Chapter 2 #2
“Then is she Russian Intelligence? Did they finally get you, threaten or blackmail you? Because I’ve heard of what they show people, the video from the SVR’s torture-murder rooms and then surveillance footage of their relatives and friends and kids.”
“No, Kostya. She’s just a person I met and fell in love with.” Nicolai’s voice was low, measured, and terrifying. “You need, to apologize, to her. Now.”
Konstantin stared at Nicolai right into his eyes, two twins enraged at each other, but the fight bled out of him. He heaved a sigh, and he leaned around Nicolai. “Lexi, I apologize for the tone of my earlier statements.”
“That’s okay!” I yelled back real fast. “No worries! I’m good!”
The rage flowing off Nicolai didn’t abate. His pressure-cooker anger with Konstantin seemed more dangerous than the night before, when he’d shoved the Basketball Drunk who’d accosted me to the ground.
“Do it better,” Nicolai told him, his teeth clenched and not even looking back at me. “Not for your tone, but for what you said. She protected me last night. No one else did. Apologize, better.”
“But Nico, what the fuck, man?” Konstantin begged. “She must have done something to trap you. You wouldn’t do something impulsive like marry some stranger.”
“Kostya, apologize, better, to my wife.”
He stared at Nicolai, his ice-teal blue eyes, identical to Nicolai’s, wide with shock. It was like watching a guy argue with his reflection in the mirror.
“Nicolai, this is crazy,” Konstantin argued with him. “It’s crazy that you married someone, anyone, after everything you’ve said for years, and didn’t even tell anybody you were going to. It’s only logical to think that you must’ve been coerced or drugged to get you to do it.”
After everything Nicolai had said for years?
“I wasn’t coerced or drugged,” Nicolai said, his voice carefully measured.
“If you’d broken the trust funds and donated it all to starving orphans and run off to be a Buddhist monk in Dharamshala, I would’ve been like, yeah, he finally snapped. That tracks. But I still would’ve come after you to make sure you were all right.”
“I’m fine, and I’m waiting.”
“You were wasted last night.”
“Yes, and I married Lexi. She is my wife.”
Nicolai’s firm statement sounded like a manifesto.
Kostya hung his head and sighed like he was clearing the anger out of his throat.
His jaw moved forward as he leaned to peer around his brother.
“Lexi, I was concerned about my brother’s state of mind because an elopement is vastly out of character for him.
I see what I said was untrue, and I apologize for what I said. ”
“It’s fine,” I called out again. “I am totally fine.” My breath caught in my throat as I stumbled to make them stop. “Everything’s fine.”
Nicolai’s head swiveled, his dark hair swinging around the edges of his face. His sharp glance raked me from my bleached-blond hair to my beat-up tennis shoes.
His harsh sigh suggested he didn’t like whatever he saw.
He turned back to Kostya, his tone still stern but lower in energy. “Lexi didn’t trap me. She took care of me last night when I was vulnerable to any manner of predation.” Nicolai’s voice dropped, tapering off, as he turned away from Konstantin and walked away.
The rough wall was itchy against the backs of my arms and legs sticking out of my ratty tee shirt and shorts.
Nicolai’s cold glower at where I was smashed against the wall ransacked my body, all buffeting hail and furious winds. When he looked back to Konstantin, the relief felt like the storm turning away from where I was crouching.
“I tried to keep you from leaving the Sanctuary,” Konstantin said, almost pleading.
Nicolai stood at the end of the bed and held his hand out to me, beckoning. “Yes, I remember.”
I peeled myself off the paint and inched around the end of the bed, ready to jump away in case they went at it again.
“You didn’t even call me to come to the church when you got married,” Kostya said.
That time, hurt flooded his voice.
Nicolai must have heard it, too, because his shoulders drooped, and he grimaced as he held his hand out to me. “Lexi tried to get me to talk to people last night, but I wouldn’t do it. I became rather. . . .” He trailed off.
“Imperious?” Konstantin suggested.
Nicolai winced, his eyebrows flinching in. “Must we use that term?”
I reached where Nicolai was still holding his hand out, my fingers sliding into his, but I kept it light in case I needed to snatch my hand back and retreat.
Konstantin sighed. “Then don’t be such a tyrant.”
Nicolai rolled his eyes. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you to be there. I should have.”
Kostya ran his hand through his dark hair, letting the thick, dark strands exactly like Nicolai’s fall like silk. “Just tell me what happened.”
Nicolai settled himself wearily on the foot of the bed, stretching his long legs. He gestured toward the other part of the room, a whole separate sitting area that held dark wood dressers and two leather chairs the color of whiskey. “Sit down, Kostya.”
Konstantin sauntered the few steps to a chair, lowering himself onto the edge of the seat and leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and hands clasped, a classic listening posture.
“Lexi.” Nicolai released my hand and patted the bed beside him.
Since the storm seemed to be over, I sat on the other half of the foot of the bed, perching on the edge of the mattress like I might leap up and run at any time.
Sitting next to a man on a bed in a hotel room was scandalous, even if we were supposedly married.
My nerves were frayed, raw strands quivering.
Konstantin’s bright blue eyes narrowed at us, judging.
Totally judging.
I knew that stare.
That stare had stared at me my whole life.
Even though I’d crashed in the same bed as Nicolai last night, us sitting on the bed, on the one bed, together, with me hanging out right next to him while his brother stared at us, felt obscene.
But hey, we were married, supposedly after a two-year secret courtship, even though we’d actually met last night, right about twelve hours ago, when he’d fallen down drunk at my feet and proposed because he was wasted.
But we were married.
After a hurried Russian Orthodox church ceremony in the wee hours of the morning, we were married in the eyes of God.
And, legally, sure. We were legally married. We’d signed and notarized the marriage license that morning.
So, yeah, we were married, legally and before the Deity, even though we were complete strangers.
But we were going to ditch it in a year with a divorce and an annulment from Nicolai’s Orthodox church. That was the plan. We were only staying married for that year because some Russian dude was trying to pressure Nicolai into an arranged marriage with his daughter.
That part was more alien to my daily life than the Russian Orthodox three-sacraments-in-one insta-wedding. Who even did arranged marriages these days?
And yet, Nicolai’s brother was still staring at us, judging, measuring the wide distance of the duvet between our thighs on the bed and imagining what that meant.
Were we too far apart, thus giving it away that we were actually strangers?
Or were we sitting too luridly close to each other, flaunting the dirty hetero sex that we were supposed to have done the night before?
Here we were, sitting on the bed.
The bed where we were supposed to do the dirty things.
I wanted to crawl out of my skin and fling the weird off my fingertips in a shiver-shake.
Wow, I was really nuts about this. I might need therapy or something.
Nicolai leaned back on his arms where he sat beside me, glancing from me to Kostya, and he sighed. “I was properly gazeboed last night when I left you at the Sanctuary, after Volkov and his ilk pushed the vodka shots on us.”
Konstantin rubbed the back of his neck, looking at the bedroom wall beside him. “You didn’t look that wankered.”
He shrugged. “My memories are a bit fuzzy from there on out. Lexi was performing as a living statue on the sidewalk outside the club, wearing a wedding dress and busking. I dropped to my knees and proposed on the spot. She accepted, most likely to humor the drunk at her feet who had messed up her act. I insisted we get married immediately, that night, and I demanded it be held in a Russian Orthodox church. And that’s how I married a complete stranger last night. ”