11. Katerina
Gustav’s a different person today. He’s smiling, albeit occasionally, and he’s not yelling nearly as much. I can’t tell what made the difference, but no one wants his company to succeed as much as I do. If he does well here, if he stays in the United States and never touches his magic, Leonid will leave him alone, and I won’t have to feel guilty about trying to trade knowledge about him for Alexei’s powers.
Not that my trade worked.
I shouldn’t have blurted the offer out like that. As if someone as honorable as Alexei Romanov would call off his engagement just to get his powers back. He would never be so blatantly selfish. Sometimes I project my own actions and feelings on him, and it always leads me to make the wrong call.
Like how I’ve backed myself into a corner.
I framed Leonid’s demand too heavily, and I can’t modify it without confessing that Leonid doesn’t care about Alexei having his powers as long as Leonid himself can also use them, which negates my involvement and therefore the credit. It would also compel me to admit that I went there with an offer—betraying Gustav for my own gain.
I’m stuck either failing in my goal or being outed as a villain.
As if that’s not bad enough, I’m also forced to sit here and watch Alexei and Adriana flirt and coo and generally behave like teenagers in lust. I can’t really roll my eyes and huff, because then I look even more juvenile, so I’m stuck looking away and pretending not to see or care.
Only, there’s not anywhere decent to look in this lobby.
“Why do we need to sit out here?” I ask. “Kristiana might be helpful. She knows a lot about betting and horse racing, plus she’s his sister, but what are the rest of us supposed to do?”
“You could protect him if it comes to it.” Grigoriy’s scowling. Of the three men, he’s always despised me the most. “Unless that’s too much to ask from someone like you.”
“Leonid took my powers when I went to beg for Alexei’s,” I mutter. “So I won’t be much help there.”
“Wait, he did?” Adriana looks shocked. “I—I’m sorry.”
The only thing worse than watching them flirting is having her pity me. “It’s fine,” I say. “I barely use mine anyway, and I can still shift.”
“Clearly,” Mirdza says. “That’s how you freaked out everyone at customs.”
“Not customs,” Grigoriy says. “The Department of Homeland Security. Customs is for declaring plants.”
“Anyway,” I say. “My point is that the rest of us could be. . .I don’t know. Doing something else. What’s the reason for all of us just hovering out here while he has meetings?”
“I need to keep all of you safe,” Aleksandr says, “and we need to protect Gustav, at least until he fully understands what’s at stake and what his role in it may be.”
“Do we even know that?” I ask. “I already told you that as long as he doesn’t try to use his powers, Leonid will leave him alone.”
“As if we can believe anything that maniac says.” Aleksandr scowls.
“So what’s your plan, then?” I ask. “Are you hoping to force Gustav into doing something selfless, and then train him into some kind of weapon to aim at Leonid?”
Grigoriy shrugs.
Aleksandr looks at the floor.
Alexei swallows.
And I realize that’s exactly what they mean to do. “You three act like Leonid’s the devil,” I say. “Which is ironic, because you’re almost as bad as he is, manipulating someone’s life like that.”
Aleks scoffs. “How can you, of all people, say that?”
“How dare you accuse them of being bad?” Adriana asks. “None of them incinerate massive groups of people.”
“What?” I ask.
“That was my introduction to Leonid,” Adriana says. “He barbecued a dozen men in the open street.”
“None of them have the power of flame,” I say. “Or who knows what you’d have seen them do?”
Mirdza looks a little sick.
“The difference between you guys and Leonid is that you don’t have any faith in his moral compass. If it was Alexei who had won the election, he might have done the same exact thing as Leonid, eliminating the leader of Belarus.” I can’t help my frustration. “And now you’re here, planning to craft yourself a dangerous puppet you can use to take him down, as if that’s better than him. At least he attacks people himself.”
None of them say a word to me, but they murmur amongst themselves plenty. What’s ironic is that I don’t trust Leonid any more than they do, but at least I can see the hypocrisy in what they want to do with Gustav.
Which makes the next three hours of waiting while Gustav merrily conducts his meetings and presentations torturous. I’m pacing in the hallway outside yet another boardroom, waiting for the presentation there to start so we can finally be done and head back to Gustav’s place when Alexei approaches.
Without his girlfriend, for once.
“Are you okay?” He actually looks concerned.
I should ignore him. They probably sent him out here to pump me for information. His expression’s so earnest, and his concern so terribly real that I can’t help myself.
“I—this—using Gustav like a loaded gun feels wrong. I think you should tell him what you want, and then tell him the risks he’d be facing if he agrees, but let him choose.” No one ever gives anyone else any choices, and isn’t that their biggest issue with Leonid?
