Page 93 of My Wild Horse King

It makes me feel a little better.

“Who are you talking to, exactly?” Amanda Saddler somehow magically beamed herself down from the judging booth to the side of the bleachers we all just walked past.

I spook a little and step backward. The girls both laugh. “Horses,” Whitney says.

“I’m Gustav,” he says. “We tried to talk to you yesterday—my father’s pretty much a constant source of embarrassment, but I swear, we do not need money.”

Amanda narrows her eyes. “What do you want, then?”

“Journals,” he says. “Not to have them—but Dad told my sister Kristiana that our family had some old journals that might’ve talked about horses, actually. We were hoping to take a look at them.”

Amanda frowns. “I did have some—kept them for far too long, probably. But a few years ago, there was a fire. Everything that I’d been storing in my barn burned to the ground.”

My heart sinks.

Whitney’s frowning. “But didn’t Gabe?—”

Amanda shakes her head. “I’m sorry you came all this way for nothing, but I can’t help you.” She pivots on the heel of her cowboy boot and marches away.

I kind of want to stick around and see whether Whitney and Emery win any prizes or money once all is said and done, but seeing as I can’t talk, and with as depressed as Gustav looks, I don’t even bother trying to argue when he points me back out the way we came. He’s clearly keen on shifting me back and getting out of here.

I can’t blame him.

We just wasted a lot of time on something that doesn’t even exist, and Leonid’s coming—probably closer to us with every passing hour—and we’re no closer to having any idea how to save Gustav’s life, much less how to vanquish the threat Leonid poses with his insane trials and massacres of perceived villains.

It hits me then.

I’m not sure why I didn’t realize it before. His insane and undisclosed trials must be him simplylookingat people, deciding if they’re evil, and then ordering them to be eliminated. He’s executing all the villains he finds in Russia before he’s even found evidence that they’ve done something concrete wrong.

It’s probably the most Leonid thing I’ve ever heard.

In his mind, he’s making the world a better place, one murder at a time.

Gustav has slid off my back, and I notice a bare stall on the far corner—no tack, no chairs, nothing at all in front of it, and there’s no one standing around within a hundred feet. I duck inside and shift, too eager to share what I just figured out to wait.

“Holy smoking goat meatballs,” a male voice says.

I spit out the bit and yank the bridle off my face.

Gustav swears under his breath, and he doesn’t use the word meatballs at all. When I turn, I realize there was a kid in the stall I ducked into, mucking it. He looks like a high school kid. He’s staring at me like I’m—well, like I’m a horse who just turned into a person.

His jaw’s dangling. His eyes are wide. And then he says, “I can’t believe it was true. All of it was true!”

24

GUSTAV

True? What was true? What’s this kid saying?

“I have got to find my grandma,” he says. “Can you guys wait here for a second? She isnevergoing to believe this.”

I grab his wrist and drag him back.

The muck rake drops to the ground with a clatter.

“Not so fast, kid.”

“I’m not a kid.” The boy scowls. “I’m seventeen years old.”

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