Sergei felt the anger and the bile rise in his throat, and if he could have done it, he’d have killed Yurovsky and every other guard in the house on the spot. The House of Special Purpose — that’s what the Ipatiev mansion had been officially called, and Sergei had always taken it to mean imprisonment.

Now he knew that it meant murder.

He laid the curtains on the floor — they were the color of cream, and imprinted with little blue seahorses — and gently rolled Ana’s body onto them. He looked at her face, smeared with blood and ash and tears, then closed the ends of the curtains over her as if he were wrapping a precious gift.

“Move along,” Yurovsky shouted, “all of you!”

Sergei could hear the truck engine idling in the courtyard. The Latvians were throwing the remaining bodies over their shoulders like carpets, and carting them out. Sergei picked up Anastasia in his arms, as if carrying a child to bed, and leaving the cellar he heard Yurovsky joke, “Careful not to wake her.”

Sergei was numb with shock and grief, and when the guards told him to toss the body into the back of the truck with all the rest, Sergei simply climbed inside instead, and slumped against the side wall with the body between his knees.

“You always were sweet on that one,” a guard cracked. “That’s why the commandant sent you into town tonight.” He slammed the half panel at the back of the vehicle shut. “Now you can help bury her.”

He banged on the side of the truck, and the engine was put into gear. With a jolt, the truck lumbered across the courtyard, out through the palisade, and onto the Koptyaki road. The pile of corpses — Sergei counted ten others in all — gently swayed and rocked, as if it were all a single creature, at every bump and pothole in the road. The Tsar and his valet, the Tsaritsa and her maid, their daughters, the heir to the throne, the cook, the doctor … all tangled together in an indiscriminate mound of blood-soaked linens.

Sergei wondered where the truck was headed … and what he would do when he got there.

An old car, crammed with shovels, gasoline, and Latvians was jouncing along behind them.

For at least an hour, they forged through the forest on old rutted mining roads. Sergei could hear tree branches on either side scratching at the sides of the truck and the tires squelching in the mud.

And then — unless his mind was playing tricks on him — he heard something else, too.

He bent his head.

It came again.

A moan.

He pulled the cream-colored curtain away.

“Ana,” he whispered, “are you alive?”

Her eyes were closed, and her face twitched like someone still caught in a nightmare.

“Ana, be still!”

Her face was wrenched in agony, her lips parted, and she started to cry out.

Sergei pressed his palm to her mouth, and said, “Ana, don’t make a sound. Do you hear me? It’s Sergei. Don’t move.”

She tried to scream again, and again he flattened his hand on her lips.

“If they know you’re alive, they’ll kill us both.”

Her eyes opened, filled with panic, and he leaned even closer so that she could see him better. Despite all that had passed between them, in looks and words and flowers, the bounds of propriety had never been crossed. Until this night, Sergei would no sooner have dreamed of holding a grand duchess of Russia than he would have imagined himself becoming the Tsar.

Even as his heart soared — the love of his life was cradled in his arms! — Sergei’s mind raced. How had she survived the slaughter? Was the blood covering her body her own — or her sister’s?

And how could he ever spirit her away from this caravan of death?

The truck was going up a hill, the gears grinding, when he heard the thundering of hoofbeats and wild shouts coming through the forest. The brakes squealed, and even as the truck stopped, Yurovsky was leaping like a demon from the car behind, cursing and brandishing a long-muzzled Mauser.

Was Anastasia going to be rescued after all? Were these the White cavalry officers, loyal to the Tsar, that Ana and her family had long prayed for? Or could they be renegade Czech soldiers who abhorred the revolutionaries? Sergei didn’t care, just so long as there were enough of them to overpower the Red Guards. He’d take his own chances.

“Keep still,” he said to Anastasia, smoothing her befouled hair with his hand.

He could hear horses snorting, and the creak of wagon wheels.

“We were promised we’d get them!” someone was shouting. “All of them — alive!”

“Well, you’re too late for that now,” Yurovsky replied. “But this truck can’t make it any farther. We’ll need those carts to get the bodies to the Four Brothers.”

Sergei knew that the four brothers referred to the stumps of four towering pine trees that had once stood where nothing but coal pits and peat bogs now lay. Was this how Yurovsky had planned to dispose of the bodies? By throwing them down the abandoned coal shafts?

“I promised my men that they’d have some fun with the duchesses,” the man complained. “And I planned to have the Tsaritsa myself.”

“Shut your trap, Ermakov, and do what I tell you.” Yurovsky was struggling to remain in command of the rowdy horsemen; that much Sergei could tell from the strained pitch of his voice. “Unload the bodies, and the first man I see stealing anything, I’ll shoot.”

What would they steal, Sergei thought? The rings on their fingers? But even as he heard a few of the men dismounting, and the Latvians clambering out of the car, he knew that this might be his only opportunity to save Ana. As soon as the back panel was dropped flat again, and he saw the faces of the peasants leering in at the bloody cargo, he stood up, teetering a little as if he were drunk, and said, “Take them away, comrades.”

A few dirty hands reached in, grabbed the dangling arms and legs of the dead and dragged them out of the truck. Sheets were pulled aside, and one man called out, “I’ve got a duchess, but I’m damned if I know which one.”

There was laughter, topped only when another man shouted, “And I’ve got the queen bitch herself!”

Picking up the body of Anastasia, and handling it with deliberate carelessness, Sergei stepped over the corpses of the maid and the cook and hopped down onto the ground. The road was illuminated by the headlights of the car, but the forest was thick on both sides, and as the hay carts were brought around back, Sergei carried his bundle past one wagon, and then another, and when a cry went up at the discovery of the Tsar—“Who wants to spit in the face of Nikolashka himself!” Ermakov exulted — Sergei pretended to drunkenly stumble off the rutted path and into a pile of brambles.

But no one called out after him, and no one noticed. Everyone was so intent on defiling the corpse of the Tsar that they didn’t see him disappear, and hoisting the girl over his shoulder like a sack of grain — and how many times had he done that very thing in the fields of Pokrovskoe? — he trotted into the dense and pitch-black woods. Ana groaned, and all he could say was, “Hush, Ana, hush.” She was heavier than he thought she would be, and her body was harder and stiffer, but in all the hubbub and confusion, the Reds might not even notice that one of the duchesses was missing until they assembled all the bodies at the Four Brothers. By then Sergei planned to be miles away, hidden in the one place he knew would provide a safe refuge for the lone survivor of the imperial family.

Chapter 42

Harley had just spent the worst night of his entire life, and he was not about to go through another one like it. He’d broken into Russell’s remaining stores of beer and drifted off into sleep for half an hour here and there, but every time he did, he’d awakened again with a start, expecting to see that old lady from the cliffs, or Eddie, bruised and bloodied, cursing him out for cutting the rope.