To Rule A Kingdom of Nothing (Billionaire Sanctuary: The Heir #3)

Chapter 1

violent delights

NICOLAI

To Rule A Kingdom of Nothing

is the third book in the

Billionaire Sanctuary: The Heir series.

Please read Books 1 and 2 first.

A Prince of Smoke and Mirrors

An Heir to Blood and Power

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The next morning, I lay on my back on the bed, my heart pounding my ribs like a fist punching a basement wall again and again.

It would have to be done. I would have to say it.

Like ripping off a plaster, I told myself.

Quick, clear, and firm. Hope was not merciful. Ambiguity was not kindness.

A bold stroke to slice everything cleanly away.

I was fucking dying inside.

My ad hoc wife, Lexi, lay beside me in the hotel bed, a warm, squishy bundle under the blankets. Scooping her into my arms, burying my face in her shoulder, and stroking the softness of her skin was a temptation to which I could not yield.

Her sleeping breath was light, a soft catch in her throat at the turn of each inhale, and then a quiet sigh, again and again.

The in, the out, I meditated upon her breath, floating in those last moments.

My silenced phone lay against my sternum, the battery overwarm from replaying the video again and again.

Don’t wake up.

Lie here, safe and still with me.

Don’t wake up.

But Lexi stirred, tiny little stretches presaging her rise toward consciousness.

I steeled myself for what must be done.

She rolled over. Her quiet murmur might have been a dream. “Hey.”

I willed down the sickness in my throat.

Bright glares reflecting from the cars on the street below striped the ceiling.

Firm. Quick. Like a cleaver. “I’m divorcing you. Get out.”

“What?” Her pitiful keen held kittenish notes of panic.

“We’re done.” Quick and clean. Drawing it out was sadistic. “Pack and get out.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” I lied. I hated lying to her.

“Nicolai!”

God, I wished I’d never come to Las Vegas for John’s bachelor weekend. I should have stayed in Paris, critiquing Clemmy’s texted pictures from the other side of the Atlantic.

It would have been better if I had never met her.

But I held every minute of yesterday in my heart. Every glance, every breath—

Every taste.

One more terse statement from me should be enough. Lexi would run out of the hotel room crying, and I could have divorce papers served to her wherever she ended up.

She would curse me for the rest of her life, posting cruel diatribes on social media with old Taylor Swift songs in the background.

I was counting on it.

My breath shuddered in my chest where my hand clenched my damned phone, its screen down and dark against my tee shirt.

I didn’t trust myself to look at her.

“Baloney.” The mattress bent under my hips as Lexi maneuvered herself to sitting, her legs crossed. “Bull-hockin’-loney.”

The steel in her lilting voice was unexpected.

No, Lexi must adhere to the script. She needs must run out of the room and the hotel, preferably sobbing, in full view of everyone in the lobby and bar.

Because I didn’t know who’d recorded that video, but it must have been someone trusted in our small group, someone with the proverbial keys to the castle.

If she made a spectacle in the lobby of this private hotel, the Billionaire Sanctuary, word would get around. Someone would be indulging in a morning cocktail in the lobby bar, or security personnel would be chatting with the always-amiable staff at the front desk.

Everyone would hear about it, somehow.

They’d know she’d left me.

So, I needed to inflict more cruelty to make sure she did it right.

My fucking heart.

“Your bag is on the luggage cart,” I told her.

“I’m not leaving.” She snatched at the bedsheet and blanket, dragging them to cover her curvy bare legs, thin pyjama shirt, and utter lack of a bra, and I envied the blankets stroking up her skin. “At the very least, we’re talking about it.”

God, what I would give to wrap my palms and fingers around her calves and thighs, lick and bite her smooth skin and drag her through a gamut of emotions from desire, to uncertainty, to fear, to submission, to absolute ecstasy, just to watch them flicker across her pretty face. “I said, get out.”

Her voice snapped like a retort to an impertinent query from the press. “Absolutely not.”

Glaring wedges of chrome-reflected desert sun wove patterns on the ceiling. “I’ll have Ueli remove you if you aren’t out of here in fifteen minutes.”

“Seriously? Threatening me with your security people? That’s lazy, even for you. And I swear to God, this time, I’m not leaving without speaking up for myself.”

If I laid hands on her, I’d have her up against the wall, my mouth on her throat, instead of shoving her out the door. “Ueli will drive you to wherever you’re staying.”

I’d texted him to be waiting in the living room when she emerged.

“I’m not leaving until we talk,” she said.

“Yes, you are.” I couldn’t stifle the sigh weighing down my chest.

“I do not believe a word you’ve said all morning.

Everything is just complete and total bull hockey.

This is ridiculous, Nicolai. You’re acting like a different person.

” She paused. Out of the corner of my vision, I could see she’d frowned and was staring at her hands gripping the blanket.

“I’ve only known you for, I guess, not even a day and a half.

You don’t have, like, multiple personalities or anything, do you? ”

A reasonable enough assertion. “I’m as mentally healthy as anyone I know.”

Low bar, that.

She squinted at me. “You didn’t say you didn’t.”

Clarity was important. “No, Lexi. I don’t have dissociative personality disorder or any other psychosis. Regretfully, it’s just me in here.”

“Okay, then. Not a fae High Lord. No split personality. Then why are you being so weird?”

