other, much as Kris and Aleks track one another with their eyes constantly. Grigoriy’s strong, almost dour face is in a state of perma-scowl. . .unless he’s looking at Mirdza.

Now that I’ve accepted the reality, it’s so painfully obvious. Those three couples arestupidin love with one another. I thought that letting go of Alexei would hurt, but after the first wave of misery passed, I feel remarkably free. It’s almost like I was holding on to something that hurt me, and I’ve finally released it.

Why didn’t I let go sooner?

I wonder how often in life we hang on to things, not because we need them, not because they help us in any way, but because we can’t remember how to let go. Like a child who clung so tightly to their mum’s hand that they can’t release it. Like a rope pulled taut for so long, it’s fused with the other fibers and can’t be separated.

None of those things are better for the clinging.

And neither was I.

“Hey.” Mirdza takes a few steps toward me and sits down, ruining the perfectly good buffer of three chairs that I’ve carefully maintained on either side of myself all day. “Is this okay?”

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