Page 72 of My Dark Horse Prince

The man who terrorized that poor woman and her child and ordered others to kill me and then tracked me here and came again slumps to the ground, his eyes glazed, his head at an unnatural angle.

“You’ll never have nightmares of him hurting you again,” Grigoriy says. “You saw for yourself that he’s dead.”

My hands are shaking.

My stomach’s churning.

My head’s pounding.

But I force myself to my feet and start for the door.

“Wait,” Grigoriy says. “We can’t leave yet.”

“I’m going,” I say.

“But that doctor welcomed them in,” he says. “He can’t be allowed to—”

I stop, fighting briefly against my entire body, which is screaming for me to run. “If you harm the doctor, I’ll never see or talk to you ever again.”

Grigoriy sets his jaw. His brow furrows. “He knew they would kill you,” he says. “He allowed those men into the hospital, and he’s a physician. I saw the paperwork on his wall—he took an oath to do no harm.”

“More violence won’t fix anything,” I say. “All it does it hurt people.”

Grigoriy jerks his thumb at the dead bodies in congealing pools of blood. “Violence stopped them. They won’t throw any more women out of trains.”

“But who will take their place?” I ask. “Someone else will simply step into the power vacuum that killing Yevginiy made,” I say. “You fixed nothing. You just made room for a new leader to terrorize the women in Saint Petersburg.”

Grigoriy shakes his head. “That’s not true. These men can’t hurt people anymore. Eliminating them was the right thing to do.”

“What’s going on?” Dr. Hubert jogs through the operating room door and pulls up short, his eyes widening in horror. “What happened here?”

“You caused this,” Grigoriy says. “You accepted payment from the mafia to come after the woman you had just taken payment to repair.”

“Don’t,” I beg. Again. “Please, don’t.”

“I had no choice,” Dr. Hubert says. “They said if I didn’t help them, they’d kill me.”

“You always have a choice.” Grigoriy smiles.

“So do you,” I say. “Let him go.”

As if I’m watching a movie in which I have no role, they act like they can’t hear me.

“They told me she had run away from home,” Dr. Hubert says. “They said they were just looking for her.”

“You didn’t believe that,” Grigoriy says. “You knew they wanted to hurt her, and you took their money anyway.”

Dr. Hubert doesn’t argue. He gulps.

Grigoriy walks toward him, leaning over in a fluid movement to yank the knife Yevginiy threw at him out of the drywall.

Dr. Hubert backs up quickly, scrabbling backward as fast as he can without taking his eyes off of Grigoriy.

But it’s futile. Grigoriy speeds up to a jog, and I watch in horror as he slits Dr. Hubert’s throat with his own hands. I can’t decide what’s worse to watch. A phantom dagger, massacring seven men slowly, or a man, a man I cared for, using his own hands to slit one person’s throat.

“You were running from something when you came here,” Grigoriy says, “but when bad people leave, they don’t change. You made poor decisions here, too, and now they’ve caught up to you.”

There’s no way Dr. Hubert can understand a word of what Grigoriy’s saying.

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