Page 31 of A Prince of Smoke and Mirrors (Billionaire Sanctuary: The Heir #1)

Though the motions had been unfamiliar, they’d felt solemn, momentous, a pivot in my life.

But they were not. It was all just a show.

It was all fake.

In a close-up of my face, emotions flipped across my eyes and features, expressions that I practiced in front of the mirror when I’d been getting ready to marry Jimmy, wide-eyed moments of innocence, and devotion, and love.

Somehow, maybe due to muscle memory, those expressions rotated faster than I’d ever been able to when I’d practiced them before.

Hope. Starry-eyed joy. A little trepidation.

Longing.

My heart wept for that silly ingenue on the video who looked like she believed that the hasty wedding ceremony meant anything at all. Just give me half an ounce of something disguised as love, and I was a goner.

Jeez, I was stupid sometimes.

The priest prayed over our pawn-shop wedding rings and we exchanged them, sliding them on each other’s fingers with no vows.

Then, the priest settled crowns on our heads and spoke in Russian for a while, we drank from a shared cup of wine, and the priest led us as we perambulated three times around the altar together. When the priest took the crowns off, then he prayed over us and pronounced us husband and wife.

And that was when I freaked out.

So embarrassing to freak out during a solemn religious rite, and I totally did.

Dear Lord, what I would do to go back and not freak the heck out.

The stupid girl on the phone screen asked the priest and Nico, “But what about the vows? What about the kiss?”

Nico slurred his words only a little bit considering how totally wasted he’d been. “We don’t do that in the Orthodox Church. The blessing is the sacrament.”

Panic had blossomed in my eyes. “I thought we would say vows. I always thought I would say vows when I got married.”

Nicolai had turned to the priest and said something in Russian, and the priest had shrugged and nodded.

He turned back to me. “I asked him if we could just say a few words to each other on the occasion of our marriage.”

Dear Lord, I’d been so upset, but his words had calmed me down. “Is that okay?”

“It’s allowable to speak to each other during our wedding, yes.”

So, it was with freaking out and ice-crackling fear in my heart that I’d looked up at Nicolai, who’d been gazing kindly down at me, and I inhaled to recite the scripted vows I had written to marry Jimmy Johnson, that asshole, just a few days before.

The words stuck in my throat.

I’d been so careful writing those vows to say to Jimmy, editing and restructuring and rethinking every word, every pause, every emphasis, trying to make sure that I got it right and I didn’t say or do or sound like anything that would embarrass myself or offend his family.

His family talked a lot about people behind their backs. I hadn’t wanted to give them any ammunition to use on me.

I’d been so desperately afraid that I would screw it all up, that even then at that last minute, they would reject me and throw me out of their family.

Evidently, that fear had been well-founded.

And so I couldn’t just recite those watered-down, mealy-mouthed vows to Nicolai, who was holding both my hands in his and pressing the backs of my knuckles to his heart, watching me with a faint smile and intense warmth in his bright eyes.

And Lord, that smile. That sweet, joyous smile like he was really happy.

That I made him happy.

I hadn’t even had even one drink yet that night.

I was probably exhausted from nights of half-sleeping in my car and walking the streets as if I had somewhere to go during the day when my car became too hot, so half-formed vows tumbled out of me from somewhere deeper, somewhere afraid.

“I, Alexandra Faith Byrne, take you, Nicolai Pet— Pet ? —”

“Nicolai Petrovich Romanov.”

“—Petrovich Romanov, to be my lawfully wedded husband. I’m begging you to love me because I’ve emptied myself out and I don’t know who I am anymore.

I want to be with you, to be loved and to love you, to be together and not be alone anymore.

I don’t know how you found me or why I believe it, but I do.

I do, Nicolai. I take you to be my husband. ”

Pathetic.

I’d known then that my stupid spewed vows were absolutely pathetic, so I stared down at the heat-wilted purple hydrangeas I’d been carrying since seven o’clock that night when I’d started busking outside the Billionaire Sanctuary place.

On the video, Nicolai touched my chin with his knuckle, slowly raising my face so he could look into my eyes. The guy who’d been recording the video raised the camera angle, capturing the expression on Nico’s face.

The stutter of his breath, the way his teeth caught his lower lip, and the glisten in his eyes looked more like love than anything I’d been able to practice in the mirror for my wedding to Jimmy.

The shine was far more, so much more, than I’d ever seen in Jimmy’s eyes.

How did the gentle dewiness in Nicolai’s ice-teal eyes look like he actually loved me?

Sitting there in the hotel room, watching Nico’s close-up on the tiny phone screen, one thing became horrifying obvious.

Nicolai Romanov was a better actor than I was.

I’d studied theater all four years in high school, taking acting classes plus technical theater and directing, performed in every community theatre production I could find, and somehow, this random guy was a better actor than I’d ever been.

Rude.

Nicolai whispered to me, his gaze steady and locked on, as my eyes searched his.

