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 was great, that it was a totally appropriate engagement ring from 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.
It was just an expression of what he thought he should do, what his friends expected of him.
Though Jimmy Johnson’s meager engagement ring probably had been a painfully accurate expression of what he’d felt for me, or at least it had been a reflection of him giving me as little as he could get away with and then withdrawing even that absolute minimum without caring what happened to me afterward.
The desert sunset was a nuclear bomb on the western horizon, flames licking out over the edge of the earth, pouring destruction around us.
The whole sky was on fire.
We approached the towering hotels of the Las Vegas Strip from a back road because the traffic was lighter on the grid around the main drag.
One of the other security cars was leading the caravan in front of us, and the other lurked behind, a black hulking presence in the windshield’s rearview mirror.
The security guy sitting in the passenger side of the front seat twisted to talk to us. “We recommend the underground entrance.”
Nicolai nodded with a careless wave of his hand. “Fine.”
Just before we reached the Caesars Palace hotel, Ueli spun the steering wheel in a quick turn, and the nose of the SUV dipped as we descended into the gaping maw of an underground parking garage entrance I hadn’t even noticed.
I tried to act worldly and sophisticated, but I grabbed the handle on the door and squeaked at the car’s sudden descent.
Nicolai shot me a small smile.
Yellow tube lights rolled by overhead.
I fervently wished to be more sophisticated so I wouldn’t embarrass myself and Nicolai tonight, praying to my fairy godmother for a miracle.
Heh. Fairy godmother. Evidently, Clementine and Nicolai were my fairy benefactors, as she’d gotten me the dress and hairstyle, and Nicolai had magicked up the SUV coach.
And the diamond rings.
So, that made Ueli and his henchmen—mice?
The lead SUV went past the entrance and parked, and our SUV rolled up to the door and rocked to a halt. The headlights shining over my shoulder from the chase car behind us flickered.
Obviously, this was our stop.
I reached over, flipped the door lock, and yanked the door handle.
The vehicle’s door swung open, creaking.
I leaned toward it to get out.
Ueli was reaching across the back of the seat from the driver’s spot, his hand flailing at me as he yelled, “Stop! Fucking stop her!”
Nicolai grabbed my shoulder, wrapping one muscular arm around my waist and pulling me across the seat until my back rested against his chest. His strong arm crossed my body, restraining me.
The other security guy in front had kicked open his door and leaped at mine, shoving it closed.
From behind my head, Nicholas said very calmly, “Our security personnel exit the vehicle first and assess the perimeter.”
Oh, my prayer for more sophistication had not been answered. I was still a dumb hayseed-chewin’ rube. Got it. “Right. Sorry.”
Nicolai settled me back into my seat while the front-seat security guy exited the SUV, his head swiveling around as he assessed the perimeter, I guessed. Two more guys from the cars in front and behind us prowled the sides, again, assessing.
A whole lot of assessing was going on.
Ueli turned his back to us, surveyed one last head-swiveling look at the motionless parking garage that was nothing but an expanse of exhaust-stained concrete and dark shut-off cars, and then waved two fingers in the air.
“That’s our signal,” Nicolai told me as if he were describing driving directions. “I’ll exit my side of the vehicle and walk around the back with Ueli behind me. Stay in the car until I get to your side. At that point, Dushyanta will open your door, and I will hand you out.”
Celebrities looked so suave stepping out of their cars because it was choreographed. “Okay.”
“Stay inside until I have walked around to your door.”
“Yep. Got it.”
After all that instruction, I stayed planted on the car seat until Nicolai was standing at my door and turned to look at me in the SUV.
As the other security guy, Dushyanta and I should remember his name, opened the car door, Nicolai stood outside, extending his hand. I grasped his palm to steady myself as I stepped out, the thick silk of my skirt flowing around my ankles.
I’d kind of gotten used to how stunningly gorgeous Nicolai Romanov was while we’d been hanging out and talking in a hotel room, but for a moment as I took in his freshly showered and shaved self, wearing a pressed suit and crisp white shirt open at his throat, it hit me again.
Those perfectly sculpted cheekbones, skin pulled taut over his square jawline, tousled black hair barely curling at his forehead, just everything about him clean and in balance, his clear blue eyes almost sparkling in the overhead lights as he looked at me, I was as floored as that first moment last night when this unearthly beautiful man had walked out of the crowd like a fairy-tale prince to where I’d been standing on the sidewalk, destitute, begging for pennies.
With Nicolai smiling into my eyes, I felt a little like a princess stepping out of a silver carriage, even though I wasn’t wearing glass shoes and the SUV was black with darkly tinted windows instead of pumpkin-orange.
No red carpet. No flashing light bulbs.
Just Nicolai and me and two security guys in an exhaust-stinky concrete parking structure with cars thumping on the concrete floors overhead.
But a princess, nevertheless.
