Page 24 of A Prince of Smoke and Mirrors (Billionaire Sanctuary: The Heir #1)

the video

NICOLAI ROMANOV

Oh, fuck me. There was a video.

If there was a video, a video could be leaked.

If I could keep the video quiet, if I could slap NDAs on the priest and anyone else who might have a copy to avoid it being released and circulating out in the world, there was a chance of handling this problem discreetly.

Because the alternative was too dangerous to consider.

“Yeah. It’s on your phone,” Lexi said. “You insisted that we take video of the wedding and livestream it so all your friends could see it, too.”

The pounding was returning to my head like ball-peen hammers slamming over every square inch of my skull with each pulse of my heart. “We livestreamed the wedding.”

“Every minute of it.”

Everyone must know.

If the ceremony had been streamed on my social media, everyone knew that I had married a woman in a Russian Orthodox rite.

The ramifications swarmed me.

It didn’t matter whether or not it was legal.

If I’d wanted to marry someone last night for shits and giggles, I should have gotten married in any other tradition than Russian Orthodox.

Lexi had crawled back over to the close side of the bed and was staring at me over the edge, blond waves of her hair framing her elfin face. “You don’t seem too happy about this.”

“I was very drunk last night. I’m mortified this was my idea.”

“Like I said, it isn’t legally binding. We can just rip up that marriage license over there to shreds, and it’ll be like it never happened.

Or we can go back to the marriage bureau, and they’ll officially cancel the license.

It’s the signing, notarizing, and depositing the license that makes it legal, not some priest saying stuff over us. I mean, heck. None of it matters.”

“It’s not just that. My extended family and some other people who do matter are very devout. As far as they’re concerned, we’re quite married. Indeed, in the eyes of the Russian Orthodox church, we are very married. We are married for life.”

“Yeah, but is that what you think?”

I held my head in my fists. “Yes.”

Her eyelids lifted, exposing white sclera all the way around her brown irises. “Oh.”

“Could you take me back through the evening in more detail?” I cradled the side of my aching head in my palm. “I seem to be missing parts of it.”

“Oh jeez, Nico. You were blackout drunk last night?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“You didn’t look it. I mean, you looked schnockered, but not blackout-drunk.”

“Concealing drunkenness is practically a graduation requirement at the boarding school I attended.”

“Wow. I’m really glad I didn’t let you sign that license, and I’m even more sorry I let the priest do all that stuff. I thought it was no biggie.”

“Indeed. Just—start anywhere.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Okay, so we’re in Las Vegas, Nevada, in the United States.”

“Yes, I remember that part.”

“You stumbled out of that weird place called Billionaire Sanctuary that the doorman wouldn’t let me into.”

Snatches of vodka-soaked conversation from Demyan Volkov et al surfaced in my memory. His daughter. My uncle. “It’s a private club.”

“And I was outside on the street doing my performance art, busking.”

Here, the fuzzy memories began to fragment, but the epiphany that God had sent me an alternate bride floated in my head. “You were wearing a wedding dress, a big white wedding dress.”

“Yeah, and you saw the dress, I guess, and proposed. The first thing you said to me was to ask me to marry you. Actually, you told me to marry you, but we’ll call it asking for now.”

I remembered that part, too. The desperation for a bride, any bride except the one that my uncle and Volkov had selected for me, rose again. “Oh, God. I really did that.”

“And you insisted on getting married right away. I tried to get you to talk with your friends about it, but you insisted that we go buy a marriage license right then. And you said it had to be a Russian Orthodox priest.”

Shame, regret, and absolute humiliation warred in my head. “Of course, I did. You wouldn’t have known to find a Russian Orthodox priest.”

“And then you insisted on the baptism and olive oil ritual—what’d you call it again?”

“Chrismation.”

“Sorry, man. New vocabulary word for me. Yeah, and then the Russian Orthodox priest married us. And then we said our vows.”

Hope sparked. “There is no exchange of vows in a Russian Orthodox ceremony.”

“Yeah, we added them at the end because I wanted vows. The priest said it was okay.”

Hope died.

I’ve never been an idiot.

I have tried so hard all my life not to be an idiot.

Why had I been such an idiot? “Oh, God.”

“But I wouldn’t let you sign the license.”

I peeked up at her from where I sat on the floor with my face in my hands. “At least, there’s that.”

She scowled at me, her cute little face crunching up like an angry hamster.

