Chapter 11
nicolai’s magic trick
NICOLAI
Ifooled them all.
John was laughing and slapping me on the back in congratulations as Clementine steered Lexi through the crowd, their two blond heads bobbing through the undulating field of multicolored dandelions toward the ladies’ room, set in a dark alcove along the rear of the balcony.
When I’d performed my magic trick and flipped over that line about how I, and probably I alone, could have kept a covert girlfriend secret for two entire years, the tight-knit group of eight of my closest friends plus other hangers-on had simultaneously achieved enlightenment, metaphorical stage lights glowing on their heads.
Their postures had relaxed as the world became orderly to them again, and they’d believed my fantastic tale of me being able to keep the secret of a clandestine love affair.
It was just crazy enough to be true.
But Clemmy knew.
That lift of her gray-blue eyes to the light-swirling ceiling had not been the relief of believing my tall tale. She’d placed the final piece of a puzzle, saw the truth laid out before her, and was ready to take a sword to my story.
And now she was surely interrogating Lexi in that ladies’ room with the skill of an FBI homicide detective.
John clapped me on the shoulder again, jolting me down to my shoes.
That smack wasn’t John’s usual friendly back-slapping blow.
The intensity of it warned me that he wasn’t quite as mollified by my magic trick as I’d hoped, and then he announced, “Nico, I need one of those fruity drinks or else my blood sugar will crash. Surely, your scotch reservoirs are low.” His tone was threaded with steel. “Come to the bar with me.”
Shit. “I could use a scotch.”
John led the way, navigating toward the bar in the crowded dark club filled with flashing lights, and I followed him, watching the back of his dark-haired head as I pushed through the sea of bobbing scalps, their shoulders poking my arms and back, their hips brushing my legs.
My face portrayed my usual unbothered, sardonically bored persona.
I wasn’t sure John believed that version of me anymore. Our friendship had been too long.
Childhood friends were truly the worst.
At the bar, John ordered a blended mango mojito with extra mango puree, which should set his trainer’s carb restriction targets back a month.
After I ordered a Macallen 25, neat, John grinned hugely and ran his gaze over the crowd milling around us at the long bar.
Shadows danced around us, black specters thrown on the polished wood of the bar and color-filled bottles on the wall by that garish light show of a chandelier.
The thumping music was marginally reduced over in this corner of the balcony, a sonic trick so people could talk without screaming until their forehead veins bulged.
With a cursory glance, I determined that only people in John’s outermost circle, the third-round invitees and lower on the guest list, were clustered around this particular open bar.
John grinned even wider and lowered his head near my ear while the bartender mixed our drinks. “Are you in trouble?”
The bartender was shaking his head as he added an embarrassing amount of mango slime to a blender. “John, I already told you—”
“Seriously, is she Russian intelligence? Did they finally get you with a honeypot?”
My sharp glance and squint were real, maybe the most real expression I’d had while sober for months, as nightmare images flitted behind my eyes. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Lexi! Your so-called wife! Why can’t you see it?
You just happened to meet her in Italy, huh?
Like someone who was oddly perfect for you, someone who was so perfectly fascinating that you couldn’t resist, who begged you to keep your relationship quiet so we wouldn’t see the goddamned obvious and talk you out of it, because she was trained to be perfect, popped up in your path right after Hannalore broke it off, when you were vulnerable and heartbroken? ”
“I’ve never been vulnerable and heartbroken in my life,” I scoffed.
“Is Putin blackmailing you, and he sent her with an ultimatum? Is she related to Vladimir fucking Putin? Because that’s just like an authoritarian narcissist, to marry his daughter to a deposed heir to a throne and then un-depose him to start an actual royal dynasty.”
More horrifying images—slicing, amputating, screaming, ultimate horrors no one should endure or witness—rolled like a filmstrip in my mind, the memories carved into my frontal lobe with a dripping knife.
“No, John. It’s just like I said, that Lexi and I have been involved for two years on the proverbial down-low. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about her.”
“But it kind of fits.”
It did, but John had the wrong organized crime boss in this case. “Putin’s daughters are in their late thirties and already married.”
“There’s that other daughter, the new one, from his side piece in Paris.”
“And Lexi isn’t her. Lexi is an American whom I met in Italy. She’s just a normal person. Look at her. That bone structure isn’t Russian.”
“His granddaughter, then. Or niece. Or adopted daughter from one of those Russian ballerina-slash-assassin spy schools.”
The bartender handed me my drink while John’s was still whirling orangely in the blender.
“Russian assassin-ballerinas are a comic book plot commandeered by the movies so they could cast beautiful actresses as skinny, bendy, sexy Russian spies who still somehow kicked ass and shot people. They don’t exist.”
“Sounds like someone’s nervous that I might be getting too close to the truth.”
“Jesus Christ, John. Give it a rest. I apologized for not telling you about her. No one else knew, either. I didn’t tell anyone. Not even Clemmy or Kostya. Kostya’s having a fucking tantrum about it. Even my security staff didn’t know about her.”
“Your security didn’t know? You couldn’t have pulled that off.”
“I ditched them for nearly eighteen hours last night by just walking out of Billionaire Sanctuary without a backward glance. You saw me do it. Kostya tried to stop me, but I kept going.”
Our security details talked to each other, sometimes to coordinate, mostly to bitch about how their principals were feckless idiots who would surely be dead in ten minutes without them.
Dushyanta—yeah, it would definitely be Dushyanta—would blab to someone else’s squad that I’d gone AWOL overnight, and that gripe would get back to John’s people, and then John would hear about my extended drop off the proverbial map.
The bartender presented John with his oversized drink. I swore to God that I could smell the sugar as it passed under my nose, and I inhaled deeply, letting the sweetness infiltrate my sinuses all the way back to my reptilian brain that hungered for sugar and fat.
