My Trojan Horse Majesty (The Russian Witch’s Curse #5)

15. Izzy

Chapter 15

Izzy

W e do manage to eat a pretty nice dinner. I’m shocked that Leonid’s able to eat both the salmon and the swordfish.

“You’ve had me eating hay for days,” he says. “There’s something to be said for the lean look, but much more of that and I’d move from lean to emaciated.” But it’s clear from the way his eyes sparkle that he’s not actually upset.

Having seen him with his shirt, er, well, all his clothes off, I can attest to the fact that he doesn’t look like he’s starving. He looked. . .just right.

“Why are your cheeks pink?” He glances around. “Don’t worry about the cameras. My people will make sure none of the photos we don’t approve are used anywhere. And if they are, our hackers are great at shutting things down.”

I hope he’s kidding, but I’m pretty sure he’s not.

He leans across the table and drops his voice. “Isabel Brooks, I swear that you won’t be harmed by your association with me. I’d never allow it.”

“Do you know why we’re linked?”

He shakes his head.

“Do you know anything about what our connection means?”

Again, he shakes his head.

“It’s as big a surprise to you as it was to me?”

“It is.”

In that moment, I have a choice to make, just as we all make choices all day every day of our lives. I decide to believe him, but it makes me nervous. The last man I chose to believe was lying to me, and now I’m worried he was lying to many others as well.

“Let’s go.” He stands.

“We can’t.” I look around for our waiter.

“My people will pay.” He waves for me to stand.

“Are you serious? You just wander around, and your people eliminate non-approved paparazzi photos and pay your bills?”

“It’s the single best thing about being czar,” he says. “That, and they clean up all your unpaid parking tickets.” It takes me a second, but I realize he’s kidding. Leonid’s making a joke.

“You’re so not who I thought you were.”

His head bobs back and forth. “I mean, I could neigh loudly in here if it would make you feel better, but I think a lot of people would be confused.”

“You’re a very strange man.” I stand up and follow him out.

On the way out of the restaurant, Mikhail falls into step beside me, and Boris falls in alongside the other side of Leonid.

“Are they, like, your personal guard?” I whisper.

“He doesn’t need a guard,” Mikhail says. “We’re his first and second lieutenants.”

“I like them because like me, they don’t need guards,” Leonid says. “And I trust them.”

“You’ve known them for so long that you trust they’ll always support you?”

Leonid snorts. “Not exactly. I can take their power away at any moment, so they never want to make me unhappy.”

“That’s. . .” Again, it’s not what I expected. I want to ask him more about his story, but I don’t really have a chance. He wasn’t kidding about his people being around—there are at least twenty people in all black gathered in the parking lot, and they surround us like super-fans mobbing a celebrity, only they’re all speaking in scattershot Russian I can’t make out, and most of them are frowning.

“I’m going to head back to my apartment.” I stop walking with them and fish the keys out of my pocket. “I’ll give you my cell phone number, though. You can call me tomorrow.”

“Wait.” Leonid’s head snaps backward in my direction. “You have to stay with me.”

Or he’ll black out. I forgot for a moment. “Right. Well, I guess a few of them can come with sleeping bags or an air mattress or something?—”

He shakes his head. “It would be far easier if you would come with us. Is that alright?”

“Where are you going?” I glance at my watch. It’s nearly ten o’clock. “I need to sleep soon. I have to work tomorrow.”

Leonid’s brow furrows. “Work?”

“I was off for a few days, and it’s been the weekend, but I have a job at a vet hospital. I’m an aide.”

“Okay, well, we can work that out on the way over.” Leonid lifts his arm, like he’s waving me to come along with him.

“Over where?” I lift my eyebrows.

He smiles. “How about I let you drive?”

Apparently some of his minions understand English, because that sets them off. They’re talking in such rapid-fire Russian that it makes me a little nervous.

“They don’t really understand,” Mikhail says. “While we were gone for a few days, they worked very hard to keep the media from noticing.”

