Page 12 of A Prince of Smoke and Mirrors (Billionaire Sanctuary: The Heir #1)

billionaire sanctuary ii

NICOLAI ROMANOV

My uncle Michel and his business acquaintances were no doubt waiting at Billionaire Sanctuary to slither over to me and hoping some royal cachet would rub off on them.

Therefore, I took advantage of the opportunity and stayed at the Waldorf Astoria to sober up John with food, water, television, and yet more food until other friends of ours arrived at his suite around seven on that bright summer evening.

While John and I were eating middling-quality room service steaks in the dining room, the hallway door banged open in the other room.

I tensed, ready to throw the long, wooden dining table sideways to act as a barricade and drag John to the floor behind it, but the male voices shouting in the other room were all too familiar.

Magnus and Ryan barged into the hotel room, striding toward the dining room where John and I were eating.

“Nico, you slacker, nice of you to finally show up.” Magnus examined John’s plate and filched a steak fry, stuffing the wedge into his mouth and giving it one hard chew before swallowing. “We thought we were going to have to send out a search party.”

I rose to greet them and made a show of wiping my hands on my napkin, even though I would never have smears of food on my fingers. “Magnus, Ryan, good to see you both.”

Ryan glanced at my plate. “You’re not eating at the Sanctuary? Something wrong with the food there?”

“Not at all. The food there is excellent. John and I just ordered here tonight. Don’t worry, Ryan. It’s fine.”

Ryan von Prussian had recently acquired Billionaire Sanctuary, and it was his first turnaround job.

Magnus shook my hand, his palm firm and dry, and then leaned over my plate, noting the steak and salad. “Not carbo-loading before the big bash? You’re not the DD, my man. We have staff to do that for us.”

Magnus and Ryan had been in the same class at school as John and I were, though they both seemed younger in maturity somehow, perhaps from having older brothers who took on the family responsibilities.

I sat down to finish my supper. “I probably shouldn’t get hammered tonight.

That uncle of mine insisted on coming to Las Vegas, which means he and his cronies will be writhing around my ankles the entire time I’m there.

I don’t want to be coerced into signing away my life due to inebriation or hangover. ”

“Oh, what could he really do, anyway?” Ryan asked the ceiling. “And as for hangovers, that’s why every hotel here has IV hydration and oxygen bars in the lobby. Takes the edge right off. Even the Sanctuary has them.”

Their rationales didn’t reassure me at all. My uncle was far more manipulative than these overgrown schoolboys gave him credit for.

Ryan snagged a roll from the breadbasket and ripped it in half before chewing a hunk off the end. He’d always been subtly violent, a common trait among the wealthy students at our boarding school. He swallowed like he was forcing down something he’d choked on. “Is Konstantin here yet?”

I slipped my phone out of my pocket for a second and checked my texts. “He boarded his plane in Boston this morning. He says he’ll meet us at Billionaire Sanctuary.”

Ryan raised an eyebrow. “You’re leaving him lying around where Michel can swoop in?”

I sawed a large bite off the end of the steak. “Good point. We’d better arrive at the Sanctuary before Kostya does.”

An hour later, we split up for the transfer.

Magnus, John, and Ryan were driven down the Las Vegas Strip in a limo with their scant security because no one in particular was trying to kill them.

My operators had combined forces with Harry and Meg’s to form a medium-sized mercenary force to escort us to the private club.

Eavesdropping on the former special forces soldiers was always interesting.

Evidently, Harry and Meg were more high-profile than I was, but I was considered a higher-risk target.

That morning, they’d received information that Russian intelligence operatives had been conducting surveillance on my Paris apartment and office the previous week.

I hadn’t been told.

From John’s suite, the security professionals ushered me through an unobtrusive rear exit to a private section of the parking garage and into the front passenger-side seat of a boxy SUV. Harry and Meg sat in the rear seat, which told me who had the larger security operation.

Of course, they did. There were more wackadoodles, as Meghan called them, in the world than FSB assassins. It was like her to use a cutesy, disarming term to describe rabid racists, anti-monarchists, and lone jackals.

My security detail just called them targets.

As the black SUV rolled down the Strip, phalanxes of lights rose up the heavily tinted windshield, a view I wasn’t often treated to when riding in the rear seat.

The view of the long hood of the SUV and wide-open nighttime street ahead felt almost like I was riding in a convertible, which I’d never done in my life, not even at school.

While the British royals had an agreement with the paparazzi to leave their children alone, my family had never made that bargain with the assassins of the old Soviet Union or Putin’s Russian Federation.

Even as a child, even as a rebellious teenager, my security cocoon had been snapped tight.

Though I was trying to watch the lights and allow the experience of riding in the front seat to wash over me, my own thinking closed in.

Kostya should have arrived at Billionaire Sanctuary already, but he hadn’t texted yet. He’d had a direct transport from the airport.

If I texted him, he would say that I was fussing over him like a mother hen. He’d been only seven when our father had died, and five for our mother.

I wasn’t Kostya’s parent. I knew I wasn’t his parent. I hadn’t been a parent to him because I’d been only fourteen myself when we’d been orphaned, but I was probably the only person in the world who worried about him.

If anything had happened to me, Konstantin would become very important for the wrong reasons.

Our uncle Michel, our second cousin Boris, and sundry other relatives would suddenly develop an interest in the college student who would be slated to inherit the vast amounts of money we’d married over the past several generations.

Not to mention certain inherited titles.

Ahead of our SUV, the point security vehicle nudged along the traffic and cleared a spot at the curb.