My trainer and I needed to discuss my macros since I was so easily tempted. I didn’t even like mango all that much.
John winced. “Seriously, eighteen fucking hours? Ricardo would’ve shat puppies if I’d ditched my team for eighteen hours.”
“I’ve been doing it for two years. It’s too easy.”
“Why the actual fuck are you ditching your own people? That’s not safe, Nico.”
I glared into my scotch. “Michel hired them.”
“Oh.” He paused, staring at the minty orange drink in his glass. “That explains a lot. You were seriously alone out there all night? With your secret girlfriend?”
“Lexi flew here on the spur of the moment when I told her to come. We’ve been meeting clandestinely for over a year. Every time I travel, I send her a plane ticket and ditch my team in the evening.”
John shook his head and sipped his drink, and he winced. Yeah, that much sugar probably made his teeth ache.
“We’d been talking rings and strollers for a while,” I continued. “Last night, seeing you in final preparations to marry Anna got into my head. It wasn’t jealousy, precisely, though it’s amusing to think of it that way.”
John nodded over his drink, listening.
Good. “It was more like your preparation to truly take the leap gave me permission. No one in our friend group from Le Rosey has married. Have you noticed that?”
John’s nods sped up. “It gave one pause.”
“We probably need therapy.”
John snorted into his drink. “You think? But the administration forced you into counseling after—afterward.”
No one liked to say it out loud. “We were all abandoned by our parents on Le Rosey’s doorstep when we were kindergarteners or thereabouts.
We all tomcatted around the dorms, busting a nut as a surrogate for feeling loved.
Yet everyone thinks they don’t have intimacy issues.
We’re all emotionally mutilated, John. We never stood a chance. ”
John glared at his sugared cocktail. “I guess.”
“And then I found Lexi in a museum in Verona, someone who’d grown up in a family, who has an open heart and loves like her whole soul is bulletproof. Is it any wonder that I didn’t want you damaged nitwits turning her into a zombie, too?”
John’s eyebrows flinched like he’d been shot between the eyes, and I closed my eyes to scrub that image from my mind before it began circling.
“Yeah, okay,” he said, again scrying for answers in the orange depths of his mojito.
“Las Vegas is where anything can happen on a roll of the dice, and the city inspired me to ask her to elope. No, I begged her to marry me last night. It wasn’t a lark, John. It was a desperate grappling to have someone.”
Fashioning my lie felt a little too much like pulling strands out of my heart, stringing them on a harp, and playing a song on my still-quivering nerves.
“She said yes, even though I was paralytic.” I kept talking. “She wanted to wait until I sobered up. I insisted on getting the license. I insisted on finding a Russian Orthodox church. Did you know I rousted that poor old priest out of his bed to conduct the ceremony?”
“It seemed like he could’ve used a cup of coffee on the video,” John muttered.
“And that video,” I scoffed. “Some people go public with a post on Instagram, but I hard-launched our relationship with a livestream of the holy sacrament of matrimony.”
John’s pinched brows widened as his slow chuckle wound up. “You sure did.”
“And you must admit, it is perfectly in character for me to marry her as thoroughly as possible, forcing a priest to baptize and chrismate her before the matrimonial rite. All the t’s crossed, and all the i’s, dotted. Scrupulous attention to detail. On time and complete.”
John tilted his head, nodding, agreeing that such precision was indeed in character for me.
And then he fucking asked, “What do you think Hannelore is going to say?”
I couldn’t keep from rolling my eyes. “Hannelore broke up with me and has been married to someone else for over a year. Her opinion of my relationship status does not concern me.”
John didn’t even look up at me. “You sure?”
“Her opinion of my relationship status didn’t overly concern me when we were together,” I admitted.
Now John leaned back and stared at me. “Damn.”
I shrugged. “I never cheated on her. I just never felt the connection with her that I should have. Every day was just another day. She scheduled herself with my admin for dates, and I did the same with hers. I just went on and on, feeling nothing, just numbness and an unexpressed resentment that I’d rather be in my flat in Paris reading a book than taking in a fashionable art exhibit or being seen at the right parties.
I thought I must not be able to feel emotional connections, any emotional connections, that it must have been me. ”
That statement dropped off my lips like I’d said it a thousand times. It had certainly echoed in my head more than that.
“Even when you were fucking her?” John asked, like his crassness was supposed to be shocking.
Oh, but the truth was more shocking.
“Especially when I was fucking her, and then I felt like a little shit because going through the motions for my own pleasure meant I was a soulless prick.”
John’s exaggerated blink confirmed my suspicions. “That’s a lot.”
“Yeah, it was.”
“But you don’t feel that with Lexi?”
Truth blurred. “Lexi is different than anyone I’ve ever met.
I was drawn to her immediately. Our eyes met, and I couldn’t get her out of my head.
I followed her outside and practically stalked her.
I was obsessed with her. I still am,” I lied.
I needed to thoroughly disseminate this story, to tell these lies to John and anyone else who would listen to cover up my quickie marriage, so the rumors of a real marriage might get back to Volkov.
And yet, the words swirled in my brain, ringing like bells.
Different.
Obsessed.
I am.
“For two years?” John asked.
The spiral of lemon peel balancing on the edge of my squat highball glass toppled in, drowning in the liquor. As a blade of light sliced through the glass, tiny spots of citrus oil marred the surface of the whiskey. “It seems like I’ve known her my whole life.”
“Okay. I get it. I mean, I don’t get it. But let’s get back to Magnus and Ryan and those other guys. They’re going to think we ducked out for one last blow job for my bachelor party.”
The strobing chandelier turned to neon streaks as I rolled my eyes. “Jesus, John. What happens in the dorms, stays in the dorms. Besides, you said you liked the taste.”