Chapter 2
an explicit threat
NICOLAI
“Stop the video.”
“That woman is—” The crack in her voice was disgust and terror, and she finally dropped the phone onto her lap. “She’s screaming. It’s muted, but my God, the way she’s screaming. That wasn’t real. Please tell me it wasn’t real.”
I snatched my phone from the rumpled sheets, its screen flickering with horrors, and thumb-tapped to stop the video. An unfortunate close-up of the woman’s sliced, screaming face filled the glass before I swiped it away and clicked the side button to turn off the screen.
“That wasn’t you, though,” Lexi insisted, staring at me. “That man who was hurting her, it wasn’t you.”
The attacker in the video had a more wiry build than I did, paler brown hair, and twitchy shrugs and shoulder jerks, while I tended to remain quiet, physically. “It wasn’t me.”
“You haven’t—ever—you haven’t done something like that.”
“I have not, and I would never do such things to anyone.” And that was my foible.
“Then why?”
I couldn’t meet her gaze. She would be unnerved that I might be the kind of person who would casually receive such atrocities on my phone. Any halfway decent person would be repulsed. “It’s a threat.”
“Do you know that woman? Is she okay now?”
“No.”
“Which question did you answer?”
My heart was thrumming again. “I never met her.”
“We have to find out where she is. We have to help her.”
My voice was quiet, but I had to push air past the hard clench in my throat. “She’s beyond help.”
Her tears were starting, deep moral pain crumpling her face. “You don’t know that. We have to help her.”
I’d felt the same earlier, but the human body can’t sustain such rage, especially when one is utterly helpless. “We can’t.” The phone’s screen remained dead in my hand. “The video continues. You don’t want to see it.”
“It couldn’t get any—” Her face glitched, froze, and she swayed before she crumpled over, her hands smashed over her face. “No.”
“You don’t want to see it.” Repeating it felt stupid, but my mind was quaking as hard as her shoulders. “The video was filmed a few months ago. Probably February.”
“But how do you know?”
Because she and her husband had disappeared around Valentine’s Day.
The news of their murder had been whispered in disgusted hisses in March as the horses had thundered over the hedges and fences at the springtime Cheltenham Festival in Gloucestershire, as our attempts to close ranks hadn’t succeeded.
I shouldn’t have reached for her, but Lexi was sobbing in a miserable little heap.
My hand stole across the gulf of blankets between us, hovering over the few inches that felt like a force field because I should not touch her.
This grief, this rage, this agonizing moral injury would force her to leave me, and she had to.
My fingertips touched down on the softness of her tee shirt first, then spread, and my palm settled on her back as she gasped and shuddered with sobs. “You shouldn’t have seen that,” I murmured to her.
“No, that should have never happened! Not that I shouldn’t have seen it. Not that they shouldn’t have gotten caught. We need to throw them in a volcano or something. We need to stop them from doing this to anyone ever again.”
That video was not the very worst of the rumors. “It is why you need to pack your things right now and leave. This video is a threat.”
“You can’t tell me that you live with threats like that.”
“Not usually this . . . explicit.” I leaned back, steadying myself with my hand stroking her back.
I laid my phone on the nightstand and snagged the box of tissues beside it with one finger, offering it to her while I rubbed her spine.
“The only way I can protect you from them is to divorce you, annul the marriage, and remove you from my life. You need to go somewhere else, anywhere else. Don’t try to contact me. ”
She snatched a tissue from my offered box and dragged it into the miserable ball she’d curled into. “They shouldn’t have done that to her. No one should ever do that. There’s no reason that should ever happen.”
“Her husband was a journalist who was writing about criminal business enterprises, certain heinous crimes, and the politicians and other powerful people they were extorting for engaging in illegal actions.”
I couldn’t even name it. That was how terrible it was, how ruinous, how soul-destroying, that even I could not force myself to speak of such crimes.
“You said you didn’t know who she was,” Lexi sighed.
“They said her name and her husband’s earlier in the video. The sound wasn’t up for you. The couple disappeared a few months ago. Her husband was going to expose their depravity.”
