“No mistake,” Volkov said. “Michel Pictet said we would negotiate. Tambovskaya Group will make significant investment in your family corporation business, and we’re now negotiating how much.”
My uncle said, “Nicolai, it’s something to consider.”
Even though a thick vodka mist swirled in my skull, this wasnothappening. “No.No, absolutelynot.”
“What? It is just business arrangement, like all of life,” Volkov said, shrugging.
“Just hear him out, Nicolai.”
When I glanced at my brother on my other side, Konstantin’s eyes widened more, like he was stretching his eyelids at a crime scene. He said, “We Romanovs haven’t arranged marriages for centuries, like since the eighteen hundreds. And even then, there was always an expectation that either party could refuse. Our marriages have always been love matches, not for treaties for land or anything.”
“Yes, yes.Lovematches, you had,” Volkov mocked. “When you drag three sisters from Austria to St. Petersburg and pick one, and then she converts and marries you the next day, that islove.”
I leaned forward over the table. “I’m not in the market for a wife.”
“So be in the market.” He leaned back and peered at us, his gray eyes appraising Konstantin and me like we were lobsters in a restaurant fish tank. “Our family has significant cash flow, but people of wealth and status won’t do business with us because they see us as still criminals. You have legitimate business connections. This is good deal for all of us.”
Shit, and I’d thought Michel’s shady business connections were my biggest problems. “I apologize that my uncle misled you in thinking that I would ever,ever,agree to marry for money.”
“Is not for money. Is forconnections.My daughter went to elite girls’ boarding school in England, but those English girls snub her. They are Lady This and Lady That and featured inTatler,but my girl is no one there, even though I pay same tuition plus make donations. My grandchildren will be princes and princesses, not peasant nobodies. English lords and ladies willhaveto pay attention.”
“We are stopping this discussion right now. I will not discuss this further.”
“Why is such problem? I married my wife to combine influence with Pskovskaya bratva, and she was pretty. We get along, have common interests, good at business. My daughter is beautiful woman, and smart, too. She read economics at Oxford. You will like her.”
Again, his last sentence sounded more like a command than a recommendation. “I cannot stress enough thatI will notmarry your daughter.”
Volkov frowned. “I do not like you refusing deal.” He shook his head a little like he was clearing it. “Come, we will drink until we understand each other.”
He picked up the bottle and topped up all the shot glasses on the table with clear liquor, sloshing a little down the sides.
Not enough vodka in my bloodstream wasnotmy problem. “No, thank you.”
The pudgy guy sitting next to Volkov, veins spiderwebbing his inflated nose, swayed in the booth seat. His eyelids drooped.
Volkov stared at me, his eyes narrowing. “I said,drink.”
This Russian mafia pakhan wasn’t accustomed to being defied, but he didn’t usually consort with emperors. No one fucking toldmehow to conduct my business or who I was going to fucking marry. “We can discuss a business deal, but I am not contracting to marry anyone. No disrespect to you or your daughter, who I am sure is lovely and intelligent, butabsolutely not.”
“Then how youwillfind a girl to marry, huh? You will go to Royal Ascot horse races, The Proms, and polo matches, and you meet blue-blood women there. People like you. Princess This and Lady That. Maybe twenty women who are like that, you meet in your whole life, and you choose one of them. It is not so different from old days when the dowager Empress,your mother, would write letter to cousins and find two suitable princesses who would come toSankt-Peterburgto audition in front of you.”
“That’s not how it is at all,” I sputtered, keenly aware that Volkov’s description was exactly how it was.
John Borbon, whose bachelor party I was in Las Vegas to attend, was the Duke of Badajoz and fourth in line to the throne of Spain, and he was marrying the Infanta Anna, the younger sister of the future Spanish queen. They’d met at a royal garden party at Buckingham Palace during the London season. Over egg-mayonnaise sandwiches and Victoria sponge, they’d discovered that they weren’t genetically related despite both being at the top of the list for the throne of Spain. Their ancestors must have danced around each other but never touched, though they’d double-checked that with a genetic test to make sure no one had slipped into the wrong bed a generation or two back.
They’d gotten engaged six months later.
That’s howeveryoneI knew found a spouse.
“Do not deny what is in front of my face. You are not on dating apps, swiping left and right on hundreds of women,” Volkov scoffed. “There is no difference. There are few women in the world you would even consider asking for marriage, and my daughter would not be one of them because I am just old vor from Soviet days. My great-grandfather was criminal in gulag who ruled his prison, but now we make money in business instead of dig coal.”
I knew I was backpedaling, but the vodka was rising uncontrollably in my veins. “Look, it’s really not that way.”
If I’d protested that several royals I’d known had married commoners, it would have merely proven Volkov’s point. If we didn’t marry among ourselves, we sure as hell didn’t marrycriminals.My mother’s family had barely passed musterbecause they were in private banking, which everyone knew was a front for money laundering, though it’s rarely discussed.
But she’d been rich, and her family filled our bank accounts.
Just like Grace Kelly had saved Monaco’s finances when she’d married Prince Rainier with her million-dollar dowry, we’d advertised that as a love match, too, though it had been anything but. She’d just wanted to be a princess.