“I, Nicolai Petrovich Romanov, take you, Alexandra Faith Byrne, as my lawfully wedded and much beloved wife. I have been searching for you my whole life. I have been so alone until you took my hand, and I’ve never wanted anything in my life until I wanted you.

I have fallen in love with you with my whole being, my heart and my soul and everything alive in me.

I give you the world and my soul. I will conquer the world so I can lay it at your feet.

I will love you my whole life, my whole life and beyond. ”

The way his eyes glistened almost looked like real emotion, but he’d just been wasted.

Even now, sitting in the crowded hotel room and watching it, Nicolai barely blinked, and his breathing lightly lifted his bare chest like the wind had been knocked out of him.

He didn’t remember the ceremony, and if his words had ever been true, they weren’t anymore.

That spark, that tiny ember of belief, dimmed and floated, rising out of my reach.

On the phone screen, Nicolai had been peering into my eyes, and he turned his chin but didn’t look away from me as he said something in Russian to the priest.

The priest grumbled in English, “You may kiss the bride.”

I remembered Nicolai’s fingertips brushing my jaw.

In the video, my shoulders lowered as my head tilted back and I closed my eyes. He kissed me softly at first, a brush with his lips over mine and a retreat.

In the close-up, I could see that Nico had backed up an inch and looked into my fluttering eyes, checking in.

He must’ve liked what he saw because he swooped in for more, a kiss that looked like he loved me and he’d kissed me a thousand times before, his thumb tracing my jawline.

His hand where he had been touching my chin opened, his fingers cradling my jaw and then slipping back into my hair at the nape of my neck where I’d tied my bleached-blond hair into an updo for my street performance.

I could still feel how he’d kissed me.

When he broke it off, and he had broken it off because I sure as heck hadn’t, my lips were still parted as he straightened. I’d been left dazed, my breath hitching in my lungs, my ankles shaking in my high heels.

“Hello, Mrs. Romanov,” he’d murmured to me.

Last night, that kiss had convinced me. He’d been gentle and sweet, like he’d been repeating those vows a thousand times with his lips on mine.

No wonder I’d been practically stumbling afterwards, drunk by association.

I’d had the moment at my wedding I’d dreamed of, a real profession of love that might last a lifetime, but it had been from a guy I’d known for less than a few hours.

And it had been completely fake, and that hurt.

When Jimmy had left me at the altar with her on his arm, nothing had ever mattered again. When we’d been dating all those years, I’d changed everything about myself for him, been whatever he and his family had wanted me to be, and he’d still left me.

He’d left me easily and without even looking back as he’d marched out of the church with that other woman, the one he’d been living with for years, the one he had a dog with.

Jimmy had promised me that he loved me and that we’d be together forever.

What was a momentary dazed look in a man’s eyes, if years of promises meant nothing?

That kiss had meant nothing.

Because nothing mattered.

A guy I’d literally scraped up off the sidewalk hours before had said everything I needed, and the cold realization of how much I was starving for those words poured cement into any little cracks of dreaminess that might have survived Jimmy’s betrayal.

If Nico could say that, if he could look at me like that and whisper what my heart had been dying to hear, then nothing was real. Nothing mattered at all.

Nicolai glanced up from our wedding video on his phone at me, and one of his eyebrows twitched lower, a micro-expression that bled through the acting.

Yeah, what he’d said during his vows disturbed him, too.

He hadn’t meant it, because no one could have meant that after knowing anyone, let alone me, for only a few hours.

Ueli looked up from the phone, staring at Nico. “You really married her.”

Nico looked back, his face stonily blank. “It was a bit spur of the moment.”

Ueli shook his head. “All right, I guess we’re bringing her into the security bubble. I’m going to need some background information from her.”

“No, you don’t. She’s in the bubble. Get her a watch with a panic button. You don’t need anything else.”

He shrugged again, his hands rising off his legs in exasperation. “Fine. We’re going to need to train her how we move through situations, especially in crowds. And for the love of God, don’t turn off your location services again. We were frantic last night when you were suddenly gone.”

“Sorry to worry you.”

He didn’t sound worried. Indeed, Nico’s blasé was epic.

Ueli was frowning at him again. “In any case, we need to get you back to Billionaire Sanctuary or at least onto a private floor if you want to stay here at Caesars.”

Nico glanced up, and I followed his line of sight to a brown amoeba-blob stain in the corner of the ceiling, like the whole gaudy shtick of Caesars Palace was covered in rot. He wrinkled his nose. “The Sanctuary, I think.”

“Then if you could get dressed, perhaps.”

Conveniently, knocking sounded on the door again. “Mr. Romanov! Laundry service!”

“Now I can,” Nico said.

Ueli rolled his eyes, the white part barely different than his pale irises. “I’ll coordinate the transport.”

Someone else answered the door and then carried a plastic-wrapped suit on a hanger to the bathroom.

“Nico,” I whispered and ducked my head when Ueli and two other guys swiveled their heads at me. “Nico?—”

He stood, adjusting the towel around his hips to keep himself decent. “Not here. Come with me.”