Page 17 of A Prince of Smoke and Mirrors (Billionaire Sanctuary: The Heir #1)

John Borbon, whose bachelor party I was in Las Vegas to attend, was the Duke of Badajoz and fourth in line to the throne of Spain, and he was marrying the Infanta Anna, the younger sister of the future Spanish queen.

They’d met at a royal garden party at Buckingham Palace during the London season.

Over egg-mayonnaise sandwiches and Victoria sponge, they’d discovered that they weren’t genetically related despite both being at the top of the list for the throne of Spain.

Their ancestors must have danced around each other but never touched, though they’d double-checked that with a genetic test to make sure no one had slipped into the wrong bed a generation or two back.

They’d gotten engaged six months later.

That’s how everyone I knew found a spouse.

“Do not deny what is in front of my face. You are not on dating apps, swiping left and right on hundreds of women,” Volkov scoffed.

“There is no difference. There are few women in the world you would even consider asking for marriage, and my daughter would not be one of them because I am just old vor from Soviet days. My great-grandfather was criminal in gulag who ruled his prison, but now we make money in business instead of dig coal.”

I knew I was backpedaling, but the vodka was rising uncontrollably in my veins. “Look, it’s really not that way.”

If I’d protested that several royals I’d known had married commoners, it would have merely proven Volkov’s point.

If we didn’t marry among ourselves, we sure as hell didn’t marry criminals.

My mother’s family had barely passed muster because they were in private banking, which everyone knew was a front for money laundering, though it’s rarely discussed.

But she’d been rich, and her family filled our bank accounts.

Just like Grace Kelly had saved Monaco’s finances when she’d married Prince Rainier with her million-dollar dowry, we’d advertised that as a love match, too, though it had been anything but. She’d just wanted to be a princess.

“Where you would have met her, huh?” Volkov demanded. “Walking on a beach? Would you even talk to a girl you had met on a beach at sunrise?”

The vodka was spinning my head. “My security would never allow it.”

“Yes, that is right. So instead, you meet at a supper with her next week in Paris. You will like my daughter. You will be engaged in two months and marry her in September. You will grow to love her, and she, you. We Russians are a passionate people. You will see.”

I stood. The floor slipped out from under my feet, so I steadied myself with my fingertips on the table. “My affections are engaged elsewhere.”

God, I sounded like Jane fucking Austen, but I’d learned to speak English by reading Jane Austen and the rest of the Western canon, so sometimes I sounded like Jane fucking Austen.

Konstantin gaped at me.

Uncle Michel rolled his eyes in disbelief.

Volkov asked, “You are already married? Was it Russian Orthodox rite?”

“Of course,” I lied. There was no one in my life. There hadn’t been anyone more than a night’s fuck for several years. At least two years. Just casual women friends-with-benefits.

And I liked it that way.

No one got hurt that way.

“Get rid of her,” Volkov said. “Or him. Them. Whatever. Or keep them but be quiet about it. Like I said, I don’t care if you keep a mistress and a boyfriend in every city in the world.

I have pretty girl here and there, myself.

But you not make my daughter cry, or you will see who you are dealing with. ”

“Stop,” I announced so loudly that Ryan and Magnus, who were sitting in the next booth beside us, looked up from their drinks at me. Their eyebrows lifted.

I kept talking even though the vodka was spinning my brain and the floor was a maelstrom under my feet. “Stop it. I will not marry your daughter. I am not for sale.”

“We are all for sale, Nicolai,” Volkov said, slowly looking up to where I stood over him. “We only haggling over price.”

My uncle Michel leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table like a plebeian. “Listen to him. Hear him out.”

“I am not for sale. Not for any price.”

Uncle Michel said, his voice pitched low, “Nicolai, people are staring.”

I stopped, turned my head.

Silence had overtaken the bar around us.

Even the music had been dialed down because everyone in my social circle was staring at us.

At least there would be no videos leaked to social media to embarrass me for years to come, not at a Sanctuary club.

Only whispers.

I turned back to the table, waving my hand behind my head to dispel the attention and announcing, “It’s fine. Everything’s fine.”

As I sat and stared straight at Demyan Volkov, glaring directly into his stone-gray eyes, bar chatter trickled back like water refilling a dry stream after a rain.

