Yeah, I got the secret message. I just wasn’t playing his game.
Before I could retort, my lawyer said, “You didnotjust threaten my client, Mr. Romanov. I’m sure that’snotwhat you intended.”
Nicolai Romanov was a good guy, and he’d given a damn about me these last couple of days when no one else had. He’d literally scooped me up when I’d been living in my car and eating the cheapest crap I could find in gas stations. He’d bought me a suitable dress with Clementine’s help so I wouldn’t be embarrassed at the party with his friends.
He’d been secondhand mad when I’d told him about Jimmy literally leaving me at the altar during our wedding, and he’d publicly kissed the stuffing out of me in front of my ex in the casino, just so I could have a little bit of petty revenge.
And it had been excellently petty.
He’d allowed me into his circle of friends when no one else in the whole dang world would have cared if I’d fallen off my suitcase, collapsed, and died on the hot Las Vegas street.
An image flash of Jimmy and his sisters and his mom andherstepping over my twitching body without a downward glance imprinted on the backs of my eyelids when I blinked.
If Nicolai hadn’t walked into my life, I would still be out there, hungry and unshowered, desperate and destitute, and alone.
“The threat wasn’tfromhim,” I told the lady-lawyer, Victoria, who seemed to be on my side. “Nicolai wouldn’t threaten me.”
Her knife-sharp look made me want to step back, but I was already leaning my butt against the sideboard. I couldn’t back up any farther.
Ueli leaned toward Nicolai. “Was there an incident?”
“Nothing to speak of,” Nicolai muttered.
Ueli rocked back on his heels. One of his pale eyebrows dipped.
I called out to Nico over the lawyers’ heads, “I won’t abandon you.”
“Nevada is a no-fault divorce state,” my lawyer murmured to me. “You can’t stop him from divorcing you. He doesn’t need your consent.”
“That’sright,wedon’tneed your consent,” the too-smart lawyer on the other side piped up, not like he’d just been reminded, but like he’d been waiting for a gotcha. “Mr. Romanov, we can draw up those papers for your signature right now.”
Narcing to Ueli about the torture-murder video might make the situation more difficult for Nicolai, but it might keep him alive if Ueli knew.
But Nicolai raised the wager before I got a chance. “Lexi, you have toleave.I won’t allow this charade to continue.”
“No, I won’t.”
His level gaze was devastating. No regret, no emotion at all, laced the flat tone of his words. “Ueli, remove her.”
Ueli and Dusha started walking around the couches, their eyes pinned on me, their intended victim. “Nicolai, don’t do this.”
His voice was a cold metronome. “I told you I would have them remove you. I meant it.”
Not even a blink.
He thought this was for my own good, but he didn’t know what the right thing to do was.
The problem was that I didn’t know, either.
I just knew I didn’t want to leave him to face it alone.
“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” I blurted. “You can’t throw me out.I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Humiliation flooded every cell in my body. Jimmy’s church had promulgated that wealth indicated God’s favor, but poverty was your own fault, a sign of laziness and lack of ambition. My lack felt shameful.
“Ueli,” Nicolai said.
The two bodyguards stopped, but their gaze never shifted from me.