And like a modern-day princess with security personnel overseeing her every move, we were hustled through the private back doors and through the kitchens.
The staff casually looked up, but as we were neither Beyoncé nor Taylor Swift, they looked right back down and continued prepping salads and chopping meat.
Our entourage took a few quick turns through industrial hallways and a long ride in an oversized padded-wall freight elevator. The security guys shuffled us to the back and stood at parade rest in front of the doors.
While the elevator shuddered and my feet felt heavy, I muttered to Nicolai under my breath, “What do I say when you introduce me to your friends, if you are going to introduce me to your friends?”
“Of course, I will introduce you. Say something along the lines of, ‘Lovely to meet you,’ or ‘So nice to meet you.’ It doesn’t matter what you say.
The music will probably be too loud for anyone to hear anything.
” Without looking down, his fingers found mine, and he squeezed my hand gently. “You’ll be fine.”
The wall-padded freight elevator was slow, taking forever, like we were traveling between worlds. “If I screw it up too much, you can always tell people you imprisoned me in the attic.”
“Nonsense. One doesn’t confess to imprisoning one’s wife in the attic. I’ll say you’re at the spa.”
I swiveled and looked up at where a very small smile tweaked the corners of Nicolai’s mouth. “That is not reassuring!”
The freight elevator’s doors finally parted.
Just as they cracked open, sliding apart, Nicolai stiffened. His chin rose, his jaw tightened, and his whole posture braced.
I squeezed his hand, looking up and trying to question him with my eyes.
Nicolai’s fingers flexed around mine, a furtive squeeze, before he dropped my hand. He stared at the elevator doors slowly grinding apart.
Cigarette smoke trickled in through the widening gap, filling the air with pale blue haze.
One fingertip of nicotine craving stroked up the back of my neck and touched my scalp.
Man, if I stayed in Las Vegas much longer, I was going to fall off the ex-smoker wagon. This whole city was designed to seduce everyone back into any addiction they’d ever had.
Screaming techno dance music blasted into the elevator like accelerating into a wall of sound, and we walked a few steps onto the VIP area of the Omnia Nightclub, a wide balcony area three stories above the main nightclub floor, where the normal people writhed like a wheat field in a swirling Nebraska windstorm.
Dim light shone from barely glowing overhead ceiling cans and the battery-operated votive candles on the tables. Men wearing slim-cut suits held drinks in one hand, while beautiful women wearing black or dark silk draped over their shoulders laughed.
Beyond the glass balcony wall, out in the dark void and far above the main floor, an enormous structure of thick concentric rings blazing with thousands and thousands and thousands of LED lights trimmed with swinging strobes sliced light beams through the smoke-filled air and gyrated like an alien spacecraft winding up to self-destruct in a movie.
The rings spun and flipped through each other, bouncing like a rocket-powered kaleidoscope.
Even the smallest ring at the bottom was wider across than my outstretched arms, and the biggest one at the top was a vast flying saucer that would have sucked up dozens of cows and disbelieving farmers with room to spare.
The whole structure moved so fast that it looked like a sped-up video played at five-times normal, bouncing to the bomp-bomp beat and then whirling furiously.
I wasn’t sure whether to walk in like a pageant queen to schmooze with people or if I should hit the deck because that thing looked like it was going to blow.
The pounding techno dance music hit a pause, a tense silence, and the huge sculpture beyond the edge of the balcony contracted into a sphere and went black for an instant before erupting into a frantic flailing of thrashing rings with the crescendo downbeat.
Nicolai must have noticed that I’d stopped dead in my tracks, because he gave my hand a quick pulse of a gentle squeeze again. “The Omnia calls it a ‘kinetic chandelier.’ It’s a bit much, but John wanted a blowout party.”
The roiling sculpture stretched into a scintillating hot pink and green tornado, the bottom of the funnel whipping around before sucking itself into a thick orange spinning disk. It was hypnotizing and over the top and beyond comprehension. “Yeah, it looks like a blowout party.”
The chandelier’s enormous, aligned rings, thirty feet or more across, bounced in time to the pounding music, the bright white beams of its micro-spotlights lasering through the smoky air as it whirled, an otherworldly robot the size of a long school bus captured and suspended in the middle of the enormous space above the thrashing crowd below to crump to our music.
Taking my eyes off of it was hard, but when I managed to, the realization struck that every single one of the people on that private balcony was stunningly beautiful.
Everyone’s skin was unblemished and taut. Their hair, shiny and shaped in a recent style. They stood easily, without favoring a bad back or a trashed knee. They were healthy and strong in their bodies and tall.
Every single one of them had white, even teeth.
Their posture was easy but ballet-elevated, not floppy like toddlers.
No one was acting like a crazed jerk.
They were all so uniformly handsome and beautiful, sophisticated and mannered.
The effect was almost otherworldly.
Were these rich people or—I didn’t know—maybe, fae?