Page 8 of A Prince of Smoke and Mirrors (Billionaire Sanctuary: The Heir #1)
the bride
LEXI BYRNE
After Jimmy jilted me, I couldn’t go back to Nebraska.
Nothing remained for me there except a bunch of construction projects with Johnson Construction LLC plastered on the OSHA-approved safety fence and my mother living a few towns over with her new husband and new kids.
And everywhere I went, people would stare at me. They’d whisper. They would believe what the Johnson family told them about me.
Scandal like that was too titillating to question and too much fun to not take part in. People would lean into it.
I couldn’t go back, and I didn’t know how to go forward.
The next day, I called construction companies to inquire about jobs, but Las Vegas was at the bottom of a real estate bust cycle. There was no business construction or even housing starts. Construction companies were laying off people, not hiring HR admins without references.
And I had no references.
I didn’t fool myself. If any of those construction companies had called Johnson Construction LLC to ask about my work history, Jimmy’s dad would sabotage the living heck out of me.
The squint-eyed glare Mason had shot at me as he’d stalked away from where I’d fallen to my knees in front of the altar was proof enough that he’d absolutely believed Jimmy and her.
Worse, if Melissa answered the phone, she would probably make something up that was so bad that they would call the police on me.
My employment options were nil. Even if I had gotten another job, they would have had me start the next week and then cut my first paycheck two weeks after I’d worked for them for half a month.
Five weeks before a new job would pay me.
My car was running out of gas, and the cell phone bill was due soon.
Not that I even needed a phone anymore. The group chats with Jimmy’s sisters had disappeared from my list as they’d kicked me out, and even their location notifications had vanished one by one as they’d shunned me.
When you need money right away, a job isn’t even an option.
Which meant it was time to fall back on other skills.
Las Vegas sported a number of theater supply stores. The showgirls and magicians roaming the Strip had to buy their greasepaint somewhere.
A tiny store called Stage and Screen was tucked a few miles away from the glittering lights.
Inside, I perused the kits and individual makeup pots.
The peculiar mineral smell of pigments in greasepaint, so much stronger than in street makeup where it’s covered up by perfume, permeated the shop, bringing back flashes of backstage dressing rooms packed with giggling teenagers readying themselves to put on a show.
I didn’t remember the last time I’d giggled like that, wiggling and helping my friends paint exaggerated stage makeup onto their faces, the creamy, whipped colors pressed onto youthful skin.
It wasn’t like I was in high school anymore, though. Expecting unrestrained joy like that in my early twenties was unreasonable.
I was an adult.
I worked in HR.
I’d saved my money, not spent it on costumes and greasepaint pots.
Sadness fluttered down and hung heavy on my shoulders.
High on the shop’s walls, raw lumber nailed to the drywall held rows upon rows of Styrofoam heads with blank faces, crowned with wigs of every hue and historical hairstyle from the fifteen-hundreds to the shaggy wild-child seventies and center-parted aughts.
The sweaty smell of scalps floated downward.
Rows upon rows of fluttering costumes in scarlet, violet, and gold hung from racks in the back of the shop, ready from any character from any time period, from Juliet to Alexander Hamilton to Macavity the Mystery Cat to Prior Walter.
Stage swords, muskets, and angel wings piled in a corner like the aftermath of war.
I inhaled deeply, drawing in the scents, breathing in the life.
Jimmy had been right about one thing. In high school, I’d wanted to be an actress. I’d been cast in all the fall comedies and spring musicals, and I’d even played the lead in both productions my senior year.
The University of Nebraska had offered me a full-ride scholarship as a theater major before Jimmy had proposed, but his mom had convinced me that show business was no place for a modest young Christian girl like me.
And so I used my overdue maxed-out credit card to buy theatrical makeup and body paint, and I held my breath until the credit card machine flashed accepted on its tiny screen.
It wasn’t Shakespeare in Central Park, but it was theatre. It was stage.
Maybe it was a part of me that I needed to recover in order to survive.
Maybe theatre would help me survive.
The next day at five o’clock in the evening, I climbed into the back seat of my car where there was a little more room to move and slathered white body paint on my arms and chest, swiping it over the back of my neck and between my shoulder blades as well as I could with a sponge meant for cleaning a kitchen sink.
My face makeup was a clown kit, but I didn’t make myself up like a clown.
White greasepaint blanked out all my features, and then I painted my lips carefully into a scarlet Cupid’s bow and outlined my eyes with black with a plastic makeup brush with limp nylon bristles.
I slithered into the yards and yards of white polyester satin and rayon lace of my wedding dress.
The peach carnations and baby’s breath in my bridal bouquet were dead in the rear window of my car, so I bought some bedraggled daisies from a convenience store to hold.
After parking my car in a cheap lot a few blocks away, I dragged my sturdy old suitcase and bundled the train of my wedding gown over my arm as I walked, slathered in white greasepaint, through the cramped crowds on the wide Las Vegas sidewalk.
No one even glanced at me.
One fashionable block away from the Strip, a street corner was bounded with luxury stores, high-end restaurants, and boutique hotels where the really wealthy people stayed, the kind of hotel that didn’t have slot machines in the lobby.
The stores and restaurants were brands I’d read about in People Magazine’s “Who Wore It Better?” column or seen on Instagram influencer accounts, but never been in the presence of in real life.
Hermes. Alexander McQueen.
Kobe and Company Steakhouse. Sushi Dominus. Movado. Louboutin.
Billionaire Sanctuary.
At the corner, I popped open a cheap magician’s top hat and dropped it on the sidewalk at my feet as I stepped up onto the suitcase, bobbling for a minute but finding my balance as the lace and polyester dress settled around me.
I struck a pose with my bouquet held high and gazed at the wilting flowers in the savagely hot sunlight, becoming a living statue of a bride, rigid, unable to move forward or back.
As still as death, but still standing.
That was my plan to get some money.
Busking, the last resort of theater folk.
People watched my marble-stiff arms and static-still face for a moment and dropped money into the hat.
Fifteen minutes of unblinking, immobile performance, a few stretches to work out the trembling kinks in my arms and legs that looked like the ballet I’d learned in high school, and then I struck another pose, rotating through positions like a ballet dancer at the barre.
Eyes raised to the heavens, eyes down demurely, arms spread wide in hope, hands clasping the dying flowers to my bosom, an arch in my back, a toe swept forward like I was walking down the aisle, I performed as a living statue in my wedding dress and became as unthinking and emotionless as stone.
In my mind, I was Lady Macbeth’s madness with blood on her hands, Hamlet mining the depths of his despair as he postulated whether he could breathe and stay alive or if he would cease to be, and King John losing his mind, screaming, Mad world! mad kings! mad composition!
What a bride was I, a beatific smile masked on my face, but madness within.
When I finally stepped down off my wobbly suitcase at midnight, foot-sore and muscle-cramped, a hundred dollars in small bills was tied into the crinolines of my skirt.
Not enough for a cheap motel, but enough to eat and put some gas in my car.
Enough to keep me going until the next night, when I would paint myself like a stone wall and perform “The Bride” all over again.
Because I didn’t know what else to do.
Every day, I just tried to survive that day and that night.
Survival was the only thing on my mind: getting enough money to eat, keeping myself safe, and maybe having enough money to sometimes sleep in a hotel room instead of in my car.
Anything can happen in Las Vegas: anything wonderful, anything crazy, or anything terrible.
If you’re not a tourist gambling at the casinos, you’re gambling with your life.
Three days later, he walked into Billionaire Sanctuary, and our eyes met just before he opened the door.
And I stopped breathing.