Page 27 of An Heir to Blood and Power

She fished it out of her bag-shaped white purse and handed it to me. “How come?”

I noted a few social media icons on her screen and openedthe one I used the most. “I don’t do a lot of social media, but surely we should be in contact on those as well.”

Lexi craned her neck. “We haven’t been any farther apart than a bathroom door since we met.”

In her social media account, a single-digit number indicated the minuscule total of her friends and followers.

Those bastards had cut her off.

Those utter bastards.

I searched and found my private account on the app, a gibberish string of letters and numbers, and sent myself a follow request from her phone.

My phone vibrated, and I accepted her account’s request and sent one back, which I tapped to finish the circuit. Then I sent a follow-request to Clemmy’s secret personal account before handing the phone back. “There, now you have me.”

Her wince was at least a little amused. “Okay. Thanks. Assuming you don’t regret ever meeting me after tonight.”

“If everything goes spectacularly wrong, I’ll set you up in a New York hotel for a year, give you a ridiculous allowance to spend, and tell everyone I locked you in the attic of my manor house on the English moors.”

Now she was chuckling.

Maybe I could make her happy.

“That’s my girl. We’ll just spend a couple of hours with my abominable friends in a Las Vegas nightclub, and then we’ll stumble back to our hotel suite at the Sanctuary. I’ll make sure everything goes off perfectly.”

Looking back, the Omnia was where our story began to fall apart.

PART TWO

a tsar, a prince, a duke, and a fool

CHAPTER 8

the omnia

LEXI

The engagement ring Jimmy had given me four years before had been flat, sitting nearly flush with my ring finger knuckle. The flimsy rose gold band had puffed up into a heart-shaped setting with three tiny diamond chips poked into it.

When my high school drama club friends had seen it, they’d plastered grimace-like smiles on their faces, nodding too enthusiastically that it wasgreat,that it wasa totally appropriate engagement ringfrom someone whose dad was paying for their whole college education and giving him fifty grand a year spending money and would be employed by him afterward and immediately make six figures upon graduating.

They’d drifted away after high school anyway.

Though they hadn’t blocked me on my socials.

But the diamond rings Nicolai had given me were somewhere on the very far end of the wedding-set spectrum.

If a celebrity had flashed rings like these on their social media, my friends would have gushed over their extravagance, their Instagram-ability, their opulence.

I would’ve privately thought the rings were ostentatious or flaunting their wealth.

The sour-grapes part of my head would’ve declared that I would never want to own such a gaudy set of rings because that money would be better spent on a down payment for a house or saving it for car repairs.

The thought occurred to me that Nicolai Petrovich Romanov probably didn’t need to save his money for house payments or car repairs. He could probably cover those just fine.

Still, even with Nicolai, if I’d had any say in the matter, I wouldn’t have let him spend so much money on me.

After all, Nicolai didn’t even know me. It wasn’t like this extravagant diamond jewelry was an expression of what he felt for me.