Chapter 11 #2
“You’re right.” I slip into the role she’s assigned me since before I can remember. “I should have called.”
“Men with guns, Piper. Callum says there are men with guns.” Her voice climbs. “Is this what your father built for us? Is this the life? I spent twenty years cleaning up after Dorian’s messes, and I won’t do it again for my children.”
She didn’t clean up Dorian’s messes. I did, starting at fifteen, while she perfected the art of needing things loudly enough that someone else always fixed them.
Nikita stays near the door behind Celine. He doesn’t move to intervene. He watches, clearly deciding to let me handle my own mother, which is either respect or a test, and I’m too tired to tell the difference.
“We’re safe,” I say to Celine. “Both of us, Celine.” I haven’t called her anything but her first name since I was fifteen and became the adult in the relationship. “The people with guns are protecting Callum, not threatening him.”
“Who’s protecting you?” She says it like a trap, and then she spots Nikita and recalculates in real time. She straightens, lowers her voice, and turns fully toward the best-dressed man in the room. “Who is this?”
“His name is Nikolai Volkov,” I say quickly. “He handles security for the estate I’m consulting on.”
She holds Nikita’s gaze a beat too long, pricing the watch, the coat, the quality of him, and I know exactly where this is going, because Celine always softens her voice right before she asks for money.
“Well,” Celine says, softening into the voice she uses on men who might be useful, “it’s good that Piper has someone looking out for her. She takes on so much. She always has.”
She turns back to me and asks for money exactly when I expect her to, wrapped in the same silk as always. “Which reminds me, sweetheart, my rent’s gone up again, and with everything so uncertain, I wondered if you could—”
“How much?”
“Piper.” Nikita says my name quietly from the door, offering to step in, make Celine his problem, and write whatever number sends her away.
Taking it would feel like relief for exactly as long as it took for him to become one more person Celine can use. I’ve spent my whole life at her mercy. I’m not doing that to a man I’ve known three weeks, even though he’s offering. “I’ve got it.”
His lips compress, but he steps back. He doesn’t argue, insist, or display generosity to make himself feel large. He lets me handle her without arguing, which is worth more than paying her would have been.
“Text me the number,” I tell Celine. “I don’t mean only the rent. I want the real number, including whatever else you’re not mentioning. I’ll handle it once. After that, we’re talking about a budget, and you’re going to hate it.”
Celine starts to negotiate, then stops when I don’t soften. Then she reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, a gesture left over from when I was small and couldn’t sleep, and her hand is shaking.
“You look thin,” she says quietly, with no request for anything underneath it.
Just a frightened woman who loves her children and has never known how to help them without needing something back.
That the love is real is the only reason I’ve played this role for so long.
“You’ve always taken care of everyone. I don’t know where you learned it. I know you didn’t learn it from me.”
It’s the closest she’ll come to an apology. The worst thing about Celine has never been that she doesn’t love me. It’s that she does, but it changes nothing about what she expects. Her needs always come first.
“I know. Send me the number by tonight.”
Platon drives back with Maren up front and Nikita beside me. He’s watching my face when the nausea hits, sudden and total. I press the back of my hand to my mouth and stare hard at the horizon.
“Do you need Platon to pull over?” Nikita asks, watching me.
“I’m fine. It’s the range. Two hours of burned powder and gun oil, and then Celine.” I swallow against it. “Stress is taking a toll. My body’s just catching up.”
Maren, in the front seat, turns around to look at me.
She doesn’t say anything. She looks at the hand over my mouth, then at the coffee I never drank in the cup holder, then back at my face.
She’s definitely counting something behind her eyes, checking one fact against another the same as I do with receipts.
She spent two hours behind the glass at the range this morning and still clocked that I turned down coffee. I know exactly which arithmetic she’s running because it’s the same I’ve been refusing to run since my period didn’t come, and it’s a week late now.
I look away first. I already have a broker who called Lazar, a dead father whose work keeps leading Shilov back to me, and a mother who’ll spend a month punishing me for the budget. The date I’m not counting goes to the bottom of a list I don’t have room to read.
I count storefronts until the nausea eases.
Maren keeps watching me from the front seat, but she won’t ask about it in a car with Platon driving and Nikita’s shoulder against mine.
She doesn’t have to because I already know the question, and she’s going to make me answer it the second the two of us are alone.