Rescued Read Online Free

body falling. Quickly Leonid looked behind him—yes, the grand duchesses had heard the gunshots. They were staring at the horrifying scene on the wall, their wide eyes pooling once again with tears.
    â€œNot them, too!” Anastasia exploded. “Must we lose everyone we loved?” She glanced at Leonid and bit her lip. “I didn’t mean—”
    â€œIt happened so quickly,” Katherine was apologizing, more to the grand duchesses than to Leonid. “I thought we’d have some warning, and we could get a sense of what was going to happen and then shut it off—”
    â€œSave them!” Maria shrieked from her place on the floor. “You saved me and Anastasia and Alexei and Leonid—go back and save Ivan and Nagorny, too!”
    Now it was Katherine whose eyes filled with tears.
    â€œWe can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s too late.”
    â€œI know it’s hard to understand,” Chip said soothingly, sounding like he was trying to be as diplomatic as a king. “But JB said there were only a few windows of opportunity for time travelers to get in and out in 1918. It was such a damaged year. With World War I and all the fighting in Russia . . . it’s a miracle anybody could be saved. We can’t get to Ivan.”
    Leonid’s heart throbbed with pain, as if his body had been riddled with bullets too. It hurt so badly that his uncle was gone. But it also hurt that Maria, not Leonid, had been the one to beg for Ivan’s life. What kind of nephew was Leonid that he could only stand there, meekly watching his uncle die?
    â€œHe was my uncle,” Leonid said. “Mine. He is my sorrow to grieve.”
    But Leonid accidentally spoke in Russian—and not just Russian, but the garbled dialect that he’d used when he’d first gone to the palace from his tiny village. Probably nobody understood him. Probably nobody understood Leonid at all.
    *    *    *
    It felt like night—or as much as any time could feel like anything in this nowhere of a no place.
    Chip and Katherine were huddled together whispering in one corner of the room, their heads tilted together. Anastasia and Maria were in another corner, their arms linked, Maria’s head on Anastasia’s shoulder. They were so close that locks of their same-color, same-texture hair coiled together into one long curl dangling between them.
    Leonid was alone.
    He went to the far corner of the room, to the wall where he’d watched his uncle die.
    â€œIs it possible that you could show me something privately, so secretly and quietly that only I will see and hear?” he asked.
    He waited, and just at the moment he was ready to give up, the word “Yes” seemed to whisper from the wall.
    It was followed by the word “Da.” The wall was willing to speak Russian to him.
    â€œShow me . . . ,” Leonid decided to work up to what he both wanted and feared. “Show me the moment I first met Clothilde.”
    It would mean seeing his uncle again, and that would be hard, but Leonid was ready to risk that.
    The blank wall seemed to melt away, and Leonid could see a younger version of himself walking beside his uncle, the man just as tall and muscular and invincible-looking as ever. Leonid was perhaps eleven or twelve. The two of them had just arrived at Tsarkoe Selo from Leonid’s village, and Leonid’s mouth was agape with wonder at his first glimpses of palaces and Fabergé eggs and luxury. Really, at that point he would have been awed by anything beyond ramshackle wooden huts, but Tsarkoe Selo was the pinnacle of the glories of three hundred years of Romanov rule. The soaring ceilings, the gleaming parquet dance floors, the meticulously tended gardens . . . No wonder Leonid’s eyes seemed perpetually on the verge of popping out of his head.
    Young Leonid and his uncle Ivan stepped into a drawing room—though of