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Anton folds his arms, looking between us with the expression of a man who has just narrowly prevented a homicide and is trying not to seem too pleased about it.

“So we’re done accusing each other of lifelong emotional grudge?”

“No promises,” I say automatically.

Alex gives me a look.

I lift a shoulder. “What? Growth takes time.”

Anton laughs properly this time, and Alex lets out a rougher one right after, like he tried not to and failed. The sound of both of them laughing at once hits me in a place I’m not prepared for. Something in my soul loosens, and I laugh alongside them.

Anton claps me on the back, hard enough to jolt me forward.

“Come on. Let’s drink before you start throwing a tantrum again,” he says warmly. “I brought the good vodka.”

Chapter 17

TRISTAN

The loud bassline of Love by Kendrick Lamar pounds through my AirPods as I push through my last set of cardio on the treadmill in my apartment complex gym. My lungs burn, my shirt is damp with sweat, and my legs are starting to feel heavy, but I keep going because stopping would mean thinking.

And thinking is the last thing I need right now. I don’t want to think about everything in my life that feels like it’s quietly coming apart. I definitely don’t want to think about the fact that, somehow, the center of all of it keeps circling back to one person.

Maksim Petrov.

Why does he get blamed for everything that’s going wrong in my head lately?

Because he’s a distraction. A walking, talking, infuriating distraction. A beautiful, reckless fucking problem who has made my life objectively worse ever since the night my divorce was finalized. He got under my skin fast, and now he’s there all the time. Annoying and impossible to remove, like the tattoo on my chest with Jake’s name inked just below my collarbone. The one I got when we got married because I was stupid enough and in love enough to think permanence meant safety.

I want that tattoo gone.

I hate looking at it.

I hate the memory attached to it, hate the way it catches my eye in the mirror like a wound that healed wrong. And yet I still haven’t had it removed. I don’t want him back in my life, and I don’t miss the man he became. But erasing the tattoo feels too much like erasing the best day of my life, and I’m not sure I can bring myself to do that.

That’s the pathetic part.

It wasn’t just a marriage. It was the happiest I’ve ever been.

And if I’m being honest, in the ugliest, quietest part of myself, I don’t think I’ll ever be that happy again. I think that was it for me. I had my one great love, my one bright day, and everything after it has just been damage control in an expensive suit.

Maybe I’ve already made peace with that.

Or maybe I’ve just gotten good at pretending I have.

Either way, fucking Maksim in his father’s office mere minutes after Pavel Petrov warned me not to do anything reckless with his son was deranged. Morally indefensible. Professionally suicidal. Also, if I’m being honest, deeply disrespectful.

Not just to Pavel.

To myself.

To every shred of discipline I used to be proud of.

Because it wasn’t just the fact that I fucked him. It was the way I did it. The way I kissed him like I’d been starving. The way I called him baby like the word belonged in my mouth when it absolutely did not. The way I made sure he’d feel me for days, like some territorial bastard marking what he had no business touching in the first place. The way he fell apart on my dick, moaning my name like a curse and a prayer.

What the fuck was I thinking?

With a curse, I stab at the stop button and step off the treadmill, breathing hard enough that it feels like I’ve just outrun a natural disaster. Maybe, in a way, I have.