“Of course not. I absolutely refused to sign the license last night because youhaveto be thinking better this morning, right? Last night was just some drunken escapade that’s going to make a great story to tell your buddies, but surely you didn’tmeanto propose to and immediately marry a perfect stranger you met on a sidewalk in Las Vegas. No one isthatimpulsive and reckless.”
No one had describedmeas impulsive or reckless since I was a toddler.
Maybe not even then.
I struggled to my feet, using both sides of the bathroom doorframe to wedge myself until I was standing up. “All right, so it’s not legally binding. Excellent. And then I imagine we found some Protestant priest to perform a quickie ceremony, an Elvis or something.” I chuckled to myself. “An Elvis. God, I hope it was an Elvis. My friends will never let me live it down. How absolutely mortifying.”
Lexi wiggled over to the other side of the bed and grabbed the neck of the champagne bottle out of the ice bath. She took a long swig of what I imagined to be rather flat champagne and then said, “Nope. You were being really weird about how wehadto have a Russian Orthodox priest, so we went on a side quest and found one.”
Oh, no.
She continued, “And then we wrassled a Russian Orthodox priest out of bed, and he unlocked his Russian Orthodox Church and performed the ceremony.”
Cold sweat popped out of every single pore on my body from my scalp to my ankles, and the hotel room’s air was suddenly freezing. “Surely we didn’t.”
“Yeah, he even insisted on baptizing meagaineven though I was baptized a few years ago. And then he slathered olive oil on my hands and feet before he would marry us.”
Disbelief slammed through me so hard I could barely force the words out. “You were baptized and chrismated in the Russian Orthodox faith, and thenwe were joined in the sacrament of holy matrimonybya Russian Orthodox priestina Russian Orthodox Church?Are youcertain?”
“Ithinkso. You and the priest were talking in some other language, which I assume was Russian. I was just along for the ride at that point. What did you call the oil part again?”
“That’s the chrismation. It’s a separate sacrament specific to the Orthodox Church. It seals the baptism. Roman Catholics call it a confirmation and do it differently and later, but chrismation is very important to Orthodox Christians.Iinsisted that all this be done?”
I was so damnthorough.
“I didn’t know any of it existed,” she said. “When I was baptized in an evangelical Christian church, it was a full-immersion dunk in a chlorinated water tank. Your bearded guyjust flicked some water on me and chanted for a while and then did the oil thing. That probably doesn’t even count, right?”
My throat strangled my words. “Oh, it counts.”
“And you guys were speaking a language I don’t even know. I assumed it was Russian. It sounded kind of menacing. Was it Russian?”
A window in my prison appeared. “It could’ve been any one of several languages. The church might have been a Syrian Orthodox church, or of course Greek Orthodox. Are yousureit wasn’t one of those?”
“We could check the video,” she said.
Lexisaid. I should try to remembermy wife’sname because it was becoming more and more apparent that’s what she was:my wife.
Her voice resolved into words in my mind, and horror struck through me. “There’s avideo?”
CHAPTER 21
the video
NICOLAI ROMANOV
Oh,fuck me. There was a video.
If there was a video, a video could be leaked.
If I could keep the video quiet, if I could slap NDAs on the priest and anyone else who might have a copy to avoid it being released and circulating out in the world, there was a chance of handling this problem discreetly.
Because the alternative was too dangerous to consider.
“Yeah. It’s on your phone,” Lexi said. “You insisted that we take video of the wedding and livestream it so all your friends could see it, too.”
The pounding was returning to my head like ball-peen hammers slamming over every square inch of my skull with each pulse of my heart. “Welivestreamedthe wedding.”
“Every minute of it.”
