All By Design: A Nikolai Lantsov Series

Chapter Eleven: addicted to betrayal

this chapter's song: karma

Nikolai Lantsov swallows hard and tries to figure out how he's going to put this. This isn't how it was supposed to end. Nikolai was meant to have his happy ending, his bright spark of a fairytale. Even if the rest of his life has been one scare after another, he was supposed to have this. He finally has the woman he loves back within his arms, and someone is trying to ruin it.

At first, he doesn't think that he can ever broach the subject at all. After scrolling through feed after feed in a dim haze of horror, Nikolai wonders if he'll be able to coax his gilded tongue into muttering a single syllable on the matter. Y/N is still looking at him, though, and in the end it's her stare dragging him back to reality, pulling him out of the spiral of hell like a rope tossed to a drowning man.

He clenches his hands so hard he thinks his fingernails might break skin, then forces the fingers to relax one by one.

Y/N's eyes flash from the crescents carved into his palms, then back to his face. "Nikolai," she asks slowly, hesitantly, "what happened?"

Nikolai compels himself to put his phone down. Once he's looking at her, it's easier to concentrate. He can lock his attention onto her and stop glancing back at his phone, the endless waves of news coming in to ruin them.

"Someone found out," he says in a rush, "About the fact that we were faking it at first. I don't know how, but now everybody knows. Everybody. All the news sources are losing their minds. I saw dozens of articles and that was just in the first few seconds of looking. Tolya and Tamar don't know what to think."

Y/N's eyes widen as the force of this realization hits her. Nikolai watches the last of her spirits leave her. She sits down suddenly, her legs all but giving out. They both know what this means. It is one thing to put on a lackluster show in this shimmering world of lies and treachery, but something entirely different to be revealed for just how you achieved your ill-gotten status.

Everyone in their line of work has secrets. Everyone. The fact that the secrets belonging to Nikolai and Y/N happened to be the ones leaked feels intentional somehow. They were doing too well, maybe that was it. No one likes to see success if it isn't theirs. Yes, that must be why. Y/N and Nikolai were genuinely happy for the first time in their lives, doing well in their fields, and someone took it upon themselves to bring all of that crashing down.

Nikolai genuinely doesn't know how they're supposed to survive this. No one does. The public may love moving their favorite celebrities around like chess pieces in the grand board of silver screens and sold out arenas, but the second the strings are shown, everything is over. This could spell the end for both of them. Everyone knows that they were both worried enough about the fate of their reputations to try and pull a stunt like this, and that's enough blood in the water to summon any shark.

Y/N has her head in her hands. "What are we supposed to do?"

"I don't know," Nikolai whispers back. He has no script prepared for something like this, probably because they were never supposed to reach this point.

He never thought they would be revealed, not even at the very beginning when he and Y/N both hated each other. Those days seem so far away that Nikolai half believes they weren't even real. Still, he remembers being completely confident that Y/N would never sell him out. The only people who knew were him, Y/N, and their respective PR officers. No one else. Nikolai has no doubt of Tolya and Tamar's loyalty– they could get him on far worse if they really wanted his days in the spotlight over– and he's long since learned to never question Zoya.

That leaves gaping holes in the story of who could have revealed them. Obviously it wasn't Nikolai or Y/N, they were finally happy, so who else could it be?