Nicolai pointed to the bright bedroom windows overlooking noon in Las Vegas as if he knew the location where the crime had taken place. “Theytorturedandmurderedher. I don’t care if you’re tough. Ican’tdrag you into this.”
“You knew what you were doing when you married me,” I told him.
He squeezed his eyes shut and paced the few steps over to the chair by the end of the bed. “I was very drunk, and very stupid, and desperate, and a selfish shit. I should have thrown myself in the river.”
“Las Vegas doesn’t have a river. The nearest one is the Colorado. You could throw yourself off of Hoover Dam, I suppose. There’s nothing but desert around the Strip.”
“A golf course water hazard, then. Or I should’ve flown home to Paris and drowned myself in the Seine, as would have been dignified and proper. Except then Volkov would’ve gone after Kostya.”
He closed his eyes, and I watched his throat bob as he swallowed like his chest hurt.
“You don’t have to do this alone, Nicolai.”
“I should never have gotten you nor anyone else involved. The vodka was whispering in my ear, telling me there was an easy way out, and it advanced a stupid, shallow answer that was destined to fail. There was simply no way my marrying someone else would have dissuaded Demyan Volkov. I don’t know why I thought it would, other than I was bladdered that night and ruined the next morning.”
“You sure know a lot of words for dead-butt drunk.”
He kept staring at the carpet and shrugged one shoulder. “It’s British vernacular. And boarding school.” His deep sigh curled his shoulders in, and his voice cracked. “How did I not know you’d been in such extremis? That you were so vulnerable? I truly did take advantage of you.”
“It wasn’t your problem.” I wasn’t being overly kind. I just didn’t want to talk about how failing and pathetic I was. The embarrassment was worse than the poverty. “It didn’t come up in conversation.”
“I see why you were so worried about your car.”
“Yeah, I was worried you’d taken off with it. It’s not likeyouneeded my old banger. It’s just all I have.”
Nicolai’s neck bent more, and his head drooped. “I did not think about what the car meant to you.”
“I don’t have anything else. I thought Jimmy loved me, and to pay him back for loving me, I changed myself to whatever he wanted and gave him everything I owned.” Shame weighed on me like thick chains. “We can stop talking about how poor and naive I am any freakin’ time now.”
He stood. The sun-drenched glare from the window turned his skin golden. “I did not mean to offend.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You really own nothing but that car.”
“Isaidwe don’t have to talk about it.” And yet his sympathetic head tilt sucked the words out of my mouth because I had to explain. “I saved up for years and poured all my money into the wedding. I was moving in with Jimmy when we went back to Scottsbluff afterward, so I sold or donated all my stuff and broke my lease. I’m an idiot, okay? I’m just a stupid idiot who got scammed because I believed someone who told me they loved me forsix years.”
Nicolai nodded slowly. “That is a very long con, six years. Anyone would have believed it. I had made arrangements for Hannalore to move in, and that relationship lasted less than three.”
I pressed on because I was the dumb one, and the thick coating of shame concealed righteous anger. “Yeah, but did she have a side piece who she wasliving with,who shehad a dogwith, and you weretoo stupidto figure it out?”
Nicolai angled himself away from me. The yellow-beige glare from the sunny window cast a golden light over his face and shirt like he was walking away into the light. “If she did, I never suspected. I didn’t know much about Hanna’s life otherthan what she told me, so I probably wouldn’t have known. One doesn’t suspect a lover of betrayal, and surely, this Jimmy wanker should never have used you so egregiously.” He shook his head with a sad huff. “If we ever do see him again, I can’t be held responsible for my actions.”
“Wearen’t going to see him again. You’re throwing me out,remember?”
Yeah, I was an idiot. Why in the heck was I challenging Nico to do what I didn’t want him to?
Nicolai flashed one frustrated frown at me, then walked over to the landline phone on his side of the bed and lifted the handset. He spoke into it. “I need cash brought up. Twenty American ought to do it.”
My ribs hurt like I’d gotten jumped in the high school parking lot and beaten to a pulp.
Nicolai hung up the phone and walked over with his wallet, holding out a black credit card. “I’ll get you one in your own name. The bills will come to me. It has no monthly limit.”
“I don’t need that or your money.” Not that twenty bucks would go far, but sure. Twenty bucks was three meals if I was going to be on the street again.
He was still holding out the credit card. “I want you to take it. Please, my honor is wounded.”
“‘Your honor.’ Oh, my word, Nicolai.Puh-lease.”
