Prince of Hearts (3 page)

He nodded. “Yes, I’ll be back in two weeks!” he yelled back, obviously not understanding. He gave her an insolent little wave and turned his back. Aline stomped her foot in frustration.

She was tempted to follow him up the staircase and strangle him, but she’d never make it in time. Fyodor was already halfway up the dirigible’s ladder, two suitcases in one hand, his automaton side quickly scaling upwards.

Romanov started climbing up behind his so-called valet, and as he climbed, Aline stood, glued to her spot on the platform, staring upwards in mingled shock and frustration.

She was not mechanically inclined at all, despite her late uncle’s best efforts. Owing to her rare blood condition, she didn’t even have an Iron Necklace. She could operate a wireless tickertext and a steam kettle, but that was about it. As her rare blood disorder, her sea-and airsickness – not to mention her poverty – had nipped in the bud any thought of Welding for herself, she had little incentive for studying the subject.

But even without being an expert, she didn’t think it was logical that the entirely human Professor could scale the dirigible ladder faster than Fyodor, suitcases notwithstanding.

Her hair whipped into her face again, distracting her from her study, her frustration with the situation quickly outstripping her shock.

“I quit, Professor! That’s my news! I’m getting married, you infuriating clod, to someone who lets me finish my sentences!” She had no hope he’d heard her, but she felt somewhat better to have yelled at him. Then, for good measure, she made a rude gesture she’d learned from her years in St. Giles at the Professor’s retreating back.

With that, she stumbled towards the door to the car before the dirigible blew her to the tracks.

Chapter 2

NOTICE: All Citizens are urged by Her Majesty’s Government to acquire an Iron Necklace to combat the Deadly Fog that has arrived on our shores from the Continent. The Device has proven the only successful deterrent against this latest debilitating Consequence of the Great Steam Revolution. Casualties have already been estimated in the tens of thousands in France alone. Reports that the Fog originated in the Pale of Europe, formerly the Crimea, have been discredited by the War Office…

-from
The London Post-Dispatch
, 1857

Genoa, 1896

THE man currently known as Alexander Romanov – Sasha to his few intimates – had grown up surrounded by monsters. His father, Tsar Ivan The Terrible had been a legendary monster, still reviled to this day. His uncles had also been monsters, as well as the soldiers under their aegis who’d carried out their contemptible orders. And his older bastard brothers, the ones his father had raised alongside Sasha, were perhaps the worst of the lot, as savage and profane as the worst biblical demons.

Only Sasha had not realized they were monsters for many years. In their company since his birth, he thought the behavior of his grand Russian family was normal.

And he was the heir, Ivan Alexander Ivanovich, Tsarevich of the Russian Empire, and his father’s favorite – and only surviving – legitimate son. He was expected to follow in their footsteps.

But when Sasha became interested in the manuscripts his tutors assigned him when he was around his seventh year and discovered that there were other ways to live, he was shocked. It was not normal for his father to beat his mother. It was not normal for a tsar to beat and maim his vassals for amusement, or to rape his serfs. It was not normal to live life with no rules.

It was rather like the moment he realized the earth was round and not flat – a concept relatively new to barbaric 16
^th
century Russia – wondering how such a simple, obvious fact had escaped him for so long.

Of course, the discovery of his family’s monstrousness confirmed his own private fears. He’d always felt different from the others. Even out on the hunt, a sport at which he’d excelled, he’d never felt bloodlust when he took down an animal like his father or brothers did.

His father called his behavior weak, and Sasha had tended to agree with him. With the help of regular beatings to make a man of him, he strove to overcome his natural aversion to the acts of cruelty that seemed to come so easily to the other males of his family. He’d wanted to fit in. Being seen as weak was dangerous when surrounded by predators.

Then the Novgorod Massacre had happened in Sasha’s fifteenth year, and Sasha had decided he would rather die than become what his father wanted him to be.

But Sasha hadn’t died, no matter how much he’d wanted to by the end of his life as Ivan Ivanovich. His father had taken everything from him – his wives, his unborn child, his faith, his very heart – and given him the one thing he’d never wanted: eternal life.

