2. Kristina

2

KRISTINA

At first, it was just a nightmare. The same one I have every night. Suffocating blackness, damp stone walls under my fingers. Total silence... and then the only thing worse: the sound of their boots as they came down the steps to get me.

Some tiny sound coaxed me out of the dream and up towards waking. It used to be that I’d scream as I woke up, my body’s way of releasing all the horror I’d just relived. I’d wake up half the palace. But I found that if I really, really focused as I came awake, I could clamp down on the scream and stop it before it started. That’s why people think the nightmares have stopped.

So as I swam up through the blackness, I concentrated hard on where I was. You’re safe. Thousands of miles from where it happened. In a plane. And you’re in America! A little thrill of excitement at that. I’d always wanted to see America and now I was finally getting to, even if it was just little glimpses through the windows of limos. You’re safe . No one’s trying to hurt you.

I opened my eyes.

It was dim in the cabin. I could see Emerik and Jakov, the two guards who’d been on duty when I went to sleep. They were my favorites: one old and experienced, one young and dutiful. It was a pity they hated each other.

I frowned. I had a hazy memory of someone asking who I was in a deep, slow, American accent, and Emerik being annoyed with him. Had that really happened?

Emerik and Jakov were asleep in their seats so the other two guards must have taken over. I looked around for them—

Movement in the shadows caught my eye. One of my guards seemed to be standing to attention, his body rigid and straining. Then he suddenly fell like a puppet with his strings cut and I saw the blood gushing from his throat.

Oh Jesus.

A man appeared from behind him, all dressed in black. He stepped over the dead guard and now I saw the second body beside it. Both the guards who’d been on duty were dead. And now the killer turned towards the sleeping Emerik and Jakov. No! Not them! I opened my mouth to shout a warning—

My head was suddenly tugged back against my seat. I screamed, but a palm was pressed tight over my lips, muffling it. I looked up into the eyes of another man. He was dressed in black too, but his skin was bone-white, so pale it almost glowed in the dark cabin. His eyes were as coldly gray as a gravestone and he was staring down at me with absolute hatred. Not the way a person hates another person. The way a person hates cockroaches. I’d never seen hate like it.

Wait. My stomach twisted. I’d seen it once. Five years ago. God, no. It can’t be!

He moved around in front of me and pressed my head back even harder into the softness of my leather seat. I felt my neck stretch, my throat exposed. A knife flashed in his hand and I grabbed his wrist with both hands to keep it away from me. I was panic-breathing, now, but I could barely move air beneath that smothering hand. And he was strong, his forearm solid muscle and his hatred and fury making him even stronger.

Inch by inch, the knife descended towards my throat. The edge gleamed, dipping and trembling as we struggled, but always moving inexorably downwards. I screamed, sobbed and pushed, but now it was so close I could feel the breeze on my skin each time it moved. Then the first touch of it, ice cold, but scoring a line of fire across my throat—

A huge shape loomed behind the man in black. A monster, surely: too big to be a person. The man with the knife was suddenly lifted... and hurled, like he was nothing more than a toy. There was a thump as he hit the bulkhead at the front of the plane and slid to the floor.

The shape moved forward into the light. God, he was huge, not just tall but wide, his shoulders twice the width of mine, his chest so solid and broad he put me in mind of a bull about to charge. He had thick, black hair, shaggy and unkempt, and his cheeks were dark with stubble. As soon as you saw him, you knew he’d been put on this earth to do one thing: fight.

Brute. That’s what my mother would have called him. He was exactly the sort of man she’d always warned me about. I should have been terrified.

And yet... his eyes. He was staring down at me and his eyes were as blue and clear and honest as a summer’s day. There was a hunger in those eyes, but there was more, too. Fury, that someone had tried to harm me. And a desperate need to stop it ever happening again.

“You’re gonna be okay,” he told me in that strange, heavy American accent I’d half-heard in my sleep. Alien to me, and yet familiar. An accent that crept in through my ears and rumbled down through my body, going off like a hot bomb when it hit my groin. It was like an earthquake dipped in honey. It went with his face: God, he was gorgeous. Hard beautiful, not soft beautiful. Like a storm cloud or a mountain. His looks were totally unlike the men my mother had introduced me to: the princes with their looks refined through umpteen generations of proper breeding, all long noses and weak chins. Or the politicians and industrial tycoons with their broad, pink faces made soft by years of liquid lunches. This man was peasant stock, his heavy jaw stern and unyielding, his features hewn from granite. I pegged his age at about thirty. His strong brows set off those clear blue eyes, balancing out their tenderness. And his lips…. Wide and powerful, hard and yet gloriously soft. My eyes locked on that full lower lip and a tremor went through me. If he kissed you, you’d stay kissed.

Then I glimpsed movement behind him and drew in my breath in fear. The man he’d thrown had gotten to his feet. He picked up his knife... and ran right at my rescuer.