Page 111 of The Crown's Fate
“What have you done?” Her brow furrowed.
“I ... I’m sorry,” he said.
She turned her bronze hand from side to side.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, for it was the only thing Nikolaicouldsay.
Vika glanced around them, past Nikolai and Pasha and Yuliana, to the soldiers standing watch, no longer fighting, around the square.
“Is it over?” she asked Pasha.
Pasha nodded slowly. “I think so.”
She looked at Nikolai.ThroughNikolai. He was so weak now, he was hardly even a shadow anymore. But he nodded, too.
She frowned at her metal fingers some more. Then she said to Nikolai, “Quite honestly, it’s ugly. And heavy. But it will be more satisfying now to punch you.”
He didn’t know if he was supposed to laugh.
“Why did you do it?” Vika asked. “You could have won and taken the throne with me incapacitated.”
Nikolai sighed. “Because when you were hit—when it was like the end of the Game and you were going to die again—what I truly wanted broke free of the darkness, and everything became clear.”
“I don’t understand.”
He looked into her eyes. Her fiercely beautiful, defiant eyes.
His single dimple crinkled his shadowed cheek, as he smiled fully for the first time in a very long time. “It’s because you said you loved me. And I didn’t forget.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
“Isee you,” Vika said.
Nikolai shook his head and looked down at his fading silhouette. “I’m hardly here.”
But he was. He was faint, but her Nikolai was still there, as she’d hoped all along. He had found a piece of himself and fought Aizhana’s energy.
And yet, his mother’s darkness still lived within him. Would it come back after Nikolai had rested? Would it take over his body and his will again? If only there were more of the old Nikolai to fight it.
Vika looked at her new bronze hand. It was a shame she couldn’t simply punch Aizhana’s energy out of him. She flexed her fingers, still adjusting to the feel of the metal. She was made of so many different parts now: the statue’s old magic, Nikolai’s energy at the end of the Game, Sergei’s energy through his bracelet.
Wait. Nikolai’s energy!Vika’s mouth dropped as the realization hit her. All this time, energy had been transferred toher. But what if Nikolai could reclaim some of his own energy he’d given her during the Game? The pure, self-sacrificing Nikolai she’d been searching for might still exist in her own veins.
“Give me your hand,” she said as she reached with her human fingers for his shadow ones, so faint they were like dissipating wisps of smoke.
But as soon as she touched him, a jolt of heat shot through her. It knocked all the air out of her lungs.
“What’s happening?” Pasha demanded.
Neither she nor Nikolai could answer. He was swallowed by light, first a dull glow where she held his hand, but then expanding, brighter and brighter until they were engulfed by a halo so blinding, she had to squint.
It was like touching him for the first time at the masquerade, and wanting him to kiss her in his bed, and dancing with him in the volcano dream, all bound in a ribbon of mandarin and thyme and fire.
Vika gasped for air. It was working.But why now? Why hasn’t this happened before?There had been plenty of interaction between the two of them recently.
But there had always been something between her and Nikolai. An egg. A dream. Misguided ambition.
Now, though, there was nothing separating them.