It seemed a cruel joke that Sasha had lived for centuries, cursed with the mechanical heart beating in his chest, put there upon the orders of his madman of a father.

When he’d left Russia, he’d started living by his second name, Alexander, and his maternal surname, Romanov, in his attempt to leave Ivan Ivanovich behind forever.

Current Welding technology was nothing compared to the device in Sasha’s chest. Like the twelve Elders who shared his fate, he was immensely strong and fast, and any injuries he received healed at an accelerated rate. Thankfully, the secrets of Da Vinci’s heart were lost. All Sasha knew was that he’d not aged a day in the three hundred years since his strange rebirth.

And he’d lived every day of those three hundred years searching for answers to the questions that had plagued him all of his life. What had motivated his father to inflict so much cruelty upon the world? Why had so many followed in Ivan’s footsteps, but not him?

Or would there come a day that he, too, would turn into a monster? Was the blood that coursed through his mechanical heart tainted with Ivan’s evil? Would he wake up one dawn to find some hidden switch inside of him thrown, his conscience extinguished, and the desire to do violence pounding in his veins?

The rage had happened only once before, when, still healing after his unwanted rebirth, he’d been faced with the full scope of what his father had done to his beloved Yelena and their son.

He’d taken exquisite pleasure in killing his father, watching across the chessboard as Ivan Grozny, scourge of Novgorod, had endured the slow, fatal agony of arsenic poisoning – and the agony of knowing it was his favorite son who’d done it.

His father hadn’t deserved the honor of dying by the sword.

Reason told him his fears of becoming like Ivan were baseless, and what he’d done to his father was just, all things considered. He’d never felt that bloodlust again, and doubted he ever could. There was no one left for him to lose, after all, no heart left to break.

But a part of him deep inside that was still that frightened fifteen-year-old boy, helplessly watching the brutal sack of Novgorod, could not let go of the past or the fear that his days as a normal, ordinary citizen of the world were numbered.

All those women,
he thought to himself, as one particularly powerful memory of Novgorod flitted over his mind,
so long ago, raped, thrown from the bridge into the icy river. The blood flowing like water over the ice and snow.

To have memories like that seared into his brain was a burden he’d not wish on his worst enemy. And he knew, deep inside, he’d never be normal or ordinary.

None of the Elders had that option.

Yet whatever he was, whatever his father and those awful, long-ago events had made him, he’d been well prepared for his lifelong vocation. It was useful to be able to bury emotion when solving murders for a living.

But that did not mean he was immune. When he looked upon the evidence of a crime and felt that ancient, sick ache in the pit of his stomach, he knew he had at least a drop of human blood left in him, which was perversely reassuring to him.

He would have preferred foregoing the reminder of his humanity if it could have spared him this present moment.

All he’d wanted was to stay in Paris with his secretary, the one bright light in his otherwise dark existence. He’d rushed them through a fortnight’s worth of meetings and conferences in a single week so that he could surprise Finch with a holiday.

He’d actually looked forward to escorting her to all of the sights she’d studied so covertly in her guidebook when she thought he wasn’t looking. Getting her across the Channel had been difficult enough with her weak stomach, so he didn’t think he’d ever have another opportunity to provide her with the adventure he knew she secretly craved.

But he’d learned the hard way in the past never to ignore a Council summons. Though this time he wished he had dared. The scene before him on the basement floor of the Genoa National Museum was so singularly vicious, and so nauseatingly familiar, he was struggling to choke down his usually disciplined emotions.

Above all else at the moment, however, he was furious.

The victim, a woman, had been here for some time, that much was obvious from the stench alone. He clenched his hands at his sides in an effort to rein in his temper before he addressed the smug Italian who still stood at the entrance to the room, arms crossed, staring daggers at Sasha’s back.

Franco Salerno had never liked or trusted him. Not that Sasha cared. Like most Italians, Franco was always unbearable company, and possessed of a narrow-minded intellect Sasha had never respected in the three hundred years of their unfortunate acquaintance. But Sasha had never given Franco enough thought to dislike the man in return.

