Chapter 2
The first thing Yegor registered, on the morning that would change every plan he had ever made, was the wrong ceiling.
His own bedroom ceiling, in his Houston penthouse, was a soft cream with recessed lighting and a single Murano chandelier hanging dead center above the bed. He had stared at it ten thousand times in the dark. He knew its every shadow.
This ceiling was white plaster molded in a coffered grid, gold-leafed at the corners, lit from below by a strip of LED warmth tucked behind a wide crown molding. Hotel ceiling. Las Vegas ceiling.
The second thing he registered was the pounding in his temples, a slow, evil throb that suggested he had drunk a great deal of something brown the night before and possibly fought somebody.
The third thing he registered was the bruise.
He moved his jaw. It hurt. He brought a hand up to it. There was a bruise on his jaw the size of a small plum, tender to the touch, and he remembered absolutely nothing about how it had gotten there.
The fourth thing he registered was the ring.
He felt it before he saw it. A weight on his left hand that did not belong. He lifted his hand slowly into his field of vision, and his stomach dropped.
A gold band.
Plain. Not a wedding ring he would have ever chosen. Slightly tight on his ring finger. Real gold, by the weight of it, not cheap brass. He stared at it.
The fifth thing he registered was the woman.
She was sitting at the small marble table by the window of what he now realized was an enormous suite, drinking coffee from a hotel mug, wrapped in what he recognized, with a slow, lurching horror, was his own white dress shirt from the night before, the silk one with mother-of-pearl buttons.
Her hair was in long, neat cornrows pulled back from her face.
Her warm brown skin was bare of makeup. Her brown eyes were already on him.
She looked at him over the rim of the mug like she was calmly, methodically planning his murder.
He sat up.
The world tilted, then settled.
For a moment they just looked at each other across the enormous suite, two strangers taking stock.
He saw a beautiful woman with a guarded face.
She saw, she would tell him much later, a man who looked genuinely frightened underneath the famous face, which was the only reason she hadn't already left, a guilty man would have been smooth, would have managed her.
This one just looked as lost as she felt.
"Good morning," he said, his voice hoarse. His mouth tasted like he had eaten the bottom of a shoe.
She did not answer.
"You're…" He looked at his hand again. His mouth went dry. "Is that…"
"Yes."
"Did we,"
"I don't think so." Her voice was low and steady, her hand on the mug. "I think we got married."
He stared at her.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry, can you say that again."
"I said," she repeated, slowly and clearly, "I think we got married."
He opened his mouth. Then closed it.
He looked at the ring on his finger then back at her.
He saw, then, a matching band on her left hand, gleaming on her brown skin.
He saw a discarded velvet jacket on the floor in a color he did not own.
He saw, with sickening clarity, his own phone on the nightstand, screen lit, vibrating against the wood.
He picked it up.
Eleven missed calls from his sister.
Sixteen missed calls from Wendell Jasper.
Forty-two notifications from a Twitter app he had not used personally in three years.
The top notification said: @MrAndMrsRightNow has tagged you in a video. 3.2M views.
His thumb moved without his permission. He tapped it.
A video began to play.
He saw himself. Two and a half feet from a camera, lit by ballroom lights, laughing, actually laughing, at something the woman beside him had just said.
The woman beside him was the woman in his shirt sitting across the room.
She was wearing a deep red dress that hugged her shoulders, a flute of champagne tilted in her hand, her cornrows pulled back into a low knot, gold hoops glinting at her ears. She was laughing too.
A man in a bright pink tuxedo with a microphone said, "Are you SURE about this, you two?"
Yegor in the video said, "I have never been more sure of anything in my life."
The woman in the video said, "He has GREAT eyebrows."
The audience screamed with laughter.
A man in a robe stepped forward.
A book opened.
A vow was said.
A ring went onto a finger.
A kiss happened that Yegor did not remember but watched, on a phone screen, his stomach falling away from him as if the floor of an elevator had just dropped from under his feet.
The pink-tuxedo man yelled into the camera, "AND THAT'S A WRAP ON MR. AND MRS. RIGHT NOW VEGAS EDITION! THREE-POINT-TWO MILLION CONCURRENT! WE'LL SEE Y'ALL TOMORROW!"
The video ended.
Yegor lowered the phone.
He looked across the room at the woman in his shirt.
He had married a complete stranger live on the internet in front of three point two million witnesses.
*****
"I need your name," he said.
He had moved to the edge of the bed. He had not stood up, because he was not sure his legs would carry him, and because he had become very aware that he was wearing only boxer briefs and that this woman had, somewhere in the last twelve hours, become his legal wife.
She set down the mug.
"Tanisha," she said. "Boone."
"Yegor Tarasoff."
"I know," she said. "It's on three million TikToks."
He pressed his hands to his face.
"Okay," she said. The steadiness in her voice was unreal. He had been around boardroom poker players who held a worse line than she was holding right now. "Okay. Let me. Let me reconstruct."
He looked at her from between his fingers.
"You first," he said.
She drew a slow breath.
"I came to Vegas for a culinary award. Closed industry event, no press.
I won a regional cooking competition. The reception was last night at the ballroom downstairs.
" She paused. "I had two glasses of champagne at the reception.
Then a couple of my crew came in from Nashville and we went down to the lobby bar for drinks.
I had ... a lot of drinks. I haven't had a lot of drinks in a very long time. "
"Why?"
She gave him a look that said none of your business.
"Okay," he said. "Go on."