But then it hits me.
I’m a hypocrite.
Maybe that’s why I’ve been so agitated.
Because isn’t that what I’ve been doing with Alexei? Isn’t that why I went to Leonid in the first place? He chose Adriana, not me. He’s known me for a long time, and he doesn’t want me. He wants her. I’ve been refusing to accept that, which is the same thing as them refusing to accept that Gustav wants nothing to do with the powers we all covet. Above all else, I don’t want to be like Leonid, or like the three of them, forcing things on people that they don’t even want. Which means. . .
That I have to let go of my lifelong dream, or that’s how it feels.
It hurts.
My insides feel raw.
Loving Alexei has been who I am. It’s been what makes me me.
I’ve wanted it—for him to want me back—for so very, very long. I’ve wrecked things in my life. I’ve hurt people. I’ve done it all so that Alexei would realize that he loves me, but what if he never did? What if he never, under any circumstance, ever will?
Have I been the villain this whole time without realizing it?
I went to Leonid and offered to trade Gustav’s whereabouts for Alexei’s powers, for heaven’s sake. This poor man—whom I’ve now met—I was willing to exchange his whole life for a chance at winning Alexei back.
Someone who doesn’t want to be won.
He prefers having her to having his powers restored.
“I’m sorry.” Tears spring up in my eyes. “I’m really sorry.”
“For having an opinion?” Alexei looks concerned. “You’ve always had an opinion, and you’ve never been sorry about that before.”
“Leonid didn’t say you had to marry me.” I wince. “He said he’d give your powers back any time, because then, every time you use them, you’d think of him. And if you ever confronted him, he’d have the kill switch. He could always just shut down your abilities again, as he did with me. It’s a reminder.” I shake my head. “I asked him to let me make the stipulations, so I could use your own powers to get what I want.”
Alexei looks disgusted. “You colluded with him?”
“Only about this,” I say. “Only to try and win you back, but I’ve realized that’s never going to happen.”
“You can’t win back what you never had,” Alexei says.
Even though he’s not trying to hurt me, it stings. But he’s right. I never had him. I never will have him.
“I’ll text him now and tell him to give you the powers back.”
Alexei shakes his head. “I mean to see whether Gustav, once he has control, can restore me. I don’t want powers that only come with a kill switch.”
Of course he doesn’t. He wasn’t born to serve someone else, to bow to some other ruler. He was born to be a king.
“I, um, I need to get some air.” I push past him, and he doesn’t stop me. It takes me a moment, but I finally get down from this horribly tall building, through the elevator full of people I’ve never met, and escape into a street that’s teeming with more strangers.
I have no idea why anyone would choose to live in this place.
The streets smell like human urine and feces. There’s a smoky smell coming from all sides. It smells like tobacco sometimes, and like something else others, something I can’t place. Cars and buses crowd the streets, and trash rolls and squishes through any gaps. Construction structures crowd one side of the road. There are huge signs everywhere you look, all screaming for attention. It’s more annoying than the morass of peddlers in the town square in St. Petersburg when I was younger.
None of it helps me feel better. None of it helps me to process what just happened. I let go of something huge, and now the world’s crowding in on top of me to flood the gap, and I want to curl up into a ball here in the street and disappear.
Then I see a familiar face on the screen up ahead.
It’s Leonid.
The devil himself, in some ways, and a lost little boy in others. “—discovered some things about Aleksandr Lukashenko that were. . .disturbing. He certainly wasn’t a leader who had his people’s best interest in mind. Our first meeting did not go well, and when I pressed him about his plans for his people, he revealed an agenda I could not allow to come to pass.”
“You’re saying that you’re the white knight in this situation?” the man in a suit asks. “You’ve saved the citizens of Belarus?”
Leonid smiles.
I’d forgotten how beautiful his smile is. How compelling. It makes him dangerous in a way that few men are.
Devilishly good looking. It’s a phrase that takes on new meaning with him. “A leader’s first priority should always be making decisions that provide the most good for the most people, don’t you agree?”
The suit-guy frowns. “Well, I don’t know. Some ethical questions aren’t clear-cut. What if there was a train headed down a track, and if you didn’t stop it, it would hit someone who had become stuck and kill him. But if you delayed the train to save the man, thousands of passengers would be late, some of them to their detriment? Businesses might fail. Families might fall apart. Should the man die so the train keeps to its schedule?”
