Maria seized me by the shoulders and looked up into my eyes. “Find her. Please, Maksim. You must.”
I scanned the grounds, everywhere for any sign of Anika on horseback or on foot. The view from her window gave me a good sense of the expanse of lands near the castle, but I saw nothing. Fucking nothing.
“Go,” Maria urged me. “Please.”
I pressed my fist against my lips and growled.
“I’m the last person she’s going to want to see.”
Maria sucked in a hiss. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Are you so blind you cannot see? She’s in love with you.”
“Bullshit,” I snarled. “I’ve seen the way she looks at me. Fucking bullshit.”
“Not bullshit,” Maria snapped back. “You know it, I know it, she knows it. Go!” She shoved my shoulder to push me toward the hallway. “Save her. Help her.”
She wasn’t just talking about right now, I knew that. She was talking about saving her from her future, too.
The room damn near swirled around me. I felt like I was waking up from a knockout punch. In less than an hour, my entire understanding of my situation with Anika had flipped. Not only would my mother approved, but now here was Maria, fucking telling me that Anika wanted me, as much as I wanted her.
“If you’re joking around with me, Maria, I’ll kill you. No shit. Right here. With my bare hands.”
“You don’t think I know that?” Maria said, actually stamping on the floor. “You’re terrifying. She is the one person that isn’t scared of you at her core. Because she loves you.”
For one second, we stared each other down—Maria with pleading eyes, me with nothing but doubt. But I could see plainly that she wasn’t shitting me. Anika wanted me. Anika loved me. She’d be mine willingly. I just had to fucking find her.
I thundered from the room, down the great staircase, and through the main hall. I shouldered open the side door, and then I grabbed the first horse I saw. He was a pure-white stallion that I’d ridden before. Hot-blooded, quick, and unstoppable. Just the horse for the job. I slung my leg over and took off at a gallop before I’d even gotten my boots in the stirrups.
As we barreled into the forest, the skies opened up. Fist-sized drops of rain pelted my back as a huge storm rumbled in, turning day to night.
Chapter 8
Anika
I was shivering so hard that I couldn’t get a fire started, and I was too exhausted to keep trying. I chattered in the freezing darkness of a small cave I’d managed to find in the torrential storm, and drew my knees up to my chest. I was soaked to the bone and deliriously tired. And terrified.
Shutting my eyes, I buried my face against my knees, trying desperately to warm myself up, trying to make myself small like animals do.
It was fitting.
I bolted from the castle that day more like an animal than a human. Some primal part of me governed my actions. I’d been neither rational nor careful. All I’d known was a desperate need to get away, get away, get away. To save myself, whatever the cost.
I had gotten away, but not nearly far enough. On a good day, the journey to the little cave where I sheltered would have only taken me a few hours. But every path was washed away by the torrential rains or blocked by lightning-felled trees.
Without the sun, I got turned around in the forest and doubled back on myself time and again. What should’ve taken me part of the morning took me nearly ten hours. Now, it was night.
The storm had broken and a shaft of moonlight cut through the opening of the secondary cave where I sat. The drip-drip of rain off the leaves outside marked the passage of the seconds. And outside in the forest, the branches groaned painfully against one another. It sounded more human than I wanted to admit.
My mare, Rosie, was in the front part of the cave, both because it was bigger and easier for her to negotiate, and because I knew she’d alert me to intruders. Who would be after me, I didn’t know, but my parents hadn’t gone very far when I decided to run—a messenger could have easily caught up to them.
I could almost hear the hounds in the distance, searching for me; I imagined our master of the hunt giving them one of my gowns to find my scent. And their blood-curdling yelps when they got on my trail.
I was afraid of being caught, but I was even more afraid of how to survive this night by myself. I’d stripped out of my wet britches and now wore only the tunic I’d been wearing all day. The sopping wet linen stuck to my skin, drawing the heat from my body.