Childhood friends were truly the worst.
At the bar, John ordered a blended mango mojito with extra mango puree, which should set his trainer’s carb restriction targets back a month.
After I ordered a Macallen 25, neat, John grinned hugely and ran his gaze over the crowd milling around us at the long bar.
Shadows danced around us, black specters thrown on the polished wood of the bar and color-filled bottles on the wall by that garish light show of a chandelier. The thumping music was marginally reduced over in this corner of the balcony, asonic trick so people could talk without screaming until their forehead veins bulged.
With a cursory glance, I determined that only people in John’s outermost circle, the third-round invitees and lower on the guest list, were clustered around this particular open bar.
John grinned even wider and lowered his head near my ear while the bartender mixed our drinks. “Are you in trouble?”
The bartender was shaking his head as he added an embarrassing amount of mango slime to a blender. “John, I already told you?—”
“Seriously, is she Russian intelligence? Did they finally get you with a honeypot?”
My sharp glance and squint were real, maybe the most real expression I’d had while sober for months, as nightmare images flitted behind my eyes. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Lexi!Your so-calledwife!Why can’t you see it? Youjust happenedto meet her in Italy, huh? Like someone who wasoddly perfectfor you, someone who wasso perfectly fascinatingthat you couldn’t resist, who begged you to keep your relationship quiet sowewouldn’t see thegoddamned obviousand talk you out of it,because she was trained to be perfect,popped up in your path right after Hannalore broke it off, when you were vulnerable and heartbroken?”
“I’ve never been vulnerable and heartbroken in my life,” I scoffed.
“Is Putin blackmailing you, and he sent her with an ultimatum? Is sherelatedto Vladimir fucking Putin? Because that’s just like an authoritarian narcissist, to marry his daughter to a deposed heir to a throne and then un-depose him to start an actual royal dynasty.”
More horrifying images—slicing, amputating, screaming, ultimate horrors no one should endure or witness—rolled like a filmstrip in my mind, the memories carvedinto my frontal lobe with a dripping knife. “No, John. It’s just like I said, that Lexi and I have been involved for two years on the proverbial down-low. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about her.”
“But it kind of fits.”
It did, but John had the wrong organized crime boss in this case. “Putin’s daughters are in their late thirties and already married.”
“There’s that other daughter, the new one, from his side piece in Paris.”
“And Lexi isn’t her. Lexi is an American whom I met in Italy. She’s just a normal person. Look at her. That bone structure isn’t Russian.”
“His granddaughter, then. Or niece. Or adopted daughter from one of those Russian ballerina-slash-assassin spy schools.”
The bartender handed me my drink while John’s was still whirling orangely in the blender. “Russian assassin-ballerinas are a comic book plot commandeered by the movies so they could cast beautiful actresses as skinny, bendy, sexy Russian spies who still somehow kicked ass and shot people. They don’t exist.”
“Sounds likesomeone’snervous that I might be getting too close to the truth.”
“Jesus Christ, John. Give it a rest. I apologized for not telling you about her. No one else knew, either. I didn’t tellanyone.Not even Clemmy or Kostya.Kostya’s having a fucking tantrum about it. Even my security staff didn’t know about her.”
“Your security didn’t know? You couldn’t have pulled that off.”
“I ditched them for nearly eighteen hourslast nightby just walking out of Billionaire Sanctuary without a backward glance. You saw me do it. Kostya tried to stop me, but I kept going.”
Our security details talked to each other, sometimes to coordinate, mostly to bitch about how their principals were feckless idiots who would surely be dead in ten minutes without them.
Dushyanta—yeah, it would definitely be Dushyanta—would blab to someone else’s squad that I’d gone AWOL overnight, and that gripe would get back to John’s people, and then John would hear about my extended drop off the proverbial map.
The bartender presented John with his oversized drink. I swore to God that I could smell the sugar as it passed under my nose, and I inhaled deeply, letting the sweetness infiltrate my sinuses all the way back to my reptilian brain that hungered for sugar and fat.
My trainer and I needed to discuss my macros since I was so easily tempted. I didn’t even like mango all that much.
John winced. “Seriously, eighteen fucking hours? Ricardo would’ve shat puppies if I’d ditched my team for eighteen hours.”
“I’ve been doing it for two years. It’s too easy.”
“Whythe actual fuckare you ditching your own people? That’s notsafe,Nico.”
