“Oh, come on. You just happen to ‘meet’ someone, and then you’re instantly entangled with them? Of course, she’s an escort.” Konstantin glared around Nicolai at me. “Aren’t you?Admit it.What are you, Czech? All the best escorts are Czech.”
At least he thought I was agoodescort, I guessed.
“How much money do you want to leave him alone?”Kostya continued yelling at me. “Because it’s the money, right? I’ll pay you. How much are we talking here?”
Nicolai crossed the room, stalking, and stated right into his brother’s face, “Kostya, you need to sit down, shut the fuck up about my wife, and apologize to her,right now.”
Konstantin stopped yelling, and his jaw was slack with shock as he panted.
“Right now.Apologize.”Everything Nicolai ground out sounded like a threat. “Lexi is agoodperson, better than anyone else we know. She doesn’t deserve your abuse.”
He ducked more. “Nico, she’susingyou for yourmoney.”
“She’s not.”
“Then is she Russian Intelligence? Did they finally get you, threaten or blackmail you? Because I’ve heard of what they show people, the video from the SVR’s torture-murder rooms and then surveillance footage of their relatives and friends and kids.”
“No, Kostya. She’s just a person I met and fell in love with.” Nicolai’s voice was low, measured, and terrifying. “You need, to apologize,to her. Now.”
Konstantin stared at Nicolai right into his eyes, two twins enraged at each other, but the fight bled out of him. He heaved a sigh, and he leaned around Nicolai. “Lexi, I apologize for the tone of my earlier statements.”
“That’s okay!” I yelled back real fast. “No worries! I’m good!”
The rage flowing off Nicolai didn’t abate. His pressure-cooker anger with Konstantin seemed more dangerous than the night before, when he’d shoved the Basketball Drunk who’d accosted me to the ground.
“Do itbetter,”Nicolai told him, his teeth clenched and not even looking back at me. “Not for your tone, but for what you said. She protected me last night.No one elsedid.Apologize, better.”
“But Nico, what the fuck, man?” Konstantin begged. “She must have done something to trap you.Youwouldn’t do something impulsive like marry some stranger.”
“Kostya,apologize, better, to mywife.”
He stared at Nicolai, his ice-teal blue eyes, identical to Nicolai’s, wide with shock. It was like watching a guy argue with his reflection in the mirror.
“Nicolai, this iscrazy,”Konstantin argued with him. “It’s crazy that you married someone,anyone,after everything you’ve said for years, and didn’t even tell anybody you were going to. It’s only logical to think that you must’ve been coerced or drugged to get you to do it.”
After everything Nicolai had said for years?
“I wasn’t coerced or drugged,” Nicolai said, his voice carefully measured.
“If you’d broken the trust funds and donated it all to starving orphans and run off to be a Buddhist monk in Dharamshala, I would’ve been like, yeah, he finally snapped. That tracks. But I still would’ve come after you to make sure you were all right.”
“I’m fine,andI’m waiting.”
“You werewastedlast night.”
“Yes,and I marriedLexi.She ismy wife.”
Nicolai’s firm statement sounded like a manifesto.
Kostya hung his head and sighed like he was clearing the anger out of his throat. His jaw moved forward as he leaned to peer around his brother. “Lexi, I was concerned aboutmy brother’sstate of mind because an elopement isvastlyout of character for him. I see what I said was untrue, and I apologize for what I said.”
“It’s fine,” I called out again. “I am totally fine.” My breath caught in my throat as I stumbled to make them stop. “Everything’sfine.”
Nicolai’s head swiveled, his dark hair swinging around theedges of his face. His sharp glance raked me from my bleached-blond hair to my beat-up tennis shoes.
His harsh sigh suggested he didn’t like whatever he saw.
He turned back to Kostya, his tone still stern but lower in energy. “Lexi didn’t trap me. She took care of me last night when I was vulnerable to any manner of predation.” Nicolai’s voice dropped, tapering off, as he turned away from Konstantin and walked away.