“People who come up with these scenarios should be shot,” Leonid says with a grin. “It would save us all a lot of time. The world isn’t as grey as people want to believe it is.” Leonid turns toward the screen. “I seek out the white and eliminate the black. That’s how you craft a better world. If the man was a good man, the delay would be worth it. If he was a bad man, the train should carry on.” He shrugs. “It’s that simple.”
“But how do you know whether people are good or bad?” the interviewer asks. “Aren’t most people somewhere in between?”
This time, when Leonid smiles, it’s beatific. “Oh, I can always tell, and they’re rarely as mixed a bag as you might think.”
I don’t even realize that I’m moving closer to the screen until a hand yanks me back, and I collapse against the person who just saved me. A very loud, very large, very dangerous bus rumbles past the spot I was standing, and I realize I would have been splattered into goo.
When I look up, the face I’m staring into is Gustav’s. I whisper his name, shocked that he was anywhere near. Shocked further that he would care whether a bus flattened me. Gustav had absolutely no reason to save me. “That was—that was a selfless act.”
He dumps me as fast as he grabbed me, and I sprawl forward, my right hand bracing against the concrete to prevent me from face-planting. “All I did was snatch you out of the way,” he says. “You’re fine, and so am I.”
He’s saying he sacrificed nothing, but I’m not so sure. He’s supposed to be preparing for his last presentation of the day, but he’s here, on the street, snatching me out of the path of a bus. In all the worry over Leonid and what he may or may not do, I hadn’t given much thought to what kind of person Gustav is. But maybe I was right to defend him. Maybe, deep down, he’s a good guy. “It’s in you, you know. The goodness, I mean.”
“Just don’t walk into roads without looking.” He stalks off to buy a coffee and then marches back upstairs without so much as looking at me. But it’s pointed. He’s looking everywhere but where I’m standing. Which means he feels bad that he was so gruff. He feels bad that he saved me as a reflex.
It’s exactly the kind of thing that shows me who he really is. He doesn’t want credit. He doesn’t want accolades, but when it comes down to it, he does the right thing.
Sitting through the last presentation in yet another antechamber for yet another board room is a little awkward, but it’s better than before, because instead of watching Alexei and Adriana interact with eyes of denial, I watch with insight. They only look at each other, much as Kris and Aleks track one another with their eyes constantly. Grigoriy’s strong, almost dour face is in a state of perma-scowl. . .unless he’s looking at Mirdza.
Now that I’ve accepted the reality, it’s so painfully obvious. Those three couples are stupid in love with one another. I thought that letting go of Alexei would hurt, but after the first wave of misery passed, I feel remarkably free. It’s almost like I was holding on to something that hurt me, and I’ve finally released it.
Why didn’t I let go sooner?
I wonder how often in life we hang on to things, not because we need them, not because they help us in any way, but because we can’t remember how to let go. Like a child who clung so tightly to their mum’s hand that they can’t release it. Like a rope pulled taut for so long, it’s fused with the other fibers and can’t be separated.
None of those things are better for the clinging.
And neither was I.
“Hey.” Mirdza takes a few steps toward me and sits down, ruining the perfectly good buffer of three chairs that I’ve carefully maintained on either side of myself all day. “Is this okay?”
I shrug. “It’s a free country—America, right?”
Mirdza laughs. “You sound remarkably modern. Grigoriy still sounds like a Tolstoy novel sometimes.”
“Tolstoy?” I cringe. “He was ancient a hundred years ago.”
“Forget it,” Mirdza says. “You seem to have caught up quite well.”
“I watched a lot of television while I first woke up, when Leonid stuck me in a room, and then I watched more in that room at Kristiana’s house.”
“Ah, television. The great educator of our time.” Mirdza looks at her hands.
“Did you want something?” I should be nicer to her. She’s the first person who has actually tried to talk to me, but I can’t help it. I’m not good with chit chat when I know the person wants something. I’d rather know what it is.
Her face scrunches.
“You can just ask. I’m a pretty straightforward person.”
“I actually don’t want anything,” Mirdza says. “But you look so miserable over here that it got me thinking.” She sighs. “Maybe I should just butt out, but I’m the kind of person who worries when horses in a herd are being excluded.”
She’s different than Kristiana, and definitely different from her twin. Is it possible she really just wanted to check on me? If so, she should know who I am. I can’t really make friends with her when I wanted to betray her sister. “Sometimes there’s a reason the herd ostracizes one horse. I—I came here to try and break Adriana and Alexei up.”
She giggles.
Honest-to-goodness giggles, like a little girl. “Duh.”
I blink.
“I mean, we all knew that, but it’s fine. You didn’t have a hope of success.”
