Page 29 of My Dark Horse Prince

“Luckily, sports cars aren’t Grigoriy’s style.” He looks, almost apologetically, at his friend. “When I first got back to Russia, I thought I’d find you and Alexei right away.” Aleks’s smile is rueful. “I ordered you a Range Rover. It finally arrived last week.”

“I’m a little bummed,” Kris says. “He told me I could have it, since you never showed up. It’ll take forever for another one to get here. Imports aren’t fast.”

“Imports?” Grigoriy looks majorly lost.

That’s when it occurs to me that we’re all speaking Latvian. “How can you speak Latvian so well?”

“It has to be something to do with the curse,” Aleks says. “I speak all three languages that Kris does.” He shrugs. “I tested Grigoriy, and he speaks them all, too.”

“Does that mean Kris is somehow tied to the curse?” That would be bizarre.

“She must be,” Aleks says. “And Grigoriy speaking all three just confirms it. Before we were cursed, we both only spoke Russian. Now we speak English and Latvian as well.”

“But Mirdza speaks them, too,” Kris says.

“I learned English from her mother, same as Kris,” I say. “I kind of grew up with her.”

“But her English isn’t quite as good, and her Russian is better,” Kris says.

She’s probably right, but neither’s really noticeably different.

“So maybe he could speak them all because of Mirdza.” She frowns. “We’ve been searching for a while with no luck. But Mirdza gets here and bam. He wakes up and finds her immediately.”

“Can we head for the car while we analyze?” Aleks asks. “I’m starving.”

Kris rolls her eyes. “Lamb chebureki again?” She laughs. In all the years I’ve known her, I’ve never seen her laugh as much as she has today. It’s really nice to see her so happy. “You’re obsessed.”

“Obsession has such a negative implication,” Aleks says. He’s moving down the hallway, so I follow him. The crutches are so much better than walking on my own, but I’m still slow. I don’t want to fall behind.

“You eat three or four from that same street vendor every day.”

“For a few days I did,” he says. “But I don’t always. It’s not a big deal.”

“What is it exactly?” Grigoriy asks.

“They’re meat pies,” Aleks says. “They became popular after the revolution.” Aleks looks down, and I get the sense that something that happened long, long ago for us is still very real to him. How strange. “It’s the only good thing that came out of the Soviet occupation.” The set of his mouth is pretty grim.

I wonder what it would be like to go to sleep—or whatever happened to them—and wake up a hundred years later. Everything you knew, everything you cared about, would just be gone.

It hits me then that Grigoriy is going through that right now.

He falls into step next to me, modifying his giant stride to match my hobbling one. “Are you alright?” he asks, his voice low.

“Are you?” I ask. “Today must have been a really rough day.”

He shrugs. “Aleks had it way worse than I do. His mother and sister were still alive. My parents had both passed—no siblings. He was stuck as a horse for months—I managed to shift back to human within a day.” His smile is half playboy, half adorable teenager. “Thanks for that, by the way.”

He’s thanking me. . .because I shifted him. “I mean, I guess you’re welcome?”

“Oh, it was you. Only Kris could change Aleks, and then she tried, and nothing. Only you could change me. I hope you’ll keep doing it, at least until we can figure out how to break whatever’s keeping me from my magic.”

“Sure,” I say. “But it’s not like I got nothing from it. You healed me, right?” For some reason, all my brash desire to grill him about it is just. . .gone. Why am I shy about him healing me? For some reason, it feels sort of scary, almost, to ask him about making my stab wounds disappear.

He slows, making me half-halt to look him in the face. “It was my pleasure to do that.” His hand balls into a fist at his side. “I vow that I’ll find the men who—”

I shake my head vehemently. “No, please vow the opposite. Never try to locate those men. Not ever.”

He frowns. “But—”

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