“Gone?” I wonder what he means. “Were you gone too?”

“Mikhail and Boris were with me when. . .” Leonid says. “You’re trying to jump ahead in the story.”

“Always,” I say. “But I said I’d wait for your context, and I’m waiting.”

“How about a compromise?” Leonid asks. “You let me drive, and we’ll meet them at our hotel.” He switches to Russian and speaks so fast, I can’t even tell how many words he said.

“You have to negotiate with your staff?” For some reason that makes me laugh.

“He’s not a monster,” Boris grumbles. “No matter what some people think.”

“You should have seen how he reacted when I locked him up,” I whisper. “He was pretty monstrous, with all his screaming and rearing up and pawing at the ground.”

Mikhail actually cracks a smile.

“Did they agree to your terms?” I ask. “Because we do need to go by my place. I have things—things I need.”

Leonid arches one eyebrow. “I only pretend to negotiate to make them feel better. I always do whatever I want.”

“That’s true,” Mikhail says. “Which is why they don’t want to agree to let you out of their sight.”

“I won’t be gone long.” He points at the black SUVs lined up in a row. “You guys go with them to reassure them, and we’ll see you there soon.”

His people, to their credit, do listen. I hold up my end and hand Leonid my keys. They are, after all, to a car he just bought me. Once we’re inside, I say, “You better pick up the pace on that story. I feel like I have more questions now, not less.”

He chuckles. “I’ll try.”

“Start with the woman.”

“Katerina?” His eyebrows rise.

“Don’t say her name,” I mutter. “Just tell me how disappointing she was.”

He starts the engine and pulls up a phone. One of his people must have either found his old one or supplied him with a new one. It’s strange, watching a man I know was born in the eighteen hundreds, tapping away on the phone like it’s totally normal. Clearly he’s had no trouble adjusting to our screen-filled world. He drops the phone in the cupholder. “She was disappointing.” He sighs. “She used me to try and convince Alexei Romanov to take a real interest, and it didn’t work nearly as well as she’d hoped. One good thing did come out of it for me.”

“What?”

He shoots out onto the road going way too fast.

“Hey, crazy man. We have speed limits here.” I grab both arm rests.

His smile’s diabolical. “Diplomatic?—”

“Don’t say it,” I say. “Just slow down, and keep talking.”

Although he does slow down, it’s not by much.

“I should’ve just gotten the truck,” I mutter. “Diplomatic immunity won’t keep me alive.”

“I’ll keep you alive.” He grunts. “But I almost died back in the nineteen hundreds, and that’s what helped me unlock my powers. A sacrifice for someone else, with no gain in it for me.”

“What?”

“It’s how we gain access to our powers, doing something selfless, and I did it for stupid Alexei Romanov, the man whom Katerina was obsessed with.”

“Peachy.”

He frowns. “Peachy?”

“Never mind.”

“Sadly, the powers I got were worse than useless to me at the time. All I gained after making that sacrifice was the ability to sense whether people were light or dark, and at first, I didn’t even understand what it meant. It took years of being around people, of watching them do horrible things and seeing their souls darken, for me to really understand what my new power even was.”

“Tell me what you see when you look at me,” I say.

He swings the cobra into a parking lot, and I glance up. That’s when I realize that we’re already at my apartment complex. “How fast were you driving?”

He shrugs and puts the car in park. “Fast enough.” Then he leans closer, drops his hand over mine, and stares into my eyes.

“Hey.” I try to pull my hand away.

“My powers only work when I’m touching you,” he says softly. “Or did you forget?”

“Right.” For some reason my voice comes out all breathy and weird.

He must notice, because he’s smirking. “Your face. . .” He’s still staring. “It’s just the darkest I’ve ever seen.” He drops my hand. “So dark. What exactly have you been up to? Torturing puppies? Kicking old women on their bad hips?”

I roll my eyes.

