Chapter 20 #2
His hands were tight fists on his knees, though he was still twisted around and was looking at me. “My family used religion to keep the peasants in line, but believing too much in priests or superstition gets us murdered.”
Woo. Okay, not that, then. “Religious friends who would be offended?”
Frustration raised his voice a note, and he shook his head like he was flinging off bees. “None. Ryan is also Orthodox in name only. Magnus is a Lutheran of some denomination, I think. John is culturally Roman Catholic. No one would care.”
“Maybe a core memory from when you were a kid?”
Deeper frown lines pressed between his eyes, and his head shaking accelerated. He was getting really wound up, and his voice sounded choked as he grated out, “No.”
“Then why?”
He broke. “Because when I marry someone, it has to be in the Russian Orthodox church so my children will be legitimate according to Pauline Law because I’m the fucking Tsar of all the Russias.”
His crystalline blue eyes flared wide, and he whipped his head up to stare at me like he was checking to see if I’d heard. He slapped his hand over his own mouth.
Wow.
Nicolai stared straight into my eyes as his hand dropped. “I didn’t say that.”
I spun all the way around on the bed to face him and crossed my legs under the flowing silk dress. “Oh, honey. Those sleeper codes run deep, don’t they?”
His eyes creased. “I can’t fathom why I said that. I should never, ever have said that.”
“Should never have said it, huh?”
His gaze held mine for an instant more, but then he looked away, sighing. The tension electrifying his body dissipated. “No. Never.”
“It is important to you. You can’t admit it or you’re not allowed to, but it is.”
“It’s too dangerous to talk about, to even think about. Definitely too dangerous to act upon.”
“I still don’t get why anyone would want to kill you for it. All that Russia stuff was a long time ago.”
“I’m the ultimate nepo baby,” Nicolai sighed.
“My name alone conjures nostalgia, even though the vast majority of Russians were terribly mistreated under every tsar. Dictators do not have the will of the people. They brainwash a small, deluded sub-fraction, many of whom love to hate other people more than they want to keep their freedom or even have a decent job. Their souls rot from within because the dictator gives them permission to steal from and murder those people and feel righteous about doing it, and then they tear down their own rights and wealth and give them to the dictator and his corrupted cronies as bribes.”
“But Russia doesn’t have tsars anymore.”
“Vladimir Putin has picked up the terrifying playbook of my tsar ancestors and used it as a palimpsest, writing Mein Kampf over the words on the page. Russian citizens are destitute, their wealth stripped by that KGB psychopath. Now, he terrorizes world leaders to do his bidding, to gouge their own citizens and send him the profits through money laundering. It’s obscene, and it’s working very well. ”
This conversation was way above my pay grade. High school civics hadn’t prepared me at all to sit on a hotel bed with the heir to an empire and debate politics. “He can’t terrorize the leaders of other countries. They have armies and the Secret Service and stuff.”
“He can,” Nicolai said, staring at his hands.
“He does. My ancestors excelled at determining who to torture and murder to keep other leaders in line. The Communists refined their methods. Putin is their political descendant, and he has conquered the world. No world leader’s children are safe from him and his kidnappers and torturers. ”
The stoic impassivity of his immobile expression was more frightening than any anger. “That’s what your ancestors did?”
He turned his head slowly, not blinking, almost soulless for a moment, and he nodded.
It was like negotiating with someone who may or may not be a serial killer. “But you’re not like that, right?”
That time, he blinked, like he was released from remembering horror.
“I refuse to be involved. I stay out of politics and political arenas because I have no ambitions. I will not allow myself to be sucked into that criminal world and put myself, Kostya, Ryan, and everyone after them in danger. I hold the line. The Romanov legacy is not for sale. And that’s all I have to say about the matter of politics.
” Nicolai shook his head. “We can’t talk about this anymore. I never should have said that.”
“Worried about hidden microphones?” I joked, trying anything to break the chill that had seeped under my skin.
His sharp glance scared me.
“Seriously?”
Everything around me felt like an enemy.
The nightstand.
The bed’s tufted headboard.
The lamps.
“A conversation for another time,” he sighed. “But some people would not be amused at any evidence I’d considered that scenario. So I don’t consider that scenario, ever.” His deep sigh sounded like resignation. “Except, evidently, when the sleeper codes activate.”
I scooted halfway across the bed, wanting to reach out to him because he seemed sad now, not cold anymore, but I didn’t. “So, just getting a divorce but not an annulment would mess up your—your claim, for the throne, if Russia ever had a tsar again.”
Nicolai Romanov nodded, turning farther toward me on the bed and toying with his wedding ring, twisting it on his finger.
“Do you want to mess it up?”
Nicolai shook his head, his eyes still guarded, his face unmoving.
Scenes from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet wafted into my mind, lines where Ophelia was falling in love with Prince Hamlet, but her brother, Laertes, warned her about the prince.
Laertes told Ophelia to be afraid of Hamlet falling in love with her because Hamlet was royalty, and she was not.
Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister.
Her brother had said that Hamlet may not, as unvalued persons do, carve for himself; for on his choice depends The safety and health of this whole state.
Fear when royalty comes knocking on the door.
Don’t believe them. Don’t listen to them.
They will love the throne more than you.
And then Ophelia had sassed her brother back for being a man-slut while admonishing her about just hanging out with some guy.
But Hamlet had toyed with her, used her in his schemes to try to dethrone his stepfather, because he cared more about the throne than her.
Ophelia was alone, her mother dead, no nurse or governess or friends to guide her. Her playboy brother left her in the castle with the scheming prince while he went back to France, and then Hamlet murdered her father.
How easy it was for Hamlet to manipulate Ophelia.
