Chapter 9
friends of the tsar
LEXI
Nah, not fae.
LOL, the fair folk didn’t exist.
Hey, I’d read the books, the ones about pointy-eared smokeshows with enormous wingspans.
I liked the books.
Heck, I’d started reading the kids’ books about Prydain and the black cauldron in seventh grade because the school library was small and it was one of the few complete series they’d had.
Fairies and fae were obviously fiction.
But the world seemed weird all of a sudden, with all these tall, lithe, beautiful people surrounding me.
Their ears seemed okay, though.
Rounded on top, anyway.
Even though all the fae stories talked about glamours that changed a fae’s appearances.
I was sure it was fine.
But that softly padded, gray elevator that hummed with white noise had been a liminal space, a conduit between my world of traffic snarls and broken teeth to Nicolai’s perfect realm.
If Nicolai actually was fae, this party or afterward would be the moment he revealed it to me.
Should I eat the canapés on the trays of the roving waitstaff? Should I drink the champagne?
Or would ingesting the food trap me in their world forever?
Or was there a pomegranate around here somewhere that I should absolutely avoid?
It was funny to think about, I supposed.
But doubt crept up the back of my neck like the tiny feet of sprites.
I was being silly, though. Faeries and fae and fey folk didn’t exist.
Right?
Nicolai steered me through the crowd, nodding at people but not intruding upon their conversations until we reached a group of mostly guys, who turned when Nicolai shouted, “John! Magnus!” above the wailing music.
Clementine was there, wearing a silvery dress only a few shades more platinum than her hair. As we approached, she perused me from scalp to shoes, and then her head tilted. Her pale eyebrows micro-dipped as she stared at my face without any other expression.
Had I smudged my makeup, despite my effort not to touch it after all?
Nicolai clapped one hand on a new guy’s shoulder, but his smile was metallic. “John! Solid bash.” He leaned toward me. “John Bourbon, one of my best friends since childhood.”
Right, I remembered that name.
The group of people, all of them unnaturally tall and oddly beautiful, angled themselves to peer around him as Nicolai and I integrated ourselves into the loop.
“Nico!” the guy called back over the thumping techno beat and screaming beeps. “I thought you’d never get here. Do tell me you’ve brought your new wife because our so-called friends do not believe you’ve fallen to the dread institution. They’re insisting the video was AI-generated.”
A guy, tall and tawny brown-skinned and sharp-featured handsome as heck with tattooed tendrils running from under his suit’s Nehru collar up one side of his neck, said, “Even if you had, I can’t believe you would livestream it, not our boy who wouldn’t allow his picture in the Rosey yearbook.
It must be AI. I’m right. Tell me I’m right. ”
One of the women, a slim Black woman wearing a lime and brown dress, smirked. “I didn’t see it. I don’t do social media.”
Nicolai’s lips stayed tight even though he smiled, and he wheeled me around, tucking me under his arm as he announced to them, “It’s all true, I’m afraid. I’ve fallen in love and am unfashionably happy. I’d like you to meet my wife, the love of my life, Lexi Romanov.”
Wow, those lies rolled right off Nicolai’s tongue.
I hadn’t met anyone else in the group clustered around John Bourbon except for Clementine, who was holding a highball glass filled with clear bubbly liquid. Diamonds hung from her ears like a waterfall of flowers and matched a thin circlet of glittering butterflies at her throat.
“We were married secretly last night,” Nicolai told them. “The wedding was impromptu because I became jealous of John, here, who is marrying his true love at the end of the month.”
“My true love,” John scoffed, lifting two shot glasses of clear liquid off the tray of a roving waiter and passing one to Nicolai. “Don’t be maudlin.”
Oh, wow. I didn’t think even Jimmy would have said something so dismissive of me in front of other people, but thinking about Jimmy Johnson, my ex-fiancé, felt like an evil omen.
Nicolai’s dark eyebrows twitched downward, but he threw back the shot and held the empty glass out to his side at shoulder-height. A waitress who happened to be standing right there took it from him. “I’m so glad you all finally get the chance to meet Lexi.”
John rolled his head as he looked at Nico, squinting. “Finally?”
“We’ve been dating for almost two years. Didn’t I mention that part?”
John’s jaw dropped, and his eyebrows shot toward his dark hair artfully tousled over his forehead. “No. You haven’t mentioned her at all.”
“Must’ve slipped my mind.”
The people in the group began offering me hands to shake, so I shook all the hands, chanting, “Lovely to meet you, so nice to meet you, lovely to meet you,” over and over again, as instructed.
