Page 150 of My Dark Horse Prince

“What’s your name?” he asked, his Russian accent pronounced.

“I’m Kristiana Liepa,” I lie.

It’s the easiest lie I’ve ever told.

I’ve wanted to be Kristiana all my life. Not because she’s rich, or because her dad loves her, or because her mother did, too. Not even because she owns a million beautiful horses, is living my dream, or has a billionaire fiancé. She’s also won the biggest horse race in Europe, but that’s not it either.

No, I spend my life wishing I could be her, because she’s had the luxury of caring for my twin sister in a way I never did.

When important, powerful people care for you, you can spend your time protecting others. When no one cares whether you live or die, it turns you into a selfish beast.

Pretending to be Kristiana Liepa is the easy part.

Convincing them not to kill me like they’re planning? That’s the hard part. But other than coveting my neighbor’s life, that’s probably the one thing in the world that I’m the best at—surviving, at any cost.

“Come with me,” the man says.

I don’t argue, but I’m already making a plan.

**I HOPE YOU ENJOYED MY DARK HORSE PRINCE!

Are you ready for Adriana’s story? I’m including the (very rough!) first chapter of the next book, My High Horse Czar if you keep scrolling.

You can preorder it right now. Here’s the blurb:

Adriana’s stuck between a rock and a very hard, very dangerous place. It’s not the first time she’s ever been in trouble, but it is the worst.

When her twin sister calls and tells her she’s going to be killed unless Adriana surrenders herself in half an hour, she figures she doesn’t have much to lose.

But Adriana has no idea how much excitement her future holds, or whose protection she’s about to awaken.

The scrappy fighter who has vowed never to date or marry is about to meet her match in the highest horse-shifter in existence—the displaced Czar of Russia himself, Alexei Romanov.

29

Fight or flight.

They say humans experience one or the other under stressful circumstances. As a female who weighs less than 6 stone, I should really have learned to run. It’s not like I’m equipped to take out mean men who are twice my size.

But my twin sister got all the flight response.

Mom always says I’m fifty pounds of dynamite in a five pound bag. And I don’t have a very long fuse, either. I just wish I was more like a thousand pounds of dynamite in a hundred pound bag. Then maybe I’d have seen another way out.

My step father really caused everything. If he hadn’t been so unbearably gross, I never would have felt compelled to move out of my mom’s apartment. That meant I needed to find another place to live, and being on your own is expensive. It’s worse when you have no education or skill set, other than riding. It didn’t leave me a lot of options.

My sister’s best friend gave me two horses who weren’t good at jumping, and I used them to run races, earning money more often than not. At first it was enough, but as bills began to pile up, I needed a bigger win.

To really make enough, I needed more money than I had, so I borrowed it. But then. . .I didn’t win. I lost. And then I was really in a bind. I kept paying things forward, staying a half-step ahead of where I needed to be all the time.

Until I wasn’t.

The first time I met Nojus, I thought he was cute. He had a little-boy air about him. I must have been delusional, because the second time we met, when I had to tell him I didn’t have his money, he was busy gutting someone when I walked through the door. I nearly lost my breakfast, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell him the truth. I lied and said it had been stolen. I think he knew, but he gave me an extension with outrageous interest, which would double the amount due. It felt better than being gutted, anyway.

Only, now, almost a year later, after throwing a race to cover some of the compounding interest, he basically owns me.

All he has to do if I stop listening to him, aside from killing me, is hand in his evidence of my criminal activity to the policija. Which is how he’s been able to use me to run his errands, threaten people in higher positions where the more obvious goons could never sneak through, and dig up information from people who would see his jackets a mile away.

Even so, I’m past the grace period.

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