"There were people walking around the lobby with cameras. They had on bright clothes. Pink, yellow, neon green. They had microphone and were stopping people."
"Mr. and Mrs. Right Now."
"You know it?"
"I've seen ads. It's a livestream dating show. Twitch and YouTube. They do walk-in stunts, weddings, breakups, fake proposals. Three million followers, give or take. My PR director showed me one of their bits last year as an example of what she did not ever want me associated with."
She gave him a hard, dry laugh that had no humor in it at all.
"Well," she said. "Congratulations."
"How did they choose us?"
"You're famous. One of the producers recognized you. Russian oil heir, he said. Bloomberg profile." She tilted her head. "He said you were 'the catch of the night.' Direct quote."
"And you?"
She raised her eyebrows. Just slightly.
"I was a woman in a red dress laughing with you at a bar," she said. "Whatever I look like to them, I looked like it last night."
He had no answer for that.
He looked again at the ring.
"Why did we say yes?"
"Yegor." It was the first time she had used his name.
It landed in the room like a stone in still water.
"I don't know. I genuinely don't know. I remember laughing.
I remember thinking the man in the pink tuxedo had nice teeth.
I remember you offering me your jacket because I said the casino was too cold.
After that ..." She gestured at the bed, at the ring, at the suite.
"After that, I have a lot of guesses and no memories. "
But that wasn't entirely true, and they both seemed to know it, because the memories were coming back now in pieces, uninvited and out of order.
She remembered, suddenly, the way he had laughed at something she'd said about the casino's carpet, a real laugh, surprised out of him, a laugh that did not match the cold expensive man in the Bloomberg photo at all.
She remembered telling him, with the careless honesty of six glasses of champagne, that he looked like a man who hadn't laughed in a year, and she remembered him going quiet and saying, closer to three, and the way that had landed between them and refused to be a joke.
She remembered the pink tuxedo man shoving a microphone at them, the producer's bright manic patter, folks we got a REAL one here, a billionaire and a queen, are we doing this or what.
And she remembered—this was the part that made her stomach drop all over again—that she had looked at this stranger, this sad rich man who hadn't laughed in years, and that some reckless, eighteen-months-underground, finally-out-in-the-light part of her had thought: why not.
just once. just one wild thing before I disappear again.
"You said something," she said slowly, the fragment surfacing. "Right before. You leaned over and said it just to me, not the camera. You said, 'This is insane.' And I said—"
"'So is everything else,'" Yegor finished. His face had gone strange and far away. "I remember. 'Might as well pick the insane thing that's smiling at me.'"
They looked at each other.
"That's a terrible reason to get married," Tanisha said.
"It's the most honest reason I've ever heard," said Yegor, and neither of them quite knew what to do with that, so they let it sit.
He looked back down at the ring.
"Why did we say yes?" he asked again, quieter this time, and it wasn't really a question anymore.
He put his face back into his hands and laughed.
It was the worst sound he had ever made.
"This is a real marriage," he said. "This is a legal marriage."
"Vegas marriages are real, Yegor."
"My God."
"We can annul it. I looked it up while you were sleeping. I have been awake since five."
His phone began to vibrate again on the nightstand. He looked down at it. Wendell Jasper, again. He let it ring out.
"The man you're not picking up for," she said quietly. "Important?"
"My future father-in-law."
She blinked once. Slow.
"Pardon?"
"I was supposed to formally announce my engagement to his daughter on Saturday night."
She sat back in the chair.
"What?"
"It's an arranged contract marriage," he said. "Forty-year industry partnership between our families. My father signed it before he died. I have spent the last three years honoring it. Saturday, I was going to put a twenty-carat diamond on her finger in front of three hundred guests."
"And now your finger is wearing my ring and there are three million witnesses, plus the screenshots."
Tanisha looked across the Vegas hotel suite at a man whose net worth was, according to the Forbes profile she had Googled while he was still asleep, somewhere north of two and a half billion dollars, and felt something inside her crumple and then, alarmingly, harden.
Because her own phone, on the marble table beside her coffee, had just lit up with a text.
She did not look at it.
She did not have to.
It had been buzzing since six in the morning. The same unknown number from yesterday in Nashville, except the area code was now triggering something in her mind that made her chest fill with apprehension.
She looked at it anyway, because looking at it could not be any worse than not looking at it.
Saw your clip, beautiful. Looking real cozy with that white boy. Do you really think some rich dude can keep me away from you?
She read it twice.
She read it a third time.
Her stomach dropped right out of her body and through the floor and several stories down, somewhere onto the Vegas Strip.
Eighteen months. She had been a ghost for eighteen months. New routines. No social media. No press. No photographs. Cash tips. She had built a business, a life and a quiet little crater of safety, and she had been so careful, so unbelievably careful.
One night of being seen.
One night was all it had taken.
She looked up. Yegor was watching her, still bloodshot from the night before but suddenly very alert, very awake, very present, a man who had spent his life reading rooms for a living.
"Tanisha," he said. "What just happened?"
She did not answer right away. She set the phone face down on the table. She wrapped both of her hands around her coffee mug as if she were warming them against the worst winter of her life.
Then she lifted her chin and met his eyes properly.
"Yegor," she said, "whatever you're about to say to me about this marriage, damage control, lawyers, your fiancée or your three hundred guests, you should know that I have a much bigger problem than you do."
He thought about this.
Outside the window, far below them, Las Vegas Boulevard was already a river of people who had no idea that two strangers in a penthouse suite had just become, in the space of one drunken Vegas night, the most viral married couple in America.
And one of them was being hunted.