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“What are you sorry for?” she asks, still not lifting her head, her tone even but edged with something weary.
“Fuck, I don’t know,” I admit, frustration spilling over, raw and unfiltered in my voice. “But you’re making me feel like shit with this silence, and I don’t even know what I did to deserve it from you.”
That stops her cold. She drops the cotton pad onto the tray and finally looks up at me, her eyes a storm of anger and sadness so raw it punches the air from my lungs. Anger at what I’ve become, sadness for what she can’t fix, and beneath it all, that bone-deep fear only a mother can carry for a son like me.
“You’ve been acting so distant lately,” she starts, her voice steady despite the emotion cracking through. “Staying away from home for days, weeks even—”
“I stay away all the time,” I cut in without thinking, the words tumbling out like a reflex.
“Do not interrupt me, young man,” she snaps, her tone stern and unyielding even as her eyes brim with concern. “Yes, you disappear often, but you always communicate. You answer my calls. You check in, let me know you’re alive and okay. This time it’s different, Maksim, and it’s scaring me.”
I drop my gaze to my hands, knuckles still faintly throbbing from the fight, because she’s right and we both know it. This distance isn’t my usual brand of reckless freedom; it’s something darker, more deliberate, like I’m carving out space to let whatever’s rotting inside me fester without witnesses.
“I need to know what’s going on with you,” she says, quieter now.
She takes both my hands in hers, and that simple touch makes my insides tighten so painfully I stop breathing for a second. I keep my eyes down because if I look at her now, she’ll see too much. She’ll see the panic, the exhaustion, the awful childlike need in me to be understood without having to explain myself.
“I need to know what’s wrong with my boy,” she says softly. “Tell me how I can help you Maksim, please.”
I bite my tongue hard enough to taste copper, words tangling uselessly in my throat because how the hell do I even start? How do I tell her I don’t know what’s breaking me, that I feel numb and overloaded all at once, like my head is a storm of demons clawing for air?
How do I confess the real poison—the obsession with Tristan that’s metastasized into something irreversible, the video call where I fucked myself for him on command, begging him to fuck me while he promised he would, only for the fear to choke me now because what if letting him in really is the end this time? What if he fucks me and finally sees how truly broken I am? What if he runs away like he did before, leaving me with nothing but the echo of his voice and a heart that’s already his prisoner?
How do I tell my mother that the man who owns every beat of my pulse is the same one shattering it piece by careful piece?
Some things are too ruined to say out loud. So I stay quiet, and she must understand at least part of that, because she doesn’t push. Instead, she lifts her hands and gently cups my face, guiding me to look at her. Her eyes are wet with unshed tears, and the sight of them twists something deep in me.
“You are so precious to me, Maksim,” she whispers softly in Russian this time. “Just know that. I am always here if you want to talk, always here if you need a shoulder to lean on, and always here when you feel lost. You can always run back to me. And if you don’t remember the way, I’ll always be there at the tunnel with a flashlight to guide you. Always.”
I swallow the lump burning my throat and grind my teeth so hard that my jaw aches, fighting the child inside me who’s desperate to surface and sob into her arms until everything feels right again.
“I know, Mom,” I manage, forcing a smile that feels more like a grimace and crumbles halfway through. “I’m so sorry.”
“There is nothing to be sorry about,” she murmurs, standing up from the chair.
She leans down and presses a soft kiss to my forehead, and for a moment, everything else fades. The fight, the confusion, the mess in my head. It’s just her and the warmth of that small, familiar gesture.
Then she pulls back, her expression shifting just slightly.
“Now do us both a favor,” she says, her tone light but carrying an edge I know better than to ignore. “And quit going to that elite circuit before I cut off your legs myself.”
And just like that, there she is again.
My mother. The Davika Petrov.
The threat pulls a ragged, genuine laugh from me despite everything.
Chapter 14
TRISTAN
“Welcome, Mr. Sinclair.”
One of the staff greets me as he opens the front door of the mansion. I step inside with a brief nod, shrugging off the cold clinging to my coat as the doors close behind me with a soft, echoing thud.
“Mr. Petrov is waiting for you in the meeting room,” he says. “I’ll lead you there.”
“Alright.”