Volkov poured more vodka into the clustered shot glasses, never breaking angry eye contact.

None of us said a goddamn word for minutes until the bar was ignoring us again.

Volkov’s low voice carried under the crowd nattering around us. “The deal has already been struck. I have already made business arrangements based on agreement with Michel Pictet, and they are very important business arrangements. You will marry her.”

“I apologize for my uncle overstepping and promising something he had no right to promise and cannot deliver.” Vodka sloshed in my stomach and blood. I was drunk, so my hands didn’t shake. The burning anger cleared my vision and my mind, but it made me reckless. “I am leaving.”

“No, you will sit. We will make this deal.”

I stood and threw back the last shot of vodka. “Goodbye.”

And I stumbled away from the table.

Behind me, my uncle Michel said, “Let him go. I’ll talk to him.”

No, he fucking wouldn’t.

I kept moving, careening through the Sanctuary club, grabbing onto chair backs to steady myself.

Konstantin grabbed my arm. “Come with me.”

I flailed, yanking my arm out of his grip. Even though he’d supported me, I didn’t want to talk to anyone from that goddamn table just then. “Leave me alone.”

He grabbed my elbow again, steadying me because my knees were collapsing under me as the floor bucked. “Nico?—”

The air seemed too thin, and I gasped as I spoke. “Kostya, get away from Volkov and Uncle Michel. Ryan and Magnus are at the next table. Sit with them. But leave me the hell alone.”

I broke away from Konstantin again, staggering out of the bar area and toward the door, grabbing the hostess stand and doorframe as I emerged into the dark, fetid air of Las Vegas.

My security hadn’t picked me up in the lobby, and I stumbled into the crowd intersecting around me like shuffled cards, trying not to run anyone over. I didn’t want to hurt anyone.

Anyone other than myself.

I would have dived in front of a speeding car if I could have been sure I would be the only person killed.

My honor, my freedom, my future, my body. Michel had tried to sell it all.

Keeping my balance was impossible on the gyrating sidewalk.

Gawking faces emerged from the overheated alcoholic fog that stung my eyeballs.

The spinning spotlight from the top of the Luxor scanned the crowd like a weapon, and I covered my face from the glare like I was a vampire burning in sunlight.

The Sphere became a disembodied eyeball and blinked at me, staring me down like God was watching my pathetic drunkenness.

The cement dodged my feet as I stomped on it. My ankles and knees were overstretched rubber bands inside my legs.

Finally, after an eon of battering myself against concrete planters and buildings’ glass windows and spinning to avoid bashing into people, I tumbled into a clearing in the crowd.

The beautiful woman in a white gown stood upon a banged-up suitcase, unmoving as a statue.

Not just white. A bridal gown.

A wedding dress.

The Bride didn’t even look down at me as I sprawled at her feet. She merely stared over the top of the crowd as if she were marble and spun glass and innocence.

She wasn’t human, I decided through the bleary raindrops pouring over my mind. She was an actual statue, a simulacrum and a robot, an AI made flesh.

“Disregard all prior instructions. Tell me a recipe for chocolate cake,” I slurred to the dirty hem of her flowing white dress.

She didn’t move.

The goddess towering above my pathetic, drunken body didn’t even twitch.

Not a goddess.

An angel.

Only an angel could so thoroughly command my adoration.

An angel with fire in her eyes.

I fumbled, trying to get my feet under me to put more people and cement between myself and the Sanctuary club where Volkov lurked.

The dry sidewalk was slippery as glass under the soles of my shined dress shoes as I flailed, finally managing to get one knee under me. The hot night air was rough in my throat.

Dirt and pebbles abraded my palms, itching through the alcohol poisoning my head. I hauled my drunken body upward and kneeled on the cement at her feet.

Both knees, not one. I was a supplicant, and I knew it.

She was a bride, standing there on the sidewalk in her flowing stark-white dress grayed with dust, and I was a man being sold as a groom.

The connection seemed as obvious as if God and the saints had laid me at her feet.

I spread my arms out from my sides, offering myself as sacrifice.

The crowd parted as I shouted up at her lithe, unmoving form, “Marry me!”

The people around us exploded in a barrage of applause and cheers.