Baby for My Ex’s Brother (Forbidden Kings #15)

1. Luna

LUNA

I’ve rehearsed this speech forty-seven times.

I know because I counted. Twice in the shower this morning, six times on the L, three times in the Uber from the stop because I was running late, and the rest in the mirror of my apartment while I did my makeup and told myself I was absolutely, one hundred percent going to do this.

I’m going to walk through those doors, find Hugo Dumas in whatever obscenely expensive suit he bought for his obscenely expensive wedding to the woman he cheated on me with, and I’m going to say what I came here to say.

I’ve got it memorized. It’s a good speech.

It opens strong, has a solid emotional throughline, and ends with a line I borrowed from a documentary about a Victorian poisoner who smiled at her sentencing.

Cherry said it was “unhinged in the best possible way.” Mike said it made him want to stand up and clap, but he once cried at a fabric softener commercial, so the bar there is debatable.

The point is, I’ve prepared.

But what I have not prepared for is the Elysian Hotel.

I knew the wedding was being held here because Hugo used to talk about this place as if it were a religious experience, some temple to the kind of wealth that didn’t announce itself because it didn’t have to. His family owns the place, but did he ever take me here?

Nope.

The exterior alone is enough to make you feel underdressed at the cellular level—pale stone and iron and the kind of architectural detail that says we have always had money and we always will—and I’m standing on the sidewalk in front of it, and the massive ornate brass and glass doors are right there.

Suddenly, my forty-seven rehearsals are doing absolutely nothing for the certainty that I’m about to make a very public, very permanent mistake.

But I look good. That part, at least, I got right.

The dress is black silk and flares just slightly at the knee, low-cut in a way that screams scandalous-but-appropriate—the exact the energy I was going for. I even used a little bronzer to make my cleavage pop, since the neckline plunges between my tits.

But… What the fuck am I doing?

I never wear anything like this. My normal aesthetic runs more toward black jeans and oversized vintage tees and secondhand boots that have seen things.

This dress is a different species entirely.

It makes me feel like someone who knows exactly what she’s doing and where she’s going, which is useful right now because I’m faking both.

My hair is up, black and pinned into something that took forty minutes and two YouTube tutorials, with the white streak at my left temple curled and framing my face on purpose. Hugo used to ask me, gently, repeatedly, if I’d ever thought about dyeing it. I never did.

Tonight, it feels like a flag I’m planting.

I smooth the dress. I check my clutch for my phone and lipstick. Got it. I take a breath and walk toward the doors.

Inside, there’s enough marble and gold and warm chandelier light to give me pause. But I came here for revenge, and I’m not leaving until I get it. I will humiliate Hugo in front of his new bride, the woman who apparently has no sense of solidarity with other women.

Excuse me, it should be more like child . She’s twenty-one, for fuck’s sake.

I march toward the sign that reads, “ Dumas-Witte Reception ,” and make it approximately twelve steps before a hand closes around my elbow.

It’s a large hand, and it comes from a large person—I process this in the half-second before I turn, a looming figure at my periphery.

Security. Fuck.

My second thought is I should have gotten a plus-one, because there’s nothing that says ‘I belong here’ quite like another human being vouching for your existence with their physical presence.

The security guard is tall in a way that requires a slight recalibration of my field of vision, silver at the temples of dark hair that’s gone mostly gray, and he has the kind of face that isn’t handsome so much as significant—all hard angles and a jaw that could break his teeth if he’s not careful.

Those eyes are chilling, though, so I don’t struggle.

They’re nearly black.

Now that I’m really looking at this mountain, there’s history written all over that hard face.

Scars. Not subtle ones. A thin one bisects his left brow.

Another traces the edge of his jaw. Even with his salt and pepper stubble, that scar can’t hide.

His hands are scarred, too, and tattooed, ink climbing past the crisp cuff of his suit jacket—which is, I notice despite myself, an extraordinarily well-made suit. Very dark. Very precise.

The grip on my elbow is not painful.

Security, I remind myself. Rich-person security, which is apparently just regular security in better clothing.

“Okay,” I say, giving him a sheepish smile. “You’ve got me. I admit it. I’m deeply suspicious. But you don’t need to manhandle me.”

He doesn’t respond to this. He simply moves, one hand at my elbow, steering me away from the doors with the calm efficiency of a man returning a book to a shelf, and I’m apparently going with him because my feet are making that decision before my brain files its objection.

“I can explain why I’m here, just let go,” I say, mostly to his profile, which does not react.

We stop in front of a door I hadn’t noticed, tucked into the wood-paneled wall of the corridor just inside the lobby, and he opens it, and we are, inexplicably, in a coat closet.

A very nice coat closet, because this is the Elysian Hotel and even the places they store things are lovely—cedar and dim warm light from a single overhead fixture, coats and jackets on a long brass rail, a shelf above stacked with hat boxes that probably contain actual hats.

