Chapter 1
Rasputin
Anastasia is alive.
All past rumors were disproved, but this is no rumor. I feel her vibrations in my bones.
She is alive. The demon is not lying.
Over the past century, the demon has grown crueler, tormenting me with excruciating pain, which made his gift of immortality a curse.
Despite my pleas for mercy, despite all arguments that I could not sense her and the entire world agreed she was dead, the demon insisted that my Anastasia lived.
And, for the crime of not finding her, he escalated my punishments.
I sense her even more strongly.
My heart swells. Anastasia is a great distance away, across an ocean. She’s changed, transformed into something not human. But it is her. Wherever she is, I will find her.
Pain slices into my body. The demon is here.
My spine and neck arch, bending me back until my hair brushes the ground behind me. My vertebrae nearly snap.
“She’s no longer a maiden!” The demon’s voice shrieks in my head like a million hot spikes. “You promised me an unspoiled maiden!”
The bend in my body rebounds forward, and I drop to my knees, sobbing.
“She was a maiden when our bargain was struck!” I argue.
And she remains a maiden. I hope. The demon is lying to me, knowing this particular lie will cut deep.
“The price of our bargain has risen!” he says in my mind.
And then I sense the change in Anastasia’s vibrations.
A different kind of pain slices through me—a searing, scraping pain that shreds my heart.
Anastasia has lost her maidenhood. Some undeserving villain is currently jabbing his rod inside the sacred place I long ago marked as mine.
Rage builds alongside my infernal, unbearable pain. I’ve gone through so much to have her.
For years, I charmed her parents and others at the Russian court.
I endured Ana’s dull sisters and, with the help of the demon, I cast the occasional spell to stop her brother’s excessive bleeding.
Gaining influence over her parents cost me dearly, and I did all the demon asked of me in exchange for his help.
I did it all to have her.
I did find some amusement in defiling the Czarina, and in cuckolding the Czar.
Not to mention ruining nearly every prominent lady in St. Petersburg, behind their husbands’ backs.
At first, I did those things seeking power and sexual gratification, but that soon changed.
Everything changed when I met my Anastasia.
I grew desperate to maintain my position so I could stay close to her. But after final time the Czar’s allies tried to kill me, the night I was left for dead—poisoned, shot multiple times and floating in the near-frozen Neva river—I confessed my true heart to the demon.
That night, in exchange for my life, I promised the demon everything.
I promised him my Anastasia. Such a hard bargain. The only way to keep her was to give her to him.
But then her entire family were massacred, and for a hundred years I have suffered.
But soon, I’ll be released from this torture.
At long last, I will be dead, and Ana’s torture will begin.