The Game by Vanessa Fewings

Author:Vanessa Fewings
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HQN Books
Published: 2017-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

15

The world fell away as I struggled to understand what Tobias was trying to do to me. Why would he have researched my family history to this extent if not to find information to leverage against me? As I ran my fingertip along the mouse pad I stared in shock at what he’d collated.

There were hundreds of personal documents pertaining to the Romanov family, along with many of my ancestors’ personal missives between each other. My chest tightened when I saw an account from my great-aunt of her attempt to escape Russia. I knew that she’d never made it to freedom.

My family tree had been traced with accuracy proving I came from royalty, a fact my father had often told me but the fantastical stories had sounded so exaggerated. Had circumstances been different and Russia not overthrown the Romanovs, there was a big chance I’d be a grand duchess.

Oh, Dad.

Squeezing back tears, I studied my father’s personal records and saw the copy of his birth certificate, his marriage certificate and his property deeds to prove we owned my childhood home in Kensington.

There were more documents containing provenance of our art collection and all of them essential to reassure the art community the paintings were once ours. All this felt like a violation of my privacy, and I snapped the lid shut and stared through the glass window at the skyscraper opposite; sunlight reflecting the late afternoon and glinting off its sleek black glass.

What I’d done to Tobias’s phone paled in comparison to what was contained here. I wanted to throw his laptop into the swimming pool and demand he tell me why he’d done this. There came the sound of a shower being turned on from one of the rooms. I wondered what he was thinking right now. He was feeling smug, perhaps?

His haunting words returning: you will feel like an abyss has opened beneath your feet.

I couldn’t swim in that stupid pool, but I was brave enough to search for the answers to why he’d gone to such lengths to rein me in. What exactly did he have on me? It was better to know, I reassured myself as I flipped up the screen and flicked a fingertip over the mouse pad to awaken the truth.

A cruel regime had stripped our family name—our right to the throne—but they couldn’t rape our legacy. Somehow, someway, my ancestors had preserved their vast collection of art so the Bolshevik troops hunting them down hadn’t destroyed them. Those monsters had murdered the czar and his family but my other descendants had escaped the Bolsheviks’ chief executioner and seen to it that some of our masterpieces had survived, though many others were looted and others destroyed in an act of outrage during the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union.

For our enemy, our bourgeois art as they’d called it, had no place in their new regime. A few relatives had risked everything to smuggle out what was left of our collection.

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