Chapter 7 This Time, I Remembered
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 I had 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 time without live-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 I married Lexi 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 with her, 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.
The priest started to sing-chant in Russian, but he stopped abruptly and twisted to stare directly at me. “You are not drunk this time, right?”
“Not at all,” I assured him.
I was devastatingly sober.
He squinted at me, like his bushy gray eyebrows were trying to roll down his face to integrate into his fluffy mustache and beard. “Hungover?”
No use lying. “A little, but I’m getting better.”
“Alexandra feed you water last night?”
What was going on with the interrogations? “Yes, and ginger ale this morning.”
He nodded solemnly. “Because she is good girl.”
I sure as hell wasn’t going to argue with him. While I could be dense as fuck sometimes, I’d at least figured that much out. “I know.”
“Give rings to me.”
I pried the two flat wedding rings out of their respective boxes, my fingers fumbling in a way I was unaccustomed to, and I tossed the shiny black shopping bag onto the first pew while the priest prayed over the rings in Russian.
While the priest was blessing the rings, I pried the remaining engagement ring out of its box and offered it on my flat palm to Lexi. “Shall I propose again?”
Lexi didn’t even look at me. Her fingers crept over and took the engagement ring from my hand, sealing it in her fist as she watched the priest invoke the blessing over our new wedding rings. “It doesn’t matter, anyway.”
I caught her other hand in mine and held it while the priest prayed over our rings on the altar.
Her hesitant glance up at me, her fathomless dark eyes full of apprehension and sadness, pierced my heart.
The sun glinted off her blond hair, so at odds with her dark eyes.
I didn’t want her to be sad. I wanted her to be anything but sad, especially at our wedding, or ring-blessing, even though this was at best a short-term marriage of convenience.
Wasn’t it?
I lifted her hand and kissed the back of it while we waited, a quick kiss, because I wanted to console her.
When I was yelling at Kostya, I’d been shouting the absolute truth that was in my heart, that Lexi was a better human being than either one of us, and I’d been damned lucky I’d fallen down drunk at her feet.
The priest was correct to admonish me. Lexi was a good person, better than me, better than anyone I knew.
She deserved better than my machinations.
She deserved better than me.
The priest turned back to us, holding our rings in a bright white cloth. He muttered under his breath, “Okay, I see now. These are better rings. You see that she is not to be played with.”
We exchanged them, Lexi carefully sliding the cold, dual-toned band of platinum and gold onto my ring finger, where the sunlight glinted on it like a beacon, and I placed the platinum setting paved with half-carat diamonds onto her ring finger.
I didn’t offer to repeat my vows, and she didn’t either. We’d made those last night in an alcohol-fueled blue flame of glory.
Or maybe that had just been me. She hadn’t been battered last night.
But I sure as hell wasn’t going to retract even one word I’d said.
She crammed the engagement ring on top of the wedding ring and stared at the bands for a moment, the diamonds dwarfing her delicate hand like my lifestyle, my wealth, and my needs overwhelming her existence.
I asked her, “Better?” Meaning the ceremony to bless the rings.
She nodded, but she looked away from me. Her fingers slipped out of mine as she walked down the aisle toward the doors, opening them to the blazing desert sunset and slipping away into the blast of fiery light and heat.
The priest looked at me, reproach in his eyes. “You make that girl happy. You should not marry a girl and make her unhappy.”
I wasn’t a believer. We upper classes never were, except for the occasional desperate mother praying for a miracle for her sick child, which was always a dangerous precedent in my family. Too easily manipulated.
Yet, maybe God himself was shining from the priest’s eyes and rebuking me for catching an angel and tying her down.
Probably not, though.
Lexi was quiet as I joined her in the back seat of the SUV in the church’s parking lot, and she was twisting the rings around her fingers.
Before the driver put the car into gear, I announced, “Ueli, we need a moment.”
The security guys stepped out without another word, closing the doors behind them. Ueli stood outside, back toward us, in the sweltering evening air, but the other guy climbed into the other SUV closer to him to get out of the heat.
Our SUV’s engine shifted to a higher idling speed, whistling notes competing with the air-conditioning’s jet-speed fan.
“Are the rings all right?” I asked her.
“They’re beautiful. I could never have imagined wearing rings like this in my life. They’re just heavier than our other rings or my first engagement ring. They feel different on my finger. Wider, I guess.”
I couldn’t help myself. Maybe I should have left her alone with her thoughts, but I pried. “First engagement ring? You’ve been engaged before?”
She nodded. “I got dumped by my fiancé six days ago.”
Shock rippled through me.
“Isn’t that pathetic?” she continued. “He left me during the ceremony, at the actual altar, for someone else. That’s why I was busking in a wedding dress on the streets of Las Vegas, because that dress is all I have left.”
Slivers of tears glistened on her lower eyelids.
Oh, no. Oh no, Lexi. No.
“He was a fool.” I picked up her hand nearest to me, her left hand with our rings on it.
I studied her pale little fingers, turning her wrist over to examine her soft palm as if I were a fortune teller, which I most certainly wasn’t, and then back to inspect how the wedding ring set looked when it was worn by a woman, this woman, my woman, mine at least for a while. “He is an absolute fool.”
“Maybe he was smart to get out while he could. You don’t know. You’ve only known me for less than a day, a large part of which you spent blackout-drunk.”
“Then I’m a fool. If we’ve only got a year, then let’s make the best of it. Let’s enjoy each other’s company, knowing there’s a time limit to this madness.”
She chuckled a little, but drily, and she continued looking out the car’s side window at the desert xeriscaping and withered cacti.
“Yeah, because we’re just a short-term interlude.
That’s all I ever am.” She dabbed one finger under her eye while still turned away from me.
“You know what’s really the worst? My phone is so quiet.
It used to beep a hundred times a day because I was in group chats with Jimmy’s sisters and sisters-in-law.
Every time a thought came into their heads, they’d text it into the group chats, and then everyone had an opinion about it. ”
I waited because she hadn’t looked back at me yet.