She had no one who loved her.
Hamlet’s machinations drove Ophelia to madness, and she ended up dead in a pond, drowned, among her flowers.
So maybe I should heed Shakespeare’s advice from across the centuries.
Fear the prince’s love.
He loves the throne more than he loves you.
“Didn’t marrying me already mess up your claim to that throne, anyway? I’m not royalty. Don’t you have to marry a princess of something and somewhere?”
Nicolai shrugged. “My claim is based on male primogeniture, father to first son to first son. My mother wasn’t noble or royal. That part of the Pauline Laws hasn’t been used to support our claim for three or four generations, I think, so that doesn’t matter.”
“It just matters that your real marriage someday is Russian Orthodox, for whenever you marry your real wife. That’s why this marriage to me has to be religiously annulled, not just a divorce.”
He nodded, still not looking at me.
At least he was being honest with me.
That was more than I’d ever had before.
“Okay. So, don’t worry about it, then,” I said. “We’ll get you what you need. If you need an annulment, we’ll figure out how to get one.”
He ran a hand through his hair and rested it on the back of his neck. “I shouldn’t care.”
“But you do. It doesn’t matter whether you should care or not.”
He nodded, but one of his broad shoulders rose in a shrug. “I’ve never admitted that to anyone. I shouldn’t admit that to anyone.”
“Um, spousal privilege?” I grinned at him, though my face felt a little lopsided. “We’re legally married. Under spousal privilege, I can’t be compelled to testify about anything you’ve told me. Might as well use it while you’ve got it.”
He looked up, letting his hand drop from where he’d been fidgeting with his wedding ring. “There is that.”
“And speaking of legal spousal protections—” I started.
“Why am I suddenly worried about what you’re going to say?”
“You’re good at business negotiations, right?”
His chuckle and half an eye roll were cute. “Supposedly.”
“So, let’s finish negotiating this pre-nup agreement. Or, post-nup in this case, since we’ve already nupped.”
“Tonight?” His steady gaze accused me of being dumb. “It’s past three in the morning, and you should have legal representation.”
“I don’t want a lawyer. I know exactly what I want. We should negotiate this now.”
He squinted at me a little, as if examining my state of mind. “I feel I should ask for a breathalyzer test from you first.”
I cocked my head at him in snark. “I didn’t ask you for a drunk test before we got married.”
His lips pulled into a grim smile as he shook his head. “You knew I was wasted.”
True. “So humor me. And like I said, I switched to drinking water when Clementine ordered me to. I’m hydrated.”
“Fine, we’ll negotiate the terms now, but we won’t sign it until tomorrow morning.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
His half-smile and dip of his chin suggested that he didn’t believe me. “Nevertheless.”
“I’ll bet the concierge desk here could send up a notary public and a witness if you asked them to.”
“Tomorrow, morning.” But his tone wasn’t angry, just firm. “Because you deserve the chance to back out when you sober up, too.”
I flopped on the soft velvet comforter on the bed. I wasn’t that drunk. My early-twenties liver was metabolizing that alcohol like a bonfire. “Fine.”
Nicolai left me sitting there, ruminating, while he grabbed his computer from the living room and closed the bedroom door again on his way back.
He sat on the bed and reclined against the padded headboard, setting his laptop aside as he unbuttoned each of his shirt cuffs and rolled up his sleeves to his elbows one flip at a time, slowly baring his muscled forearms like a stripper.
I watched.
The black tattoo carved into the skin of his left forearm, patterning his skin in long rows that looked pointed on the ends like overlapping tiles, the last few strands of ink sliding under the silver-metal watch on his wrist.
He opened his computer on his lap. “Now, where were we?”
Enjoying your slutty little tattoo is where we were, but I kept that thought inside.
After successfully distracting him from the sleeper-spy codes and his slip about being the tsar, I felt like a pretty good friend, if not a halfway decent wife.
I scooted around on the bed, bunching the flowing copper silk of my dress and tucking my legs into crisscross-applesauce.
He typed as he spoke. “As we agreed this morning, or yesterday morning because it’s nearly dawn, we are contracting for a one-year term with a settlement of twenty-five million dollars at fulfillment.”
Whoa! “Dude! I’m not that drunk. You promised to talk me down to fifteen.”
“Oh, no. I’m terrible at this.” He continued typing. “And at the end, a civil divorce and your assistance in attaining an annulment.”
I crawled up to the top of the bed and looked over his shoulder, half-expecting to find video solitaire on the screen.
But no, he had a document open and was typing bulleted points of what he’d said, including Settlement after one year: 30 Million USD.
Thirty? “You’re just kidding about that much money, right?”
“I’m not.”
“It seems excessive.”
He scrunched his nose at me. “Not really.”
“It really is.”
“Luckily for you, I’m the one writing the contract. The reason it’s not excessive is because your time is worth what someone is willing to pay. If I’m willing to pay thirty million, that’s what it’s worth.”
I could have the lawyers change it to something reasonable once they showed up in the morning. “I think someone might have slipped a mickey into your drink at the nightclub.”
“I’m quite aware of when I’m elevated, and I’m not.”
“Okay, fine, but I sure wouldn’t pay thirty million dollars for a year of my company,” I grumbled.
“We’ll have to disagree on that one.”
He typed, Lexi remaining virgo intacta until the end of the contract.
There it was. That’s what I wanted to argue. “Um, about that—” His side-eye nearly stopped my tongue, but I pressed on. “We don’t have to put that in the contract.”
Nicolai lifted his computer off his lap and set it on the nightstand before he turned back to me. “We discussed this.”
“I understand your boundaries, but I’m not signing any contract that says I have to remain a virgin.”