Crown of the Empire

Chapter 25

Chapter 25

I used to think waking up to stock market alerts, press clippings, and banking memos was chaos. Cute, really. But waking up to wedding preparations?

That was war.

The morning began with my phone screaming. Not buzzing—screaming. The notifications stacked like bricks: Dior, Chanel, and Valentino fighting for the right to design my dress; jewelers flashing digital mockups of emerald crowns and sapphire tiaras; hotels across Manila begging to host "pre-events." I hadn't even brushed my teeth, and apparently, I was already late for a consultation with three different wedding planners flown in from Paris, Tokyo, and Madrid.

I groaned into my pillow. "If another email subject line says urgent: table arrangements, I'm deleting the internet."

Nikolai, of course, was already awake. Sitting on the couch in our suite with his laptop open, crisp white shirt half-unbuttoned, typing away like the world wasn't collapsing under an avalanche of chiffon and gold-leaf menus. Calm, precise, efficient. A man balancing pharmaceutical mergers with wedding flower budgets without blinking.

"You've had seventy-two unread emails flagged as high priority," he said in that maddeningly even tone.

"Seventy-two?" I sat up, hair in a mess, glaring at him like he'd personally sent them. "Do I look like a wedding machine to you? I'm one woman, Nikolai. One."

He didn't look up. "You asked for grandeur."

"I asked for Versailles meets Met Gala grandeur. Not World War Wedding."

That earned me the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth. Progress.

I scrolled through one of the planner's PDFs, which had "royal wedding inspiration" plastered on every page. Thrones, doves, fireworks. A literal horse-drawn carriage. I choked on my coffee.

"Nikolai. They want me to arrive like Cinderella."

He glanced up, calm as the sea. "You hate horses."

"Exactly! And if I see one in my driveway, I'm suing Disney."

The absurdity of it all gnawed at me. Here we were, two weeks from legally binding ourselves together, and instead of strategizing economic dominance or philanthropic expansions, I was being asked to pick a shade of white for tablecloths. Did I want ivory? Pearl? Snow?

"Why can't it just be white?" I muttered.

"Because this is a wedding," Nikolai said flatly.

"Thank you, Mr. Obvious."

Yet beneath the exasperation, I felt it—the shift. This wasn't just decoration. This was theatre. Every fork, every fabric, every petal was going to be dissected by media vultures and political gossips. My disgraced father would watch every detail, and my mother would float through Spain with a smile, knowing she'd passed me the torch.

This wedding wasn't just personal. It was proof.

Between the chaos, there were moments.

Like us sitting on the garden steps at midnight, papers scattered between us—half ME Bank drafts, half seating charts.

"Do we really need to invite every head of state?" I asked, groaning.

Nikolai, pen in hand, barely blinked. "Optics."

"You know, for someone who doesn't smile at cameras, you're awfully obsessed with optics."

He finally looked at me. Steady. Dark eyes cutting right through. "Because they'll all watch this. And I want them to know you can't be touched."