“Of course it’s sparkly and fresh. We wouldn’t be here talking if it wasn’t.” He opens the door. “Let’s go get your stuff, Ned Flanders.”

“What?” I scramble to follow.

“You don’t watch The Simpsons ?”

“You do?” I swear, this guy keeps surprising me.

“When I woke up, the world had transformed. It took me a long time to catch up, but once I felt like I understood most things, I realized I didn’t understand a lot of the references people made. Ever since, I’ve been trying to watch at least a little of each of the most iconic television shows and movies from the last few decades. No show has run for longer than The Simpsons . Did you know it’s still being produced today?”

“Yes, thank you, Rainman ,” I say.

“Rainman?” He narrows his eyes as he heads for the stairs.

“Not this time.” I grab his wrist. “I almost passed out last time. Let’s just take the elevator.”

“There’s an elevator?” He’s scowling as we step inside. “You made me walk just to be mean?”

“I was annoyed with you,” I say.

“I’d just bought you two cars,” he says. “What could you have been annoyed about?”

I actually don’t even remember, so I shrug and fold my arms. “You’re an irritating person. I’m annoyed with you most of the time.”

“That’s probably why Katerina didn’t fancy me,” he says. “But lucky for me, she at least helped me research my powers and the history of Rurik’s line in the Romanov libraries. I discovered that my power preceded theirs, and that if they would agree to surrender theirs to me, I could gain all five.”

“Surrender?”

“They simply had to agree to grant me access to their powers, and I could use it while returning it to them. Mikhail and Boris did so almost right away.”

“So they have been your friends for a long time.”

“Friends?” He shrugs. “Not exactly.” The doors open. “They gave me the powers in the hope I’d attack the Romanovs for them, and they wouldn’t be culpable, and, you know, they wouldn’t be killed themselves if it went wrong.”

“That’s terrible.”

He gestures for me to get out before the doors close. “Terrible? No. Opportunists? Always.”

I barely make it through before the doors close.

Not that Leonid would have let them close on me. The large doors slam into his arm, but he emerges unscathed. “Unfortunately for them, I wasn’t quite as stupid as they’d hoped. Instead of attacking the Romanovs for perceived slights to their families, which has nothing to do with me, I tried to prevail upon the other three families to grant me the powers of wind, earth, and water. They all refused, but I really tried to do things the easy way.”

“And then?” I can tell we’re close to the answers I need. “What did you do?”

“I tried to force them to surrender their powers,” Leonid says. “It went badly—the harder I tried to pull the powers into myself, the more it hurt. I had quite a bit of energy, thanks to the other two powers I’d mastered, and I pulled far too long. The backlash was. . .unfortunate.”

It sounds like it was painful.

“It had several unintended consequences.”

“I bet.”

“Most importantly, none of the materials I was able to find in the library explained that when Baba Yaga?—”

“Who?”

He sighs. “I’m trying to go too fast.”

“Let me just grab my stuff.”

He plops down on the sofa and starts flipping through my old photo album again. “I’ll wait.”

It only takes me a minute, but he’s already looking at a second photo album when I make it back to the family room. It’s from junior high. “Hey.” I snatch it out of his hands. “No one gets to see that one.”

“Why not?” His bemused expression’s a little too pretty. “You were adorable.”

“That’s about enough of that.”

He picks up his phone and waves it at me. “Too late. I already documented all the best ones so I can look at them whenever I like.”

I lunge for his phone and fall against him instead.

He drops his phone on the sofa and catches me, his arms wrapping around my waist, his eyes intent on mine. “You’re clumsy.”

“I am,” I agree. “I can’t figure out why you like me.” Saying he likes me—what am I doing? Heat rushes to my face, and I try to scramble back and away. “Not that you do. I’m just saying, that if you did?—”

“I already confessed that I do.” His hands tighten around my waist, his head bends slowly over me, and then his mouth closes over mine. I know we’re just standing in the middle of my tiny, unimpressive apartment, but it feels momentous . It’s like the whole world drops away, and I’m tumbling down, down, down into a sea of stars.

