Isaak nods in understanding. I see that he is not surprised at all.
For the very first time in my children's lives, I have no way of knowing how they are faring, whether or not their needs are being met, whether or not they are being kindly treated. It is torture such as I have never known.
Spring gradually becomes summer. The day of July 16, 1918 passes as an entirely ordinary and uneventful day until the late evening, which brings a tremendous surprise.
In the distance, I see several guards approaching with a teenage boy and two younger children, a boy and a girl. As they come nearer, I see that one of the guards is Isaak, the teenage boy is Leonid Sednev, the kitchen boy retained by the Romanovs, and the two younger children, praise be to God, are my Alisa and Kolya!
They are both a bit taller and a good deal thinner than when I last saw them, but other than that, they appear to be perfectly fine.
"Lizonka!" they shout, running to meet me. I spend several minutes doing nothing but showering them with kisses and telling them how much I love them. Then I turn to Isaak with tears of gratitude in my eyes.
"I don't know how to thank you," I tell him.
"The other guards did not want me to do it," he replies. "I told them that the children are illegitimate, that they would therefore have no claim to the Russian throne should the Whites defeat us and attempt to restore the monarchy. It was only then that they allowed me to bring them along with Leonid."
I feel an ice cold sensation at the base of my spine. "What is to happen to the others, then?" I ask Isaak.
He does not answer me. "I must go," he says shortly. I watch his retreating back as he and the other guards leave and cross myself. Then I return my attention to Alisa and Kolya.
"How have you been treated?" I ask them.
"Oh, Lizonka, they treated us horribly!" Alisa exclaims. "They painted the windows so that we couldn't see outside. Anastasia opened one of the windows and they shot at her. We were all crowded together on the second floor, and they gave us nothing to eat but soup and black bread with no butter. There were guards all over the place, and they were all horrible and nasty, except for Isaak. He gave us little bits of food when no one else was watching and made sure that none of the other guards hit us."
"When will we see Mama and Papa and the others again?" Kolya asks me.
"Soon," I lie.
Isaak returns unexpectedly in the wee hours of the following morning. He is shaking and, to my utter shock, I see that there are tears in his eyes.
"Yurovsky let me go," he tells me. "I could not do what he asked me to do. The Tsar, yes. The girls, no."
"What are you talking about?" I ask him. Deep inside, I already know, of course.
"I look at Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, and...I see you, Lizonka. I see you." He shakes his head. "No, I could not do it."
We hear the news a few days later. Kind Nicholas with the sad blue eyes is dead. His family is safe, smuggled into hiding somewhere in Poland. At least, that is what the Bolsheviks want us to believe. I look at Isaak and know that it is not true, but I don't dare say anything.
And so a new era begins for me, for Isaak, for my children, for my torn, bleeding country. Alisa and Kolya will be given new names, of course; otherwise, they would be targets for assassins. Alisa will now be Maria; it is Comrade Lenin's mother's name. Kolya is to be Vladimir, or Vova for short. They will have Isaak's surname, which is Borovsky.
And so we shall be a family, drifting toward an uncertain future, leaving ghosts of the past behind.
A/N: Many thanks to everyone who read and reviewed this story. Please don't be mad at me for killing off the canon characters and letting the OC's live. I've written several other stories in which some or all of the real Romanovs do survive, but I wanted this one to be as true to actual history as possible, with the exception, of course, of the surrogate mother and her children.