Until now.

It had taken Sasha a good day by Thaddeus Fincastle’s dirigible to arrive in Genoa, and he’d received the tickertext the night before his journey, already some time after the body had been discovered. Thus over forty-eight hours had passed, yet here the body remained. It was as if Franco had taken extra pains to ensure Sasha’s discomfort – and wrath.

“I see you thought it necessary to leave this poor woman where she lay,” he said.

“Franco and I both agreed that, though distasteful, it was for the best,” the man next to Franco interjected. “We wanted to give you a chance to see the … er, tableau, as it was originally discovered. In case you see something the rest of us have missed.”

Sasha narrowed his eyes at the speaker, the dark-haired, aristocratic Rowan Harker, Lord Llewellyn. Of all the Elders, Sasha was closest with Rowan. But he could not miss the glimmer of suspicion lurking deep within his friend’s eyes. Sasha knew what Rowan left unspoken, that he and Franco wanted to witness Sasha’s reaction to the “tableau”, as Rowan called it, for any signs of his culpability.

Franco had already made up his mind centuries ago about Sasha’s guilt, while Rowan had always championed Sasha’s claims of innocence. But three hundred years of murders without any other suspects could make stronger men than Rowan doubt. Witnessing the doubt in Rowan’s eyes for himself, however …

Well, Sasha was not surprised, under the circumstances, but he was disappointed.

Sasha turned back to the body, though he didn’t want to. He’d already seen what he needed to, and knew exactly what had happened to the poor woman. The murderer had struck the woman on the head, but not hard enough to kill. Then he’d proceeded to surgically remove the woman’s heart while she was still alive.

In that, the villain had succeeded.

But if it had been the goal of the villain to keep his victim alive, that part of the plan had been unsuccessful. From the pattern of burns inside the chest cavity, it was apparent the villain had attempted regeneration, but without success.

Sasha rubbed the long scar that had never truly healed on his sternum. He’d been the last successful experiment in Vital Regeneration. But Da Vinci’s so-called Abominable Knowledge had been forgotten, the manuscripts destroyed by the High Council before the dawn of the 17
^th
century.

Even Sasha’s transformation had been an illicit one, performed by one of the last of Da Vinci’s acolytes – and under great duress. But that scientist was long dead, and the technology was extinct. For those few remaining who remembered and lived with Da Vinci’s legacy, that was a good thing.

This murderer didn’t think so. He hadn’t thought so for three centuries, since that was how long bodies like this one had been turning up, taunting Sasha. He eyed the Cyrillic poem written in blood on the floor next to the victim’s head. He suspected it was another one of his father’s, just like the ones decorating every other crime scene.

Aside from mass rape and genocide, Ivan the Terrible had loved to write poetry.

It had been a hundred years since the last string of victims, just as there had been a hundred years between those and the first ones. Sasha had his theory about why the cycle had stopped, and why it was starting again. But his theory was one that no one on the Council wanted to hear. He was convinced it was a Bonded human who’d gone rogue.

But the implications of that theory were unacceptable, as that meant one of the Council was, in the end, culpable. Which was an outrageous notion to everyone save Sasha, who shared the Elders’ fate, but had never been one of them.

And that was the fundamental difference between Sasha and the Elders. All twelve of the Elders on the High Council had chosen Vital Regeneration. But Sasha had not chosen his fate, had never wanted it, something none of the Elders believed. How could they, when they couldn’t understand how anyone wouldn’t crave eternal life like they themselves did? Sasha had been looked upon with suspicion from the moment they’d learned of his existence.

And when they’d learned who his father was, their distrust in his
worthiness
had deepened. To them he’d always be an outsider. And he’d always be the Council’s easiest scapegoat when they found the truth too unpalatable to even consider.

He was about to turn away when the small beam of light shining down from the narrow basement window above hit something shiny tucked beneath the victim’s blonde hair. He stopped and stretched out his gloved hand to retrieve it.