Sergei had never had any trouble going to ground. You could not grow up on the steppes of Siberia and not know how to live off the land and stay out of sight; it was bred into the bones of anyone whose ancestors had ever had to flee a Mongol horde, or hide from a rampaging pack of Cossacks.
But these days it was especially tricky. After he had safely delivered Anastasia into the hands of Sister Leonida, he had hovered around the town of Ekaterinburg, where great changes were under way—particularly at the House of Special Purpose. He had watched from the shadows as all signs and vestiges of the royal family were removed and burned in a bonfire in the courtyard. He could see the Red Guards overseeing local workers as they scraped the whitewash from the windows, scrubbed the obscene graffiti from the outhouse, brought in mops and brooms and buckets to clean out the charnel house in the cellar. And he had managed to forage through the trash in town and find a soiled copy of a local broadsheet, the text of which had no doubt been approved, if not written, by Lenin himself. The headline read, DECISION OF THE PRESIDIUM OF THE DIVISIONAL COUNCIL OF DEPUTIES OF WORKMEN, PEASANTS, AND RED GUARDS OF THE URALS, and the article contained the official party declaration: “In view of the fact that Czechoslovak bands are threatening the Red capital of the Urals, Ekaterinburg; that the crowned executioner may escape from the tribunal of the people (a White Guard plot to carry off the whole imperial family has just been discovered), the Presidium of the Divisional Committee in pursuance of the will of the people has decided that the ex-Tsar Nicholas Romanov, guilty before the people of innumerable bloody crimes, shall be shot.
“The decision was carried into execution on the night of July 16–17. Romanov’s family has been transferred from Ekaterinburg to a place of greater safety.”
A place of greater safety, he scoffed, crumpling the sheet in his hands. The bottom of a coal pit at a desolate spot called the Four Brothers.
But the paper was right about one thing—the Czechs and White Guards were indeed infiltrating, and overrunning, the area. Eight days after the massacre, Yurovsky and his Latvian comrades had had to make a run for it, and now that most of them were gone, Sergei had risked returning to Novo-Tikhvin late that same night.
“She is much better,” Sister Leonida said, ushering him through a back gate, “though, as you would expect, she is sorely troubled.”
“Can she be moved?”
“Why move her? She is safe here, lost among the many sisters.”
But Sergei knew better than that; he knew that the tides were always turning in war and that Ekaterinburg was destined to fall back into Red hands eventually. When it did, the monastery itself would probably be destroyed; Lenin had no love for religion.
Furthermore, for all he knew, Commandant Yurovsky—no fool—had figured out that he’d been cheated, that the youngest duchess might still be alive somewhere. No, there was only one place on earth where she would be truly secure, and Sergei was determined to take her there.
The nun led him into the bakery, unoccupied now but still warm and aromatic from the day’s baking, and silently pointed to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Then she discreetly left him to his own devices. Stepping atop a barrel of flour, he pulled the door down cautiously, unfolded its steps, and after climbing to the top saw Anastasia sitting at a small table in the corner of the attic, writing in a journal by the light of a kerosene lamp. Dressed in a black cassock with elaborate silver embroidery, and humming some melancholy tune under her breath, she didn’t hear him, but continued to scrawl across the pages of the notebook, her head down, her light brown curls grazing her shoulders. Despite everything that they had been through together, he was still shy—a rural farm boy, who felt himself nothing but elbows and knees and cowlicks when he was in her company.
But if it ever came to it, he would risk his life again to save her.
“Ana,” he said, and her head came up slightly, as if she had heard a ghost in the rafters. “Ana.”
And then she turned from the table, her gray eyes, once so filled with mischief and joy, now brimming with an ineffable sadness. She was not yet eighteen, but her expression betrayed the grief and fear of someone who had seen horrors no one should see and lived through nightmares no one should ever have had to endure. Her cheeks, once plump and rosy, were drawn and hollow, and her lips were thin and downcast.
“I prayed you would come back.” Even her voice was subdued, burdened.
Sergei closed the trapdoor behind him and went to kneel beside her at the table. She stroked his head as if she were the older woman—and here he was, twenty, just last month—but when he looked up at her, he could see how pleased she was to see him. “I was so afraid I would never be able to thank you.”
The back of her hand brushed the side of his face, and his skin tingled at her touch.
“Sister Leonida tells me you are recovering well.”
“They have been very good to me here.”