I start to laugh too. I can’t help it. She’s acting like I was a child in a superhero suit, bent on stopping crime.
“Those two are meant for each other,” Mirdza says. “Nothing on heaven or earth could have stopped them from being together.” She shrugs. “You might have annoyed Adriana. Her self-esteem isn’t what it should be, but none of the rest of us were worried.”
That makes me feel pretty lousy. I was the only one too stupid to see what she’s saying, but now that she says it, it’s painfully clear. “We don’t get to pick what our hearts want.”
“But we do get to choose what we do about it.” Mirdza’s voice is soft, and from anyone else, it would have sounded like a reproof, but not from her. It sounds like she’s been there, and she’s made the wrong choice before, too. “And for what it’s worth, you look happier now that you’ve given up. You should think about that.”
“What do you think it means?”
“You never had a mother,” Mirdza says. “Alexei mentioned that.”
“I’m not a charity case,” I say. “I made my own decisions.”
“But as someone who never had much of a mother herself,” Mirdza says, “I wonder. Is it possible that you wanted a family as much as you wanted Alexei himself?”
I blink.
“I’m certainly no expert, but I wonder whether you loved the idea more than the person.” She shrugs. “Maybe not. Just thinking out loud.”
“What if we choose wrong?” I ask. “What then?”
“I chose wrong.” She snorts. “I bet most women have.”
“You did?” I have trouble believing that.
“I think it might have been harder on you.”
“I don’t need pity.”
“But Katerina, you grew up in a time when you had to find a man—to keep you safe.” Mirdza taps her lip. “I won’t lie and say that it’s not nice to have Grigoriy around, ready to scare away the bad guys for me. But I spent most of my life having to deal with things myself, and Adriana never wanted to date, much less get married. We were raised with a plan to protect ourselves, to keep ourselves safe. We were raised to believe it was a woman’s job to make herself happy.” She turns and stares right at me. “I think you should stop thinking about Alexei or any other man and start thinking about Katerina and what she wants. Then maybe you’ll find a guy whom you can love in a healthy way.”
The door from the conference room opens, as I answer her. “No one finds joy by thinking only about themselves.”
“Are you two talking about me?” Gustav’s standing in the doorway, and none of the people from the meeting are beside him.
“Where did everyone go?” Mirdza asks. “Is your presentation finished?”
“This conference room has two entrances.” He tosses his head. “They went out the other one.”
“I wasn’t talking about you,” I say. “I just mean that, in general, trying to make yourself happy is doomed to fail. You can only really be happy when you’re helping someone else to reach their goals.”
“That’s tragic, if it’s true,” Gustav says. “Just tragic.”
“I don’t know,” Mirdza says. “I kind of like it. It feels vaguely religious, honestly, but it still might be true. As humans, I do think we find joy in service.”
“You only think that because you have no goals of your own.” Gustav brushes past me and pushes onward. “I have some work to do before tomorrow’s meetings, and it’ll take me at least two hours. After that, I’ll spend the rest of the night doing whatever you need me to do.” He looks pointedly at Kristiana. “Unless it’s saving someone selflessly.”
Then he winks at me.
For some reason, that stupid wink makes my heart race.
It’s the only exciting thing that happens all night, however. The rest of the evening consists of Alexei, Aleksandr, and Grigoriy, interrupted frequently by the women, reciting the story of how they woke up in modern day, how they recovered their powers, and then how Leonid took Alexei’s, along with the throne of Russia.
“And that’s not even all of it,” Alexei says. “He’s got an unquenchable thirst for more.”
I’m not sure that’s really true, but it’s pointless to argue. At least they aren’t trying to force Gustav’s hand.
“You might be safe, if you stay here,” Alexei admits. “Katerina knows Leonid better than the rest of us, and she thinks he’ll leave you alone. But you need to consider what will happen to the rest of the world if?—”
“I don’t buy the premise that the fate of the entire world is my responsibility,” Gustav says. “And I can’t believe that all of you think I’m the key to anything. If that were true, since I have zero powers, why wouldn’t Kristiana be able to do the exact same thing as me? Are you saying this magic is somehow sexist?”
“You’re older, dummy,” Kristiana says. “All the other powers were for an entire family line, but ours is different, we think.”
“Leonid’s powers are different too,” I finally say.
The entire table turns to me. “What do you know?” Alexei’s eyes are practically desperate. “I was there when he saved you, and nothing happened. He didn’t shock or flame anything. He didn’t exhibit any other elemental power at all at first.”
“Nothing you could see, anyway,” I mutter.
And then I go ahead and betray Leonid’s trust all the way.