The door closes behind us with a soft, definitive click.

And I’m trapped in a room with a man three times my size and zero sense of humor about these things. I turn to face him in about fourteen inches of available space, which means I’m also tipping my head back to maintain eye contact, which I resent on principle.

“I’ve been to smaller apartments.”

Still nothing.

“Not mine,” I clarify. “Mine is a reasonable size. I’m just saying, as closets go?—”

“You’re Luna Ambrose.” His voice is low and vibrates in my spine, as if he growls more than speaks. It stops me mid-sentence, the same way a hand on a shoulder stops a spinning thing.

I guess Hugo expected me. Dammit.

“Twenty-eight,” he continues, unhurried. “Candle shop on Wicker Park. Previously engaged to Hugo Dumas for approximately eight months, during three years together. The engagement ended within a week of his newest engagement’s beginning.”

“Are you—” I pause, and then restart. “Did Hugo hire you to keep me out? Because I didn’t realize he took me so seriously, considering everything.”

“I’m not employed by Hugo.”

I narrow my eyes at him. “Then how do you know who I am?”

He looks at me for a moment, and his expression doesn’t change in any meaningful way. “I make it my business to know who attends events at my hotel.”

“ Your hotel.”

“My hotel.”

I process this. “So you’re not security.”

“No.”

“You’re—” I stop again. Look at him. At the suit, the scars. “Who are you?”

“I’m Ivan Fedorov. Hugo’s stepbrother.”

Hugo never spoke much about his family, or his friends, or anything too deep.

He kept that part of his life in a separate compartment with the lid on tight.

At first, I thought he was just private.

But over the years, I realized he was connected.

I knew enough to understand that his family’s business was not the kind of thing you Googled unless you wanted the FBI to start a file on you.

I knew he had an older stepbrother, but the name was never offered.

“You’re at your stepbrother’s wedding,” I say slowly, because I’m still orienting.

“I am.”

“In a coat closet.”

His lip twitches. “Temporarily.”

“With me.”

“Also temporarily,” he says, and then, with no change in tone whatsoever, “though that’s negotiable.”

“And what are we negotiating, exactly?” I fold my arms across my chest. “If you know who I am, you know I’m not a real threat. I was just going to go in there and say my piece and?—”

“And make a scene at a wedding in my hotel,” he cuts in. “In front of two hundred guests, a third of whom have a professional relationship with me.”

“I wasn’t going to make a scene?—”

He looks at me, an eyebrow raising.

“It’s a very dignified speech,” I continue, “One I designed to surgically eviscerate your stepbrother in front of his new child bride.” Which gives me pause. “Okay, maybe I was going to make a tiny scene?—”

“Right.” He reaches into the interior pocket of his jacket, produces a slim silver case, and I think for a surreal moment that he’s about to offer me a cigarette, but he just opens and closes it once—a thinking gesture, maybe—and puts it away.

“Hugo has recently made things very difficult for me. Professionally. This marriage is a problem I didn’t need and didn’t consent to.

” He pauses. “We had words, before the ceremony.”

I think about Hugo and this man having words and decide that it must have been a very specific and probably one-sided kind of words. Like an Italian Greyhound going up against a Mastiff.

An angry Mastiff.

“He said some things,” Ivan continues, “that I would prefer to respond to personally.”

“And what does that have to do with me?”

He looks at me then with the full weight of those almost-black eyes, and I become briefly and intensely aware that I’m in a very small space with a very large, very serious person who has, by his own account, reasons to want Hugo Dumas to suffer, which puts us in rare and somewhat alarming company.

At some point, Hugo cared about me. If this giant wants revenge…

“Um—”

“You want him to see you happy. Unbroken. With someone he cannot compete with.” He says this without vanity, which somehow makes it worse. Or better? I can’t decide. “I want him to understand that his position is not what he believes it to be. That his choices have consequences.”

It clicks. “So you want to use me to upset him at his own wedding.”

“I want to offer you the opportunity to upset him at his own wedding. A speech is all well and good, but what is the old phrase? Show, don’t tell?”

Feels like a pity to waste all that time on a speech and not use it.

But the same is true of this dress. If I go in there and do my speech and leave, what was the point of the dress? What was the point of any of this, if I don’t ruin his big day properly?

I purse my lips, and then take the bait. “Okay, what exactly are you proposing then, Ivan?”

He looks at me in the warm, dim light of a coat closet in his own hotel. “Play my date tonight, and we’ll show Hugo what it means to regret. Together.”

A dozen thoughts come to mind. Cherry would want me to ask follow-up questions. Uncle Marty would tell me to try any approach I wanted, because he supports me no matter what. My therapist, if I had one, would strongly advise against doing any of this, because it’s crazy.

Which is all the answer I need.

I smile up at Ivan. “Yes.”