The Lure of Their Graves

ONE

Dimitri


Dimitri Abramovich pulled a fur blanket tighter around his bare shoulders, shivering in Rav-Mikhailburg’s deep winter chill.

He stared at the ceiling, his body leaden and his heart pounding against his ribs. Vasily was fast asleep, his arm thrown protectively across Dimitri’s lap. He hadn’t allowed Dimitri to sleep alone since they’d been reunited, and Dimitri was more grateful for it than he ever could have expressed. He hadn’t even needed to ask. Vasily had simply known.

The fire crackled in the corner of the room, the light casting shadows through the gap in the bed’s curtains, which they really should have drawn tighter to keep in the warmth but never did. Dimitri had had to dash out of bed one too many times, to retch into the sink in their bathroom, for them to fully close themselves in.

The gap provided enough light for Dimitri to see the cards he held in his shaking fingers.

He got stacks of them each day; embossed visiting cards with the names of nobles or foreign dignitaries who were seeking audiences with the Tzar. Ladushka would hand them over in the order in which she’d arranged the meetings. They meant nothing more than what his day would look like. He didn’t even need to take them, really—Ladushka just knew he liked to admire the stationery.

This time, though, three of them were different.

Three of them had portraits sketched on the back.

A beautiful woman with long hair and a knowing look in her eyes. A curly-haired man with a kind smile and a square jaw. An androgenous person with a curtain of hair threaded with jewels and a shrewd, sharp expression on their narrow face.

Aziza Timurova.

Lukas Marks.

Yullyan Sakvin.

The names that Ladushka had offered him along with these cards were seared into his memory. Three ways to avoid another war. Three ways to save his people. Mere weeks to act before someone else made a move and it was too late.

He shuffled the cards forward and backwards, as if that would make this better. As if there was anything that could make this better.

Vasily twitched next to him, mumbling something in his sleep, and Dimitri quickly slid the three offending cards into the middle of the pile, rubbing his thumbnail across the edges. He tried to breathe past the mounting panic, but it wasn’t helping.

Not when he kept looking down at the cards in his hand, and then at the man sleeping next to him.

The tonic that Mischa made for him had lifted the cloud that had hung over his mind since the war, but in the months since Alexey’s death, Dimitri wondered if maybe even medication wasn’t enough to fix what was wrong with him. He put down the cards for a moment and reached for the bottle of pills he kept stashed under the pillow, popping the cork with his thumb. He had been exhausted every day—they’d all been—but he’d felt settled. Crawling into bed with Vasily every night had been a balm and a blessing, and he had felt steady for the first time since leaving Alexey’s side. But then it had all come creeping back in around the edges; nightmares about Alexey and what Dimitri had done, fear of what was coming, the knowledge that these shreds of peace he’d gathered up and pulled around himself like armor would never be able to last.

The pill leached the taste of raspberry and sugar under his tongue and took away some of the reflexive impulse that he still fought against to find a bottle of vodka. He focused on counting Vasily’s breaths, feeling the expansion of his ribs and the shift of his hips in his sleep, constantly seeking the closest contact he could with Dimitri even when he was unconscious. And instead of being here and focusing on the now, instead of grasping the moment that they’d all fought so hard for him to have, he was wasting it by falling apart.

He reached down and picked up the cards again, thumbing through them, balancing the stack against his dead arm so that he could flip through the three with portraits over and over.

Which of them would end up claiming him for their own?

Vasily would’ve gotten a line in between his eyebrows and demanded to know why Dimitri hadn’t woken him if his anxiety was building to a fever pitch, but Dimitri wasn’t about to interrupt yet another night’s sleep for Vasily. The spymaster was working more than any of them, flat out from the time he woke up until late into the night, his only break the time he spent wolfing down food or in bed with Dimitri. His court all spent so much time taking care of him, and what he was able to do for them paled in comparison.

He wanted to make sure they were safe forever, and he knew deep down in his heart that such a thing was impossible. That it wasn’t a promise he could make. That even though he had returned from the dead for them, even though he would give his life again for them, he didn’t have the power to change the whole world to ensure they never got hurt.

Especially since, to keep them all safe, he’d have to break Vasily’s heart. And his own.

A map of the continent was burned into his memory, along with the pins that Ladushka had stuck in three countries. Urushka. The Free States. Atreus.

Neighbors, potential enemies, possible allies. Ladushka had laid out the reality of their situation, her flaxen hair in a severe twist and her mouth pressed into a thin line. The Urushkins to the east—with their notoriously arid soil—were their biggest problem, with border incursions reported almost daily, a test to see how good their defenses were and whether a breach would go unnoticed long enough for an invading force to seize the agriculturally rich far east of Novo-Svitsevo. The likelihood that he would be able to muster a full force to defend their extensive border was slim, not when the army was still decimated from the war, but that land provided too much grain to lose, and if he allowed it to be taken without a fight, it would only invite the same from other enemies.

Like the Free States. His father had always doubted that the republic to their south would ever invade—it was too small and too rich to want to bother—but Vasily’s rebuilt spy network had intercepted messages from the president of the republic to the reclusive monarchy of Atreus, setting the stage for a request for a military alliance.

And why would they need that if not to exploit the instability of their neighbor to the north? Economic growth frequently begat military expansion because money could pile only so high before it spread outwards and pushed at borders. Here Novo-Svitsevo sat, not even two years out from a devastating civil war, with an unstable throne and a dead Tzar come back to life, full of resources that could be an asset to economic development. Full of metals and minerals that could make bombs—or anything else.