His mouth is warm, and his hands are strong, and it’s everything a kiss should be. My hands press against his chest, and I can’t help remembering what he looked like without a sweater. My fingers flex, and he groans against me.

I snap backward. “I—I just broke up with my boyfriend this morning.”

He leans forward, his forehead dropping against mine. “It’s funny, isn’t it?”

“What?” I close my eyes and let my body rest against his.

“People act like time is what it takes to recover from something, to heal from it. They judge you for your actions when they take place in shorter than the appointed time, like two weeks or two months or two years is what it will take for you to recover, but time is actually somewhat meaningless.”

“What?”

He straightens enough that I can see his face, his beautiful, perfect features, his blonde hair falling down just a little bit over his brow. “I pushed for what I wanted so hard that I shoved myself into hibernation for over a hundred years. That did nothing, by the way. All I gained from that time-out was an appreciation for doing what I want, for taking what I want, while I still can. We don’t know how many moments we have, and now that I’ve met you, I don’t want to waste a single one without you knowing that I do like you , Isabel Brooks, very much. I like you more than I’ve ever liked anyone I’ve known far longer than I’ve known you. I like you more than I’ve ever liked any other human being, more than I thought I could like any other human being.”

“More, even, than the stunning Katerina?” I feel stupid asking, but I can’t help myself.

“I didn’t expect Katerina would ever do me another favor, but it appears her name causes you to feel something.” He smiles then, his face dropping back toward mine. “But yes, I like you so much more than I ever liked her, that she’s nothing to you.” Then his smiling lips meet mine again, and this time’s not at all like the last.

The last kiss was wonder and awe and worship.

This kiss? It’s heat and frenzy and need. His mouth covers mine. His hands press me closer, urgently. His mouth’s working faster, his breath coming hot and sharp in between kisses, and then his mouth leaves mine, but it doesn’t stop moving . He’s kissing my cheek, my temple, and then he keeps on moving down, trailing kisses down to my jaw, my neck, and then against my collarbone.

I cry out, “Leo,” and he still doesn’t stop, but he does growl possessively. I half-expect him to say, Mine.

What I don’t expect is the blaring, clanging sound of cowbells. I freeze, my whole body tightening in alarm. “What’s that?”

The way he says the words makes me think they’re swear words, but since they’re in Russian, I can’t be sure. “Our people are waiting for us.”

“You mean your people?” I ask.

He snarls. “My people are your people now.”

I roll my eyes and shove away. “Okay, Fred Flintstone.”

“Who?”

“A famous caveman.” I pick up my bag. “Me, big man. You mine.”

He arches one eyebrow. “You didn’t seem to mind that I was a big man a moment ago.” A cockiness sneaks into his expression. “What was it you just said?” He ducks a little closer. “I think it was my name, you screamed.”

“Screamed?” My laughter sounds a little forced. “I just. . .barely mentioned it, is all.”

He reaches for me. “Oh, you did? How about?—”

I dance away. “No, no, your people are calling. We have to go meet them.”

“At a hotel.” His eyes are sparkling. “The nicest hotel suite in Salt Lake City.”

He drives just as fast on the way, the fingers from his free hand drawing little designs on the top of mine. But when we reach his room, his very nice, very posh hotel suite at The Grand America, easily the nicest hotel in the city, I discover that there was one thing we didn’t take into consideration.

The room’s teeming with his people. They have questions for him—so many questions. He has decisions to make, decisions about lots of governance things that must have piled up while he was masquerading as a horse with me. I try to listen for a while, but it’s all in Russian, and I have no idea what’s going on, and eventually, I fall asleep on the sofa.

Strong but gentle arms move me at some point, but I swear, all I remember is a murmured word that sounds like, moy you doragoy solnyshka. And then I drift off for good.