This conversation was not going according to plan. I’d meant to drive her away, not activate her concern for my mental health. “Lexi, pack your things. Take anything you want. But leave. Now.”

“Fine. I don’t need anything from you. I’ll just go get my car.”

Dammit. A cringe tightened my eyes and face. “It’ll be halfway to Los Angeles by now.”

“You stole my car?” Her voice cracked with panic. “I need it. I need my car.”

Yes, yes. The US was so mired in car culture and suffered from a lack of decent public transportation. Even I liked a nice train ride through the countryside during times of low security measures. Switzerland’s trains were amazing. “I’ll have it returned.”

“It’s not even a good car!”

“It was being transported to my house in L.A. for safekeeping. I’ll call them and have them turn around.” He sighed. “You can keep Dusha and one of the SUVs at your beck and call until yours gets back, probably later this afternoon. You’ll need security for a few weeks or months anyway.”

“I don’t want your creepy private mercenary security dudes lurking around me all the time. I want my car.”

“It’s for your protection.”

“You don’t care if I’m okay. You just told me to get out.”

I had been joking about her being good at negotiating last night, but she certainly was spirited at arguing. “You need security.”

“What if I had just walked out when you said to? I wouldn’t have your security people then.”

“Ueli and Dusha are waiting for you in the living room. It’s been arranged.”

“That sounds like you’ve had this argument all planned since before I woke up.”

“It doesn’t matter how it happened.”

“You’re evading my question, again.”

“It doesn’t matter if I am.”

She was staring at me like her vision could flay my flesh from my bones to see into my soul. “Yeah, that’s what I always say, that nothing matters, but I say it when I’m acting like it doesn’t matter.”

She struck with the snappy poke-slap of an attacking kitten, and then I was staring at my empty hand.

She’d taken my phone. “Lexi, no!”

“Nah, I need to see what’s really going on. I don’t believe any of this for a second.” She hid my phone behind her back and pointed at me with her other hand, the accusatory whirl of her wrist encompassing every lie I’d told her that morning and in my whole life. “This is too weird.”

I twisted and struggled, swiping around her shoulder at my own damned phone she was holding beyond my reach, and she spun in the sheets to turn her back to me. “Stop it.”

“Lexi, give me my phone.” I kicked at the blankets and mostly freed my legs. “This is an invasion of my privacy.”

Because fuck me, I’d left the damned thing unlocked after obsessing over that video since it had popped up in my notifications a few hours before, when I’d awakened to my phone screen casting a green glow on the ceiling.

She spun in the sheets easily while I flailed, turning her back to me and hunching over my phone. “What the heck?” she demanded. “Was this from last night?”

The video was mercifully silent because I’d listened to it the first time through my AirPods, but then I’d muted it as I’d tried to triangulate who’d shot the video and thus so egregiously broken everyone’s trust last night.

At the Omnia the night before, we’d had a spy in our midst, and from the angles of the camera shots, they’d been right in the center of our proverbial midst, not at the edges.

I feinted a grab at the phone around one of Lexi’s shoulders. When she twisted, I almost snatched it with my other hand. “Lexi, stop watching it.”

“No. I want to know what the hell happened with you. It’s not right to just walk away from someone and they don’t even know why. It’s not right.”

To wrest it from her, I’d have to hurt her, maybe injure her, and I didn’t want to. “This is not like your ex, Jimmy the Fool. Lexi, stop. You don’t want to see—”

Her body was curled around the small screen in her hands, and she blocked my grabbing hands with her shoulders.

A flip of her blond hair filled the glowing pixels. “Someone filmed us last night? That’s rude. I mean, it was a public space, but they should’ve at least gotten permission to post it. Did they tag you?”

“It wasn’t on socials. Lexi, give me my phone.”

“They were zoomed in on us the whole time. I thought that was the point, anyway, to show everyone how real we were.”

I lunged around her, trying to snap it out of her grip.

Her hand seemed to dart away from everywhere I tried.

My hand locked around her wrist and I tried to shake the phone out of her hand, but I was too gentle.

I should have done whatever was necessary to take it away from her. “Lexi, don’t fucking watch it.”

“Nicolai, language, and let go of me.”

My feints turned to frantic grappling, and I almost knocked her over as the video played, nearing the break. “Don’t watch it. Stop.”

“Wow, they even filmed us when we were standing in the hidey hole, when I was having my drunken meltdown about you being a shadow daddy. Did I really look that wild-eyed? That’s embarrassing.”

Recklessness caused my grabs to veer off the mark, and she dodged my attempts to take my phone away from her again. I was practically crawling over her, trying to wrest my own damned phone back. “Lexi, stop. Please.”

“Did you sneak away and cheat on me or something? I mean, wow, but we never even signed that supposed pre-nup contract, so it doesn’t count, I guess.”

Swipe. Dodge. Grab. Feint. Being unsuccessful was all the more uncouth. “I would never, but Lexi, turn it off. Turn it off.”

The light in the room brightened because the video on the screen was brighter, no longer a shot from inside the dark Omnia nightclub.

I swiped at it, my fingers grazing the slick glass, but she jerked her arm away. “Lexi, no!”

Her voice had lost its breath, like she’d been sucker-punched. “What is this?”

The fight had gone out of my voice and my soul, and I sounded like I was begging even as I tried to pluck my phone from her fingers. “Turn it off.”

“Nicolai! This is a movie, right? It’s a horror movie? It’s not real. It’s not real.”