John glared at Nicolai the whole time I was meet-and-greeting. “You’ve been dating someone for two years, from right after you broke up with Hannelore, and you’ve never mentioned it to me?”
Nicolai’s level gaze at John looked like a challenge. “I like to keep some things private.”
If Nicolai needed support, I could jump in, but staying quiet when surrounded by his friends seemed like the best tactic for the moment.
But I was ready, just in case.
The guy with the black tattoo vining up his throat toward his earlobe, like the ink was tracing a path for a tongue, smirked. “At least I was half-right.”
“Well, yes, I guess you always were rather private.” John tilted his head, moving in like a snake hypnotizing its prey. “Wait, is she why you and Hanna broke it off?”
Nicolai’s face didn’t so much as twitch. “Ending things was entirely Hannelore’s idea. I met Lexi a bit later.”
“Okay, fine, but I thought you would mention something like you were in a serious relationship to me. I mean, I mean I thought we were—Seriously, two fucking years?”
When John said that, Clementine’s chin lifted, and her gaze locked onto John and Nicolai, alternating between the two of them like they were targets.
Nicolai grasped John’s shoulder again, and John finally met his eyes. “After Hannelore, I kept things very private.”
The quick flicks of John’s widening eyes to Nicolai, to me, back to Nicolai, and then over the crowd looked like panic. “But—Poppy and Tejumade—and the others—you haven’t seemed to be exclusive with anyone, um, lately.”
So Nicolai did have a reputation as a player. That was funny.
Also, John hadn’t explicitly sold out Nicolai that he’d been fooling around with other women while I was standing right there, but he hadn’t been able to help himself with the questions, either.
Nicolai shrugged and looked over the crowd. “We weren’t exclusive, but now we’re monogamous.”
Were we?
Nicolai had said our platonic marriage contract would be for a year, but sexytimes with other people hadn’t come up in the negotiations.
Was he allowed to fool around?
Was I?
I looked way up at John Bourbon, who was tall, lean, and wore a gold watch that seemed just on the tasteful edge of flashy.
He was engaged, though, so I wasn’t interested.
I sure as hell wasn’t ever going to be the girl who stole a groom from the altar.
The dozen-plus men standing in a tall fence around us were all gorgeous, chiseled jaws and cheekbones, broad shoulders and slim hips, a sepia rainbow of skin tones from porcelain-pale and athletically tanned European through the spectrum of buff-fawn-tawny bronze to the darkest ebony men.
Most wore slim-cut suits. Three of the guys wore bright suit jacket-ish tunics buttoned from shoulder to hip, nipped at their slim waists to show off their muscular physiques.
And then there was the neck-tattoo hottie in the jewel-blue suit who kept eyeing me and who I did not eye back because, currently, I was with Nicolai.
But, I mean, wow.
Standing near all those preternaturally beautiful men was almost intoxicating, like the subtle wood and spice scents of their colognes were aerosolized opiates.
And then there were the women, slim and supple or zaftig and plush, dressed in silks clinging to their thighs and bosoms, all just right there, swaying to the music with the loose limbs of light intoxication, lips parted and eyes dewy.
The bouncing sculpture of a chandelier spun light over them, highlighting breast-pocket jewelry below handkerchief triangles and sparkling on martini glasses held in elegant fingertips, a flash of white teeth, sudden concealing darkness, then a burst of dancing spotlights like sunrise that revealed them all to be extraordinarily handsome or beautiful, all sophisticated, glamorous, and wielding tightly amused smiles at Nicolai and myself.
The absolute beauty of these people shocked me like an electric fence I couldn’t let go of.
I couldn’t speak anymore. I didn’t think I could breathe.
It was like I was on another planet, one inhabited by only gorgeous people.
Or another realm.
Maybe it was just the ethnic variety of people that discombobulated me.
Before that night, I’d literally seen more colors of corn than colors of people. For a white-girl virgin from Nebraska, this party was a lot.
In my defense, corn came in a wide range of colors: white, yellow, red, blue, purple, and black, plus all the hybrids, and then there were the translucent glass gem corn types that looked like amethyst, aquamarine, topaz, and citrine.
Actually, humans were just cornstarch, brown, and browner.
So there literally were more colors of corn than people, so maybe that wasn’t the best metric for me to use, whether I was a corn-fed Nebraska girl or not.
I stared at my glass, now empty.
How strong was this champagne? I was looping about corn.
But corn distraction aside, I was standing in the center of a circle of magnificently beautiful men.