And full of practitioners of the Holy Science, a country with the kinds of knowledge that Atreus—with its closely held yet notorious manufacture of the magic that Alexey had unleashed on Novo-Svitsevo—was rumored to deeply covet. There were whispers that the monarchy consorted with demons, just as Alexey had done. And if magic required human conduits, there was now no other country with a populace more willing and able to serve. An invasion would absorb a resource of Novo-Svitsevo’s that the Free States had no use for, but together in an alliance with Atreus, they could leech Dimitri’s country dry.

Ladushka had laid it out for him in the same stark tones she always did, not masking her concern and desperation. And then she told him that there were three possible ways out.

All of them involved him being sold off again, married for the good of Novo-Svitsevo. But the thought of lying next to anyone who wasn’t Vasily stole his breath and crushed him.

His life and his body hadn’t belonged to him since the moment the rest of his family had been killed, and not even before that. The freedom he had now was borrowed and he knew it. He should be grateful to have ever had it, but that didn’t make the prospect of losing it any less terrifying.

“Dima?” Vasily shifted on top of him, his eyelashes tickling Dimitri’s skin as he blinked awake. “What’s on your mind, darling? Are you working already?” He poked at the visiting cards on Dimitri’s lap.

Vasily’s voice was gravelly from sleep, but when Dimitri turned his head to meet the other man’s gaze, he knew that Vasily was as alert as ever. Like Annika, with her years of military training which had led her to serve as Dimitri’s top general, Vasily had the uncanny ability to wake from a dead sleep ready to act. It was something that Dimitri himself had never mastered, despite the war.

Dimitri let out a sigh, knowing that there was no path forward but the honest one. At least the cards with the portraits were hidden in the stack. Vasily would find out about them soon enough, but that didn’t need to be this moment. He could have one more shred of peace. “I’m thinking about the future. And how much I don’t want it to come.”

Vasily stilled, his broad palm resting on Dimitri’s chest, covering the scar right over his heart. “The future isn’t happening right now, Dima. Do you need a reminder to anchor yourself in the present?”

His hand slipped lower, under the covers, his fingertips dusting the ridges of Dimitri’s hips. It would be easy to surrender to this, to take what Vasily was offering. But right now, all it stirred in him was a vague sense of revulsion that one day soon he’d have to let another person touch him in the same way. That he’d have to try to love another person like this. That the hands on him wouldn’t always be Vasily’s, callused and warm and so good at grounding him.

He would do it. Of course he would. But he didn’t know if he’d survive it.

As if he knew what was on Dimitri’s mind, Vasily stopped his attempt to tease Dimitri and sighed, the sound deep and sad in the quiet of the bedroom. A log snapped in the fireplace and Dimitri winced. It was a commonplace noise now that it was cold again, but it also reminded him of the sound of his own bones breaking.

They never talked about this—the two of them in their own bubble, pretending at marriage. And ordinarily, Dimitri would savor every moment that he could seize, but right now, the only thing that he could think about was how much it would hurt to end it.

“Dima.” Vasily kissed his temple. “Did you take the pills?”

Dimitri nodded, mute with the panic and disgust creeping their way up his throat.

“And it’s not helping?” Vasily sat up, the covers falling over his chest and pooling in his lap. Pulling aside the bed hangings let a rush of cold air in, but also more light. It was easier for Dimitri to panic in the dark, he knew, but right now the flicker of firelight reminded Dimitri of being dead and being devoured, and he wanted to bury himself somewhere he’d never have to think about any of this again.

When he remained mute, Vasily got out of bed and pulled on a pair of pants, throwing a dressing gown on over his bare chest. “Come on, then.”

He reached into the bed and pulled Dimitri out of the covers like he weighed no more than a wet kitten, cradling Dimitri to his chest. Dimitri’s right arm went reflexively to wrap around Vasily’s neck for balance, but his left merely lay limp on his stomach, hanging loose. The long scar from his wrist to his elbow prickled, the only sensation he had in that limb anymore.

Maybe it would make more sense to cut it off completely.

“Stop.” Vasily tilted their foreheads together. “I can tell what you’re thinking about. I know it’s hard for you to feel it right now, but you’re every bit as gorgeous as you always have been.”

“Vasya,” Dimitri protested as he was carried into the bathroom, finding his voice. “Stop lying to me.”

Someone else would be looking at this ruined body soon and he wouldn’t be able to hide. It would be another wedding night, except this time, he wouldn’t be twenty years old and beautiful. He was a decade older and his skin was mapped with scars, so many that he couldn’t count them. He limped everywhere because his joints hadn’t healed as well as they could have, to Mischa’s immense frustration.

No one would desire him like this. No one could desire him like this, and having to face his spouse’s revulsion would only make his own shame all the worse. No one could desire this ruined body except Vasily, whose love and trust he sank into every night, impossible to ignore or hide from, and he was going to have to let Vasily go.

He was going to have to let Vasily go.

Dimitri couldn’t help it. As soon as Vasily put him down on the bench next to the claw-foot tub, stepping away to fill it, Dimitri leaned over the sink and vomited until his throat burned and his ribs were sore, and when Vasily knelt in front of him and begged him to say what was haunting him so that he could share the burden, all Dimitri could do was bite his tongue and start to cry.