As always, I didn’t leap out of the car but waited for instructions.

Our combined security forces swarmed from the vehicles around us, forming a human cordon between the car and the front door of the black-glassed building rising like an obsidian obelisk from between the lower concrete structures around it.

The driver stole a quick glance at me. “Harry and Meghan go in first.”

From behind my seat, Harry laughed. “Sure. I’m used to being cannon fodder.”

Meghan tried to be helpful. “But shouldn’t Nicolai get inside the building first, where it’s safer, before we attract attention? He’s the one with professionals after him.”

The driver shrugged. “That’s how the coordinator wants to do it.”

All of us principals stopped arguing. We were not the experts here, and we knew it. Doing what we were told kept everybody alive.

A personal security consultant had once told me that principals who thought they knew better than their bodyguards were nicknamed “victims.”

Harry held Meghan’s fingers as she alighted from the car onto the sidewalk like Prince Charming steadying Cinderella.

All of us were so courtly in public, coldly retracing dance steps that had kept our ancestors alive when kings had become paranoid and murderous, even if those kings were our fathers.

Whereas common people soothed themselves in troubled times by planting a garden as their ancestors had, we felt the need to display exquisite manners and extraordinary wealth like twitching an iridescent peacock tail.

Such a costly display felt like proof we were too loyal and important to persecute.

Outside the car where Harry and Meghan crossed the sidewalk, camera flashes turned the night to noon.

Unease crawled into my shoes. “Everybody’s looking at them.”

The driver’s nod was tight, like his neck was stiff.

“They’re relatively safe. This bachelor party trip was impromptu.

Security was so tight on the front end that we could’ve let them stroll through the lobby of a major casino, which was their first choice.

The chance that one of their amateur haters managed to get it all together and figure out that they were staying at this nondescript club is approximately nil. So, they can cross the sidewalk.”

“They take a lot of chances,” I mused.

He nodded again. “They have PR needs. You would be an easier principal, were it not for the political situation.”

Yes, my living body was a political situation. “What’s my mark?”

The driver touched his ear where the coordinator running the show was giving instructions. “In just a few seconds. Get ready. Three, two, one. Go.”

The vehicle’s door opened, metal scraping metal, and I stepped out of the SUV. Looking around for anyone aiming a weapon or even watching me too closely, like they were examining my face to identify a target, was a habit I shouldn’t break.

Bodyguards had formed human chains leading to the door of the Sanctuary club.

My job was merely to saunter behind Meghan and Harry to the door that was already opening to admit them.

Nevertheless, I watched for them as much as they were surely watching for me.

Desert air scalded my sinuses with my first breath, such an assault when compared to the mild air of Europe.

As I moved, my practiced smile was pleasant but not approachable.

The swarm outside the bodyguard cordon was a usual American scrum, mostly brunette white people, a few blondes though not as many as my eyes were used to after spending school holidays in Sweden my whole life, and a respectable number of brown and Black people, especially as Las Vegas was in the southwestern part of the US.

I kept my head up, watching over the heads of the crowd. At six feet four, my eyes were above the tops of most crowds. My height made spotting assassins and being targeted by assassins easier.

A streetlight on the corner showered glare over the shops and people strolling on the sidewalk. More light glowed from the shop windows.

About ten feet away from me, a woman stood head, shoulders, and perky, pushed-up, voluminous bustline above the crowd.

Nice tits.

I did not just think that. Dear God.

But soft-looking feminine flesh rounded above the dipping neckline of her dress like two scoops of something delectable. Light tan but not pasty skin showed on the crests where her white theatrical paint had worn away.

I was a bog-standard cis-het male.

I had eyes.

I looked.

I was still looking.

Still—

Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all the saints and divinities, I yanked my gaze up to her eyes.

The woman was staring right back at me.

My gaze locked on her dark, black-lined eyes over the bobbling heads of the crowd.

Fathomless, dark, lovely eyes that stared right back into mine.

A level, straightforward gaze.

An honest scrutiny of my interest and intentions and an acknowledgement of just how much I had been ogling her.

For an instant, I thought the woman must be well over six feet tall, but her proportions would have been off if that were true.

She must have been standing on something.

A box. A stool, perhaps.

A stage.

She was painted stark white. Her eyes like the darkest of nights were lined in black, and her lips were filled with scarlet.

Not a clown, but a performer, definitely.

Under her veil that tumbled over the crowd, blown by the desert zephyr, the woman was a pretty blonde with hair like honey-streaked ash wood, a contrast to her dark eyes and brows.

The daisies in her bouquet drooped over her hands in the desert heat.

Assuming she was just another bride in the city of quickie marriages would have been easy, but the intensity of her gaze captured my attention.

Those dark eyes, those eyes I could fall into, held anger.

The anger filling her eyes was what I couldn’t look away from. The absolute passion, her targeted rage, would have been terrifying if she’d been holding a gun instead of wilting wildflowers.

That woman was absolute fire. I could burn myself on her.

I should have looked away.

My job was to scan the crowd for assassins, to be an additional pair of eyes in my security detail, so that I would react in accordance with the plan if my bodyguards took me to the ground under a gunshot or hustled me indoors to escape a thrown bomb.

Over the crowd, the bride did not look away.

Our gaze connected for three astonishing seconds during my brisk walk across a wide cement border, and I started to turn back to her before a touch on my shoulder reminded me to follow Harry and Meghan into the dark antechamber of Billionaire Sanctuary.

Deviation from the plan was risky for everyone involved, so I kept going.

But my thoughts remained on the sidewalk outside with the fiery bride.