When I was little, my mom had taken me to her mother’s funeral in Wisconsin, back when it had been just me and her, before Gerry and her new family. We’d slept in a cigarette-fouled highway motel where she wouldn’t let me leave the room because the truckers in the lobby had been eyeing both of us.
The carpeting had been orange under the bed and gray-brown everywhere else.
And then, before my interrupted wedding to Jimmy, I’d rented the smallest, cheapest room at the Monaco Casino because where I was staying didn’t matter.
Jimmy had stayed in the bridal suite.
But I hadn’t mattered.
Huh.
This living room was like something out of a movie set, a film that was sophisticated and glamorous, not a blockbuster. The pale blue couches were upholstered in velveteen, and the lamps and tables were matching matte silver and looked almost like brushed steel.
The crystal bowl of plastic fruit on the coffee table shot sparkles of rainbows around the room from where one sunlight beam lanced one curved side.
Nicolai performed a dance where he dropped his suit jacket off his arms behind his back, catching its collar on one crooked finger, and handed it to a maid in a black dress passing behind him who then hung it up in a closet, both of them somehow knowing exactly where the transition would happen. Then he walked over, plucked one of those eerily perfect apples out of the sparkling crystal dish, and bit down on it.
I was reaching toward him, a warning on my lips that he shouldn’t eat the obviously AI-generated neon-glowing plastic fruit from that uncanny valley of a bowl, but the crunch of his teeth on the apple skin was louder than the protesting peasant in my head.
Rich people had prettier things than regular people. Even their fruit was better.
Someone was pounding on the door, and a man’s deep voice was yelling, wanting in.
Nicolai stared at me like he was saying something beneath his words as he said, “Kostya is much younger than I am.Muchyounger. He isn’t as cognizant about security as I am.”
“Okay?” I’d missed something. I knew it, but I didn’t know what.
One of the security guys whom I couldn’t keep straight, let alone figure out their names, touchedhis ear like demons were speaking to him and then twisted the doorknob to pull open the door to the hallway. “Konstantin.”
The guy from the hotel lobby strode in, glaring.
Everything about him was Nicolai, from his extravagant height to the clear teal-blue eyes and the geometric angle of his jawline, his athletic stride, and the way he didn’t look around the room because opulent hotel suites were nothing new to him.
At first, I thought he must be Nicolai’s identical twin, maybe ten minutes younger since Nicolai had said that he would have inherited via his firstborn status, but Nicolai had said his brother was my age.
As the clone got closer, the tells of youth became clearer. This guy wasn’t as filled out in the shoulders and chest, and his cheeks were rounder even though anger contracted his face. He wore slim-cut trousers and a white button-down oxford shirt, and brown loafers, everything about him just slightly more casual but still exuding wealth.
And Nicolai had never looked as angry as his brother did right then.
Even when Nicolai had manhandled that jock who’d assaulted me a little the night before, he hadn’t looked thismad.
The new guy was yelling as he approached. “When the fuck were you going to tell me abouther?”
I backed toward the wall. I could feel when it was time to hide from an angry man under the dining room table.
Konstantin blustered about how Nicolai never told him anything important, never let him into his life, was just another absent parental figure, and didn’t even tell him thathe was getting married.
Nicolai calmly ate the apple, prying off bites with his straight, white teeth and chewing, allowing Konstantin’s rage to spend itself while I did my best impression of silent, motionless drywall.
As the new guy wound down, Nicolai set the slim apple core in a smaller bowl beside the fruit-bearing one and wiped his fingers meticulously with a cloth napkin that I hadn’t even seen tucked under the crystal serving ware. “Kostya, I would like to introduce you to my wife, Lexi Faith Romanov.”
My heart stuttered.
My. Wife.
To his brother.
Wow.
