LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      London—late August 1823

      The trouble with revolution was that it made unlikely bedfellows, in unlikely locations, and at unlikely times. One moment Prince Ruslan Pisarev had been peacefully asleep in the bedroom of his newly acquired London town house, the next he was sitting behind his desk, dressed in nothing but his banyan and green silk pyjama trousers, reading reports that were at once exciting and horrifying. Part of him hoped the man across the desk was telling the truth and part of him hoped the man was lying, because the truth was dark.

      Kuban, his home, was in turmoil. The Summer Palace outside the city—a place he’d visited multiple times—had been overrun by Rebels and set alight. To prove that change had come at last and permanently two months ago, the royal family had been dragged out and executed at dawn on their front lawn. The Tsar, his wife, his sons. Peter, Vasili and Grigori, boys, now men, whom Ruslan had grown up with.

      The thought of his boyhood friends murdered in such a fashion threatened to swamp him. Ruslan pushed his grief aside. There would be time to mourn them later, in private. Right now he needed his wits, yet the thought lingered. All the House of Tukhachevsken dead, wiped out in a single morning. Well, nearly all of them, if the Captain sitting before him in the pre-dawn darkness of his study was telling the truth.

      Ruslan studied Captain Varvakis with shrewd eyes, assessing the steady gaze and the straight posture of his ‘midnight’ caller. The term was loosely applied. Midnight had come and gone hours ago. The Captain was a military man to his core and with that core came a strong, unbreakable sense of loyalty to the organisation he served, in this case, the royal family. Varvakis had no reason to lie. Still, Ruslan had not survived this long without always asking the ‘if’.

      Ruslan pushed a hand through his thick hair, a bad habit he indulged in too frequently since it left hairs sticking up on end. But what did it matter? He was already rumpled from sleep—a little more tousling wouldn’t matter as his mind assimilated the barrage of information. ‘You mean to tell me Princess Dasha escaped the fusillade and she is, right now, sleeping upstairs in my guest room?’ He’d seen little of the bedraggled woman Captain Varvakis had carried in upon arrival.

      Captain Varvakis didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes. I pulled her out of the flames myself.’ Ruslan closed his eyes and let the Captain describe the scene. In his mind’s eye, he walked every inch of the rescue with Varvakis. He could imagine with vivid clarity the Rebel hordes crashing through the wrought-iron and gold gates of the palace, marching up the wide drive with manicured green lawns on either side, to the huge double doors with their panels of carved bears, smashing the artistry of centuries with ramming logs, torching and looting as they went. The aesthetic in him wanted to weep over the destruction. Whether or not he agreed with the Tsar’s policies, the Summer Palace had been a place of beauty.

      ‘We fought them, but there were too few Loyalists to offer real resistance.’ Varvakis shook his head sadly. ‘Princess Dasha was trapped upstairs. I saw her on the landing, fighting and trying to run, but the Rebels saw her, too. They already had the others and it was clear what they intended. I fought my way to her. They’d pushed her back to the flames. She had no choice but to burn or surrender. The flames would have taken her if the mob didn’t.’ Ruslan could see that staircase in his mind; it was curved and elegant. He’d slid on that banister in his youth. It was good for sliding, but not so good for fighting. It would have been difficult for a man coming up it. Varvakis had had no easy task.

      The news disturbed Ruslan on many levels, not only the destruction and death but the politics beneath it. ‘The mob rules Kuban then?’ Ruslan put his head in his hands. While he favoured change, he did not favour violence. Hadn’t the French taught the world that? Now Kuban, too, was executing royals.

      ‘Yes, for now,’ Varvakis affirmed, his mouth set in a line of grim disapproval. A man like Varvakis would dislike chaos of any sort. For his part, Ruslan didn’t like it either, yet chaos had come to him. It was here in his home—a home he’d just purchased as a commitment to moving into his future and moving away from Kuban. He’d gone to bed one step closer to being a Londoner in truth and woken up only to be dragged back into the fray. His country was on fire, a fugitive princess was upstairs and a captain was begging for sanctuary.

      ‘It will not always be chaos,’ Varvakis was saying. ‘There will be a time when cooler heads rule, when Kuban will need their Princess again, someone who can bridge the

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