Page 82 of My Wild Horse King

I can’t help smiling at his nervous question-statement. At least it’s not only me who’s struggling. “Let’s just try sharing the bed. If it causes any problems, I’ll take the towel.”

I shoot forward, claiming the side closest to the bathroom. If I have to wake up in the middle of the night to pee, I’m always really bleary and tired. I’d hate to trip and fall flat on my face, or worse, stumble over him and wake him up.

Gustav quietly circles around, sitting down on the edge of the bed near the window. The mattress creaks, predictably, because his frame is not small, but it doesn’t appear to be collapsing down on his side or anything concerning.

I keep my eyes trained on my side of the bed, notably not looking at him or any part of his delicious body, and then I slowly lower myself toward the edge. And then we’re both sitting on the bed at the same time, which feels like a coup. Gustav snags one of the pillows from the pile behind us—of which there appear to be four—and repositions it a little bit so it’s in between us. “Look. There’s a little barrier. I’ll stay here on my side, and if you feel like you’re rolling, you can lean on that.” His easy smile’s reassuring. That’s not the face of someone who would do anything nefarious.

More’s the pity.

I nod a bit, and without meaning to, I lean back at the same time he does. Now we’re both lying down, but I realize that we never turned the lights off. The lamps on either side of us are both blazing. I sigh a little and sit back up.

“What’s wrong?” Is it me, or does he sound nervous?

“Lamp.” I shift over and shut mine off.

“Right.” He’s sitting up to turn his off as I lie back down.

And then we’re lying beside one another, in the dark, on the same bed. The world isn’t ending, and it looks like everything’s going to be just fine. “No rolling at all.”

“What?” His voice sounds deeper and even more unnerving in the dark.

“I just mean that the mattress is fine.” I cringe a little, hearing myself.

“Yeah, it appears my worries were for nothing.” His chuckle relaxes me a little, thankfully.

“Let’s hope lots of things we’re fretting about turn out like that,” I say.

“Do you mean Leonid?”

I wish. “No, I think he’s coming, and I doubt it’ll be no big deal when he finds us.”

“Do you care about him?”

“That’s a complicated question,” I say. Though it’s easier to think about it in the dark. “I’ve known him for a long time, but he’s made some really bad decisions.”

“Like what?” he asks. “What’s the worst thing he’s done?”

“Other than stealing Alexei’s powers?” I ask. “He’s held bizarre trials and executed people? He stole the throne from Alexei, twice.”

“And didn’t he kill the Romanov family?”

“I’m not sure,” I say. “The thing is, there were a lot of complicated things happening at the same time. The world was weird—famine and unrest caused by some bad moves on his father’s part. The world war. Russia was in a weird spot—it hadn’t modernized like most countries had. People were angry. The Kurakins and my family were all angry, too.”

“But—”

“I asked Leonid when I woke up—he was the first person I saw—what he had done. He said he had broken the rules. He had tried to force the powers like Baba Yaga told him never to do, and he said we’d all paid the price.”

“So maybe he didn’t kill the Romanovs.”

“I think something about what he did killed them,” I say. “I’m just not sure what or how much of it was his fault.”

“But from his perspective, they stole the Rurikid powers—you all did—from him.”

Not much of an excuse. “And, he’s killing people now, in the present.”

“Good people or bad people?” Coming from Gustav, who shares the same power with him, the question’s a strange one.

“Good people don’t kill people,” I say. “It’s a basic superhero tenet, isn’t it?”

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