“I would not take advantage of someone who was obviously so drunk. Maybe other people would. Seriously, there were other people standing out there while you were proposing who would’ve been completely fine with taking advantage of you, which is why I dragged your drunk butt out of there. But I would never.”

“And then we came back here?” I looked around, aware that this narrow room with nothing but a bed and a tiny breakfast table was not my suite at the Sanctuary club. “Where the hell are we?”

“You wouldn’t or couldn’t tell me where your hotel room was, so I rented us the cheapest room they had at Caesars Palace.

I used a little of that money you put in my hat while I was busking, which I gave back to you.

I hope that was all right. We needed somewhere to crash.

” Her voice lowered to an embarrassed mutter.

“I didn’t think you’d want to sleep in my car. ”

I didn’t like Caesars at all. Just the name gave me revulsion-shivers.

I dropped my hands. “And how did we end up at Caesars Palace?”

“I drove down the Strip while I was heading for the cheaper hotels out in the suburbs. The lights were flashing. You liked the pretty lights. Look, let’s just go to the video. Just stay there. I’ll get your phone.”

My phone was over by the ice bucket and champagne.

Lexi rolled across the bed, a maneuver that would have destroyed my little remaining equilibrium, and then rolled back to drop my phone into my outstretched hands. “Here ya go.”

I had over three hundred new text messages and seventy-seven missed calls.

And yeah, we’d livestreamed the ceremony.

I was so fucked.

Scanning through the texts, some of them were exhortations and begging for me to stop, to pick up your fucking phone, to leave that fucking church right now , and Jesus Fucking Christ on a cracker do not get married you fucking idiot.

Slightly gratifying to know that my friends gave enough of a shit about me to call en masse when they saw me livestreaming the stupidest moment of my life.

The others were congratulations and emojis of confetti and champagne bottles.

And several unidentified numbers.

I went to the voice mail transcriptions.

Yes, media. Dammit.

Reporters, royal bloggers, and wealth-oriented influencers. How the hell had they gotten my private number?

Everyone, absolutely everyone, knew.

Before I went to the photo roll, I checked the location services toggle, which I had indeed turned off the night before.

I was an idiot.

That had been a stupid, stupid move on my part.

Vodka was not my friend.

I flipped the location services switch to green, knowing that I would have only an hour or so before my security team showed up.

After rectifying that, I watched the videos from the previous night, scrutinizing them like the events had happened to some other poor sod, one who did appear not to be drunk off his ass much at all.

Really, high school had been quite an education. I should thank Le Rosey boarding school for my cast-iron liver and an uncanny ability to act sober while wasted.

I watched a drunk who greatly resembled me marry a beautiful woman with a sarcastic tilt to her mouth, but I saw that drunk’s earnest tone and dead-straight gaze as the priest settled gold crowns on our heads and chanted over us in Russian.

Yes, definitely in Russian.

My heart was in my throat.

My eyes had been bleary with drink, yes, but my body language had been focused on Lexi like a lens concentrating a laser.

My breath had caught in my chest as I’d clutched her fingers, holding the backs of her hands to my chest as my eyes had searched hers, needing a reflection of the yearning slamming through me.

Snatches of memory flirted with recognition, moments of the emotions that had filled my chest, tides of peace and desire that had soothed and captured me.

My neutral mask had been nowhere to be found last night.

My heart hadn’t merely been on my sleeve, but in her hands.

And I couldn’t remember it.

Had it been real? Had the pretense of emotion vaporized in the sunlight?

I couldn’t remember.

The priest recited Lexi’s full name during the ceremony as he joined us in everlasting holy matrimony.

The gray-bearded man had a strong Russian accent when he said her name, so strong that I almost, almost didn’t parse what her full name actually was.

And then I did understand.

Lexi was a nickname.

Oh, no. Surely, I’d heard wrong.

I looked up at her from where I was sitting. “What did he say your full name was?”

“Alexandra.” Her voice did not hold a hint of guile. “Alexandra Byrne.”

“Lexi is short for Alexandra?”

“Yeah. A- lex -andra. Lex-i. I came up with the nickname in high school.”

We were Nicolai and Alexandra Romanov.

I did not believe in fate. I was not superstitious.

And I needed to keep reminding myself of that because if omens did exist, if prophecy did breach time and space, this was very very bad.

The last Nicolai and Alexandra Romanov had ended the reign of the tsars in Russia.

Shivery sensations like electric spiders raced in my spine.