“But—so then it wasn’t even her they were after!”
“They made him watch what they did to his wife, and then they did the same to him.”
“You watched the rest of the video, then. Before I woke up.”
I nodded because my throat had closed up again.
With axes. While they’d still lived and screamed.
Looking away had felt like I was abdicating my responsibility to witness.
“I can’t let that happen to you,” I choked out. “Take your things and go. Run, Lexi.”
“But they’ll come after me anyway, won’t they? That’s how these things work. I’ve read books. I’ve watched the movies.”
I couldn’t even think about that. “Not if I tell everyone that marrying you was a drunken whim and nothing else. That you are gone. That you didn’t mean anything to me,” I lied.
“But you told everyone last night that we’ve secretly been dating for years. You convinced them of that.”
“The people who sent this are lazy. I have known them my whole life. If they get what they want, which evidently is me, they won’t chase you. I’ve had hours to think it through this morning. It’s the only way.”
“‘Only way,’ my chubby patoot,” Lexi grumbled, her devastation solidifying into something grimmer as she unwound herself and straightened to sitting.
I let my fingers slide down her tee shirt over her ribs, and my hand fell to the bed.
That was probably the last time I would touch her.
“Men think they’ve come up with ‘the only way,’ but it never is,” Lexi grumbled. “It’s just the easiest way for them, not the only way.”
I unclenched my fists, spreading my hands. “I am open to alternatives.”
Even though I was not open to any other options at all. Nothing would be as safe for Lexi as if she ran for the fucking hills, right then.
“Besides,” she said, wiping her wet, reddened cheeks with the tissue. “You would still be here, around people like that. You’d still be . . . threatened.”
“I don’t matter.”
“Yes, you do.”
I didn’t. I was a sacrificial lamb from a long line of hereditary sacrificial lambs.
The tsar was always sacrificed when his influence waned—exiled, executed, or assassinated—and I’d never amassed the bitter power to stay alive in the battle royale cage match of international crime that had infiltrated and poisoned global politics.
I would not commit such despicable crimes nor incite others to commit worse upon the most weak and vulnerable people to establish a sick trust based on mutual destruction by blackmail.
It was the fucking way of the world, and I hated it with every fiber of my being.
I was quite certain my father and uncle had committed unspeakable crimes, and cold sweat broke out on my skin anew.
I hadn’t the constitution for it. Too many civilized Europeans had diluted the ruthless genes of tsars in my DNA. “I need you to leave, my angel. For my soul to be at ease, I need you to be safe.”
She was glaring at her hands, and I could practically smell the burning-electricity ozone of her mental machinery sparking. “I won’t leave you here, vulnerable, where they might hurt you.”
“Yes, you will,” I ordered her. “You’re leaving now.
You’re packing your things and going now.
I will have Ueli drag you out of here screaming if I have to, and I’ll tell everyone I tired of you.
I can make them believe it. I can make them believe I never cared about you, that this day and a half was nothing to me. ”
She finally looked up at me, her cheeks and nose flushed from crying, and her eyes red around the rims and in the whites. Strands of her blond hair stuck to her damp cheeks.
I hated that I’d made her cry, but I would do worse if it convinced her to go.
“You said there were no other options,” she said, her voice cracking. “And yet you just said another one right there, telling your friends that you kicked me out. Let’s think of some more.”
“It’ll be easier to convince these people that you’re not a threat if you leave me, preferably cursing my name and sobbing all the way through the lobby, screaming that you wished you’d never met me.
But as you hypothesized about medieval kings yesterday, a heartless royal such as myself might have staged a sham ceremony to get you into bed, and then once I’d fucked you, I tired of your commonness and am disposing of you. ”
Her dark eyebrows jumped. “Commonness, huh? Rude.”
“No one will question it. Happens all the time.”
“But does it?” Her nose scrunched as if she smelled something foul. “Really? Nowadays, rich people form legally binding relationships with normies just to boink them for a few days? I don’t think so.”
“We manipulate everyone because we don’t care. Because there are no consequences for us.”
There really weren’t.