The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [89]
His new brother, Boris, was short and stocky with the lank black hair and sharp dark eyes of his peasant forebears. Sergei knew that the other dead sons had all been blond like their mother, and he wondered if Grigori had saved him because he looked like them. But right from the beginning he had understood that Boris hated him. He would feel his hawkish dark eyes boring into him as he sat quietly at the scrubbed wooden table in the simple three-room cottage that was considered luxurious by local standards, but which to him seemed poor and spartan. Even in the darkness of the room they shared at night he could feel Boris’s inimical stare. Sometimes he thought he must be dreaming, but then he would catch the glitter of Boris’s eyes in a shaft of moonlight and know it wasn’t a dream. Besides, the only dream he ever dreamed was the one about his mother.
It was always the same. She lay on the snow in front of her captors, her long pale hair tumbled about her. Her pleading golden-velvet eyes met his for a fleeting second—and then her face exploded into a bloody redness, so glaring it burned his eyes. Screaming, he would fall to his knees, covering her tenderly with her fine dark sables, and then he would lie down beside her and bury his face in the softness of the fur, breathing the scent of the violets she always wore pinned at her shoulder until he was drowning in their scent. He would jolt awake, gasping for breath, the powerful scent of the violets still in his nostrils so strongly that he believed he was home again and she had come to kiss him good night.
He had trained himself not to cry out in case he woke Boris. He would lie quietly, bathed in the sweat of remembered horror, until the shaking had stopped, and then he would slide his hand cautiously into the straw filling of his pallet. His fingers would close around the smooth cabochon stone and he would sigh with relief that it was still there. There had been so much dark-red blood spilled on the snow that no one had noticed the ruby ring lying beside Princess Anouska. Now it was all he had left of the past, and in his heart he knew he would never have more.
Natalya and Grigori knew nothing of these dreams and the ring. They were his secret, as were his memories. In his waking moments he never allowed himself to think of the past, yet even though he had seen the orange glow in the sky that meant Varishnya was burning, there was always a tiny hope left that Papa was safe.
Grigori was his hero. He had plucked him from the jaws of death and had avenged the murder of his mother. He owed him his life and he determined that from then on everything he did would be to please his new papa. He would no longer be Alexei Ivanoff, a prince of all the Russias, but Sergei Grigorevich Solovsky, and he would make his new father as proud of him as he was of his own son. He wanted with all his heart to become the man Grigori wanted him to be. Yet somehow, try as he might, he was never able to forget who he really was and truly become that other person.
A few weeks after the incident at the fence he was riding back from the grandfather’s house where he had been sent to help with the cows. There was a path running alongside the stream that he liked to take at a gallop. Here and there the trees crowded closer together, stretching their low branches across the path, and it had become a game with him to gallop as quickly as he could, ducking instinctively to avoid the overhanging branches. He smiled as he set his horse on the track, spurring him on to greater