Page 91 of A Prince of Smoke and Mirrors

Demyan Volkov satat a desk in a hotel room farther down the Strip, drinking one last tumbler of vodka before bed in the dark morning hours. Jetlag was a fucking nightmare. His body screamed that he should be awake and moving, not trying to convince himself to go into the bedroom to start to sleep.

He liked a nice suite, a few rooms for his bougie taste, but this gold-encrusted penthouse looked like King Midas had jizzed all over the furniture and walls.

Gaudy. Very gaudy. Russians liked a display of wealth, but this high-roller suite was ostentatious even for Russian mafia taste.

Volkov wasn’t a monarchist at heart. He liked the new upward mobility possible in Russia, even for ones of good vory peasant stock, like himself.

He’d been mulling over the arrogance of Nicolai Romanov, the pissant, homelandless prince who had rejected his offer of alliance by marriage. Who was Nicolai Romanov to refusealliance with Tambovskaya Bratva? The days of the tsars were long past. It was a huge favor that Demyan would stoop to marry his daughter to a White Russian, so to speak.

A member of the fucking leisure class.

A leech on the people.

Demyan Volkov might be a rich capitalist, but a disdain for the effete nobility ran deep in his Russian genes.

Nicolai Romanov ought to be grateful for Demyan’s offer of marriage. The Romanov family needed good, strong Russian genes. Look at what happened when they married Germans and Prussian princesses for generations: hemophilia, which destroyed them. As much as Demyan understood the political forces that had led to the February Revolution, if Tsar Nicolas II had had four good, strong heirs instead of four daughters and a sickly son, the military might have rallied to them instead of joining the revolution.

Demyan understood how fragile revolutions could be.

His phone beeped with a text, which was a link.

He knew the person, so he clicked. Why the fuck not, as it delayed him lying fully awake in bed and staring at the stupid gilded ceiling in this bourgeois suite.

Nicolai fucking Romanov, in a Russian Orthodox church, drunk and marrying a stupid American girl.

Jesus fucking Christ and all the fucking saints.

This was bullshit. Absolute bullshit.

He had made Nicolai Romanov a very good offer of marriage for connections, very good offer of large investment in his businesses and his daughter so she would stop crying that she was not invited to Buckingham Palace garden parties and royal box at Ascot and Proms like other girls she had gone to English school and Oxford with, and then landless princeling went and didthis.

This was not to be tolerated. No one disrespected Demyan Volkov and Tambovskaya Bratva.

His men would be shamed. His business would be scorned.

Disrespect like this could topple a pakhan from his position.

Demyan Volkov would not lose his money and power because some weak-blooded ex-tsarevich refused him.

No one refused business dealings with Tambovskaya Bratva.

Demyan needed more information, so he picked up his phone and called his friends in the fucking leisure class, who would have seen what was going on and would tell him the real story.