“That’s right.” Alessandro nodded. “The murder created a vacuum. Alexei was too young and too sick to take the throne. The Imperium was in the middle of a war and required a strong hand. They offered the crown to a half-dozen people, but everyone refused.”
I had no idea the Russians had to play musical chairs with the throne of the largest empire on the European Continent. The history textbooks I’d read glossed over that part. Of course, in Texas the history of Texas took up more space in the textbook than the entirety of the rest of Western Civilization combined.
“What happened then?” I asked.
“Russia scrambled to find someone who was both suitable and willing to accept the crown. They chose Michael Berezin, who’d spearheaded the Russian offensive against the German Empire. Michael Berezin became Michael I, and his entire family rallied around him to make sure he survived. The country depended on it. They faced a war from the outside and civil unrest from the inside. Communists were still agitating the workers in large cities. They were mostly failing because by killing Nicholas II, Germany made him into a martyr. The Russians wanted a new monarch and they wanted payback.”
“That explains volumes about how Konstantin thinks. Family against the world.”
“Exactly. Michael I had a younger brother, Boris. He was an antistasi mage, like his mother, and a Communist sympathizer. He thought that Russia would be better off without the monarchy, so he conspired with his Communist cell to assassinate his brother. The Okhrana, the Imperial secret police, had planted an operative in the cell to keep an eye on him. The plot was exposed.”
“Plots often are.”
“Michael I couldn’t bear to kill his baby brother, so Boris was stripped of his titles and holdings and exiled instead. He ended up in the UK, where he bought a false identity, and married into a merchant family, the Winstons, who were willing to look past wobbly birth certificates and passports to add an upper-range Significant to their gene pool.”
“Your mother’s family.”
He nodded. “My great-grandfather was a very bitter man. He spent his life trying to regain his titles and status.”
“I thought you said he was a Communist.”
“That was before he became poor.” Alessandro laughed softly. “My grandfather was obsessed with titles as well, which is why my mother ended up in an arranged marriage to my father.”
His mother was a lower-level Significant antistasi. He’d told me before that she had the magic, but not the power or the training to use it.
“My maternal grandfather arranged that marriage for the title, my mother went along with it because she liked my father and wanted to escape her family, my father thought she was beautiful and they would make powerful children, and my paternal grandfather got a dowry out of it. Everyone benefited.”
His eyes were dark. Eleven years after his parents walked down the aisle, Arkan murdered Marcello Sagredo, and Alessandro’s life would never be the same.
I stood up and wrapped my arms around him. He sighed, quietly exhaling tension.
“Does the Imperium want you back?” I asked.
“It’s not me I worry about. Konstantin is dangerous.”
“I know. I will be careful.”
His phone chimed. He took it out of his pocket and looked at it. “Arkan pulled Sanders out of Alaska.”
Sanders was bad news. Of all the Primes in Arkan’s arsenal, he gave me the biggest dollop of anxiety.
Alessandro got up and kissed me. “I have to make a call.”
“I have to let a Russian prince know exactly where he stands.”
He held up his hand. We gave each other a quiet high five and headed out of the conference room, he to his office and I to the front door.
Konstantin sat on a stone bench outside our office building, exactly where I asked him to be after the meeting. A line of our guard dogs stretched from him. They approached one by one, led by their handlers, so they could memorize his scent. I wanted him properly tagged before he and Alessandro went out.
The sky couldn’t decide if it wanted to be overcast or flooded with sunshine, and the wind kept pushing the clouds back and forth. As I stepped outside, the clouds overhead slid aside and a ray of golden sunshine broke through and spilled onto Konstantin, setting his hair and skin aglow. He looked like an angel. Not one of those untouchable regal angels, but one suffused with warmth. It truly was a movie moment. I half expected him to turn to me in slow motion as a sappy soundtrack kicked in.
Konstantin held out his hand as Ranger, a huge German shepherd, sniffed him. “Kakoy horoshiy pios.”