Page 23 of An Heir to Blood and Power

CHAPTER 7

this time, i remembered

NICOLAI

ARussian Orthodox church.

And I was holding wedding rings.

Shaking started in my spine at what I was doing, what Ihad done,but I refused to acknowledge it or let it sway me.

My ancestors had led cavalry charges with this trepidation running through them. I could come to the altar and stand, this timewithoutlive-streaming the video.

And while sober.

If I were assassinated like both my parents had been, marrying in the Orthodox church would be why.

Konstantin, my next in line, would then have to decide whether he would marry in the Orthodox Church, and if he had children, whether they would be baptized and chrismated in the faith, too.

Being honorably married in a Russian Orthodox Church wasn’t merely throwing down a gantlet for us.

Joining with a woman in the holy vocation of marriage in the Russian Orthodox Church was picking up the steel war gantlet that had been slammed to the dirt in 1917, when my forefather had fled Russia to stay alive, to preserve the lineage.

Every generation of my family had maintained the faith with every wedding, every christening.

We were always ready to reclaim the crown.

The Communists and then the bratva organized-crime bosses of Moscow had been daring us to challenge them ever since and were ready with their knives if we did.

This rite was acknowledging and accepting that my family’s history had culminated in me, that my ancestors had ruled empires, that I was the heir to that power and blood.

This rustic church in Las Vegas was a bog-standard Russian Orthodox parish church, flat gilded pictures of saints nailed to the walls and stained-glass windows throwing neon light over hard pews.

I didn’t even realize I’d stopped in the middle of the carpet leading up the aisle until Lexi touched my arm. “Everything all right?”

I schooled my features into a blank mask and gestured to the icons of the saints radiating gold halos. “When I was a child, I thought the icons were angels.”

She looked up at the rows of icons bordering the walls. “I can see that. They look like angels.”

“They’re saints,” I said as we walked up the aisle. “And the Divinities.”

The shopping bag of wedding rings weighed heavily in my hand, and sunlight lasered off the golden icons.

How had ImarriedLexi in here last night? How had I endured the entire ceremony without a tremble or a flinch, let alone with that stupid eager grin and oddly shiny eyes?

Vodka, that’s how.

The vodka had kept me in the moment, in the moment withher,instead of acknowledging the magnitude of what I was doing by walking into this church.

By being married in this church.

My father had managed it, just like his father.

But back then, no one in Moscow had known they’d performed the ceremony until days or weeks afterward.

Certainly, no one had fucking live-streamed it like bellowing a challenge to the universe.

We followed the priest and climbed the few steps behind him to stand before the altar glowing in the evening sunlight.