The Winds of Khalakovo - Bradley P. Beaulieu [187]
“Atiana, please. Your father’s men should be arriving sometime today to transfer your one-time fiancé to a manor house down the hill.”
“Nikandr is here?”
He pulled the covers away and sat up, looming over her as she lay there. From the corner of her eye she saw the stone slip down into the depression his right knee was creating. She reached up and scratched his stomach to keep his attention riveted to her.
He nearly doubled over—a ticklish man—and climbed over her to reach the floor. Immediately she released her hold of the knife, trusting that a man like Grigory wouldn’t adjust the pillows, and placed herself squarely on top of the stone.
“Would that interest you?”
Now that he was gone from the bed and pulling his clothes on, she allowed the expression upon her face to slip to one of concern, and then to anger. “Perhaps you didn’t hear what happened on Radiskoye’s eyrie, Griga, but a gun was held to my head, and Nikandr’s father had his finger on the trigger. I know in my heart the craven nearly ended a woman’s life because his son had been taken from him. I have words for his son—words about his father, words about Nikandr himself—that I would say to him before all of this is over.”
“Then come, and we will visit him—”
“They are words for Nikandr alone...”
Grigory stopped as he was pulling on his belt. She thought he had noticed his knife missing, but he was staring directly at her. “Nyet,” he said with a satisfied smile. “Anything you wish to say to Nikandr you can say in front of your future husband.”
She slipped from the bed as he was pulling his shirt over his head. In one smooth motion she positioned the stone beneath the pillow and pulled the knife out from underneath it. She embraced Grigory before he could fully pull the shirt on and slipped the kindjal into its sheath while hugging him tightly. “Fair enough,” she said, kissing him on the mouth as his head emerged from the confines of his shirt.
“Enough.” He pulled away, favoring his wounded shoulder. “I have much to do. Get yourself dressed and meet me outside.”
As he opened the door, two streltsi further up the hall looked in their direction. Grigory didn’t make an attempt to block their view of the room—or more importantly, Atiana standing naked within it. He closed the door behind him like a wolf who had just won his bitch... Nyet, she thought, like a young, impudent aristocrat who’d claimed the prize no one thought him capable of winning.
She turned to the bed and spit upon it.
And then she retrieved Nikandr’s stone before pulling on her clothes.
The door before her clanked as the gaoler turned the keys. The immense door—after a hard shove from the gaoler—opened with a horrible groan. Atiana stepped inside. Dim light came from small windows worked into the stone walls.
There were four cells in the tight space with a wide aisleway between them. All four were occupied, and in the dimness, Atiana was having trouble discerning where Nikandr was being held. Two crewmen occupied the leftmost cells. In the first cell on the right was an Aramahn man with a mop of curly brown hair and a short, ragged beard.
In the final cell, lying on the straw layering the cell floor, was Nikandr, but he did not rise as she approached.
“Stand, Khalakovo,” Atiana said.
He jumped as she spoke. Her stomach churned as he rolled slowly over. Grigory had not mentioned that he was in such a state, and she realized that the information had been withheld for a purpose—Grigory had wanted to see her reaction as she laid eyes on him. Beyond her initial shock—which she hoped Grigory had not been able to see so well in the darkness—she hid her emotions well. She kept a steely gaze on Nikandr as he made it first to all fours, then to his knees. He breathed deeply, coughing painfully several times, before summoning the energy to pull himself up to his feet.
His face was a mass of black and purple bruises. His lip was swollen and cut, and the blood that had leaked from a gash along the bridge of his nose ran down his face and into the stubble along his