Page 69 of My Dark Horse Prince

All of them wearing black.

They all look just as scary as they did on the train. Except for one of them, who has his arm in a sling. It must be Durak, whose clavicle I snapped.

My heart hammers in my chest, but I feel strangely calm. “Just go,” I whisper. “This isn’t your fight.”

Grigoriy laughs then. “Actually, this is exactly my fight. It’s a fight I thought I’d have to work much harder to find.” He stands up, his hand still in mine. “And I should thank you, Yevginiy, did you say your name is?” He tilts his head. “You saved me the trouble of finding you. They really do deliver everything in this day and age.”

“Deliver?” Yevginiy laughs. “You were coming to look for me? Why?”

“I detest the smell of rotting garbage,” Grigoriy says. “Actually, I hate everything about refuse. I always make sure to burn my trash, so it can’t cause problems for the people I care about.”

Yevginiy’s lip curls. “Garbage? Are you saying—”

“Are you really confused?” Grigoriy asks. “You abuse women, and when my woman stands up for the poor lady you’ve claimed, you try to kill her.”

Yevginiy shakes his head. “Stands up for?” He sneers. “She broke Durak’s clavicle, and we did kill her. I have no idea how she survived that fall from the train after being stabbed twice, let alone in the middle of nowhere. At night. In the cold.”

“Yes,” Grigoriy says. “Keep telling me the details of exactly what you did. That helps me feel better and better about my plan for today.” He looks behind him. “And how many of these men were with you that day?”

“What?” Yevginiy frowns.

“How many of your seven friends were on that train?”

“All of them,” he says.

“Excellent,” Grigoriy says. “And my last question is, how did you come to be here, in the hospital? There are security guards outside that should have at least tried to stop you.”

Yevginiy laughs. “You don’t even know who I am? I own Saint Petersburg. When my men went back to collect that filthy cripple’s body, it wasn’t there. That’s when we started to look for her—we had her bags, you know, with her identification in them. That doc put in a request for medical hardware, and her name popped up.” He smiles.

“But how did you get here?” Grigoriy asks again, doggedly.

“That was the easiest part. Your doctor’s greedy. A little bit of money and he brought us here himself.”

“Thanks,” Grigoriy says.

“For what?” Yevginiy starts toward us, pulling a knife from somewhere. “Do you make it a habit of killing people who are about to kill you?”

Grigoriy frowns. “That would be a difficult habit, unless I was a vampire or zombie. Otherwise, how could it happen more than once?”

I can’t help snorting. Yevginiy is a real idiot.

Grigoriy pulls a knife from a sheath on his hip I hadn’t even noticed. I can’t help staring at the symbol on the hilt. Crossed axes.

“Wait, that’s—”

“This is the knife that was inside my woman when I found her,” he says. “Normally, I’d take my time carving all of you up.” Grigoriy shakes his head. “But she’s with me, and I don’t want to scare her too badly.”

Grigoriy throws his hand to the side, and the doors leaving the recovery room slam closed.

“What’s happening?” Durak asks.

The other men murmur, glancing back at the doorway.

A howling sound fills the room, and I realize why Grigoriy hasn’t left my side. He needs to use his powers, and he needs to be touching me to do it. The man who powered up two hundred industrial windmills could easily crush all these men.

But I don’t want him to kill them. That’s as bad as what they want to do to me.

“Just get us out of here,” I say. “Can you do that?”

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