Pasha’s soldiers—or were they Yuliana’s?—raised the butts of their muskets and smashed the toy faces. They took back the cannons and pushed down on the barrels to realign them.

Nikolai pushed farther out with his arm, and the cannons flung the men off them and swiveled their aim straight upward, so that any cannon fire would shoot up and fall directly back down on Pasha’s men, rather than on the broken Neva that was drowning and freezing the Decembrists.

Except one cannon did not pivot completely. It was angled upward but still slightly toward the river, and the fuse was burnt to its end.

In the midst of the chaos and the noise and her attempts to save the drowning, freezing men, Vika didn’t see the cannonball until it was already careening toward her.

She gasped, paralyzed for a moment.

Then her instincts kicked in, and she commanded the wind to shift the cannonball’s path.

It was going too fast, though, and its heat carried it straight through the blizzard undeterred. Vika tried to throw herself out of its way, but she was a split second too late, and the cannonball smashed into her left hand.

It ripped it off completely.

Vika screamed. It was as if a lightning bolt had shot through her arm and lit it on fire from within. She hurtled through the air. The sky went dizzyingly round and round. Everywhere there was shouting and smoke and cannon fire.

And then all of it snuffed out to black.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

No!” Pasha shouted as Vika began to tumble from the sky, blood following her like crimson streamers. He kicked his horse into action, and as they charged into the center of the square to try to catch her, he yelled at his infantry, “Cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fire!”

They finally heard him and stopped their attack.

Pasha spurred his horse to jump the last distance and caught Vika just as she was about to hit the ground.

“Stop everything!” Nikolai yelled at the Decembrists, although not many of them actually remained. At least a thousand had perished into the icy Neva. Hundreds lay dead on the cobblestones. Volkonsky had fled with most of his men in retreat. But the few hundred who remained fighting halted. The toy soldiers went rigid without Nikolai’s magic to move them, and the last of the shadow regiments dissolved in smoke.

“Is she all right?” Nikolai ran to where Pasha held Vika on his horse.

As if this wasn’t his fault. As if he could simply ask Pasha something like that, after all of this.

But right now, Pasha didn’t care. All he cared about was Vika.

He slid off his saddle as his horse came to a halt. He laid Vika on the frozen ground and cradled her head in his lap. Blood continued to gush from her wrist where her hand had been severed, red mingling with the snow and filling the crevices between the cobblestones. He tore off his uniform jacket, sending buttons flying, and grabbed a handful of his shirt to tear a strip from it. He wrapped her wound tightly with the fabric. “Vika, can you hear me?”

She didn’t respond.

Nikolai knelt beside her. “I’m sorry, Vika. I didn’t mean for this to happen—”

“What did you think would happen?” Pasha snapped, suddenly coming back to the reality of what had transpired.

Nikolai narrowed his eyes. “I could’ve asked the same of you about the end of the Game.”

“And yet you didn’t learn from my mistakes.”

“You forced her into this.” Nikolai pointed at Vika’s bandaged wrist.

Except the bracelet he was looking for was no longer there.

Pasha’s stomach lurched. The gold cuff had been torn off with her hand.

Vika was nearly as pale as the snow now, as her life drained out red onto the tourniquet he’d made. Pasha held her closer. “This can’t be our final fate.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

Nikolai glared at Pasha. It was his fault that this had happened! If Pasha hadn’t turned on Nikolai at the end of the Game, then Nikolai wouldn’t have had to exact revenge. . . .

He could end it now, though. Pasha was right in front of him. Vika, too. She was unconscious, on the brink of death. Nikolai could finish her and eliminate Pasha’s fiercest weapon protecting the crown.

But at the thought of killing Vika, Nikolai’s silhouette flickered. It was already faint after the fatigue of battle, and now when he looked at Vika, his anger sputtered.

He had stopped his soldiers’ attack for a reason. For Vika. The battle had taken a toll on his strength, as well as on the cold darkness that fueled his obsession with vengeance, and in the moment she fell from the sky, a flash of warmth had flared inside him, a sliver of his past.

She was dying, and if she was gone, his hope of one day being tsar with Vika as his tsarina could never exist. Nikolai sagged in the snow.

What was left of Aizhana’s energy rumbled inside him. Don’t give up. You’re so close to the throne, it seemed to say.

Nikolai hadn’t been able to fight the chill before, but the stark reality of a future without Vika sparked the truth of what he wanted. He had spent his entire life feeling alone, and she was his chance of finally having someone else who understood him. Someone else who was different. Someone with whom to explore and push the bounds of what they could do.

I don’t want what Aizhana wanted for me. I don’t want to be tsar at the cost of those I love. He had known this before his mother infected him with her energy. Now he had enough clarity to know it again.

He pushed back on the chill that tried to spread inside him. It was all he had left of his mother, but Nikolai could remember her love while still understanding that it was deeply flawed.

Au revoir, Aizhana.

Yuliana ran up to where he and Pasha sat with Vika in the snow. “Save her!” Yuliana said to Nikolai. “Do whatever it is you did at the end of the Game. Give Vika your energy.”

Nikolai shook his head. “I . . . I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you can’t?” Pasha said.

“My energy is tainted. It came from my mother; there’s too much death and darkness in it.” Even as he said it, he fought internally with the cold that still lived in his veins. But he looked around him to strengthen his resolve. He looked at the soldiers—those who were still alive—standing tense, staring at their two princes and princess on the bloodied snow. At the dead men who littered the cobblestones. And at the ones beyond his line of sight, who had drowned in the icy river. “Devil take me, look at what that energy has done to me, what I’ve done with it. I won’t transfer that to Vika.”