Chapter 43 Stefan
STEFAN
“You lied to me.”
I look up from the reports I’ve been pretending to read for the past hour.
Olivia stands in the doorway of the yacht’s main salon.
She’s wearing a white summer dress turned nearly translucent by the sun pouring in behind her.
A breeze teases it into tightening around her hips for a moment, enough to make my fist ball up in my lap.
“Lied about what?”
“This isn’t a boat.” She gestures around the salon with its cream leather seating, crystal decanters, and the original Dürer piece hanging above the bar. “This is, like, basically a floating palace.”
I set down the papers. “It’s a hundred and sixty feet. Hardly a ‘palace.’”
“Humble doesn’t suit you.” She tiptoes barefoot across the teak floors.
“This thing cost more than the house I grew up in. Probably more than all my neighbors’ houses put together, actually.
” She sinks into the chair across from me, shaking her head.
“I mean, the crew alone must cost a fortune. The chef, the captain, the—”
“Eight full-time, twelve when we’re entertaining.” I settle back. “Does that bother you?”
“Should it?”
“You tell me.”
Olivia is quiet for a long moment, her amber eyes taking in the understated luxury surrounding us. “What did it cost you?” she asks finally.
“Would you like to see the receipt?”
“I’m being serious.” Her gaze meets mine. “What did you pay for all this? Like, really?”
I don’t answer right away. I pour myself two fingers of vodka from the Fabergé crystal decanter on the side table. Sit back. Sip.
“An ordinary life,” I say at last.
“What does that mean?”
I take another sip and hold it in my mouth. “It means I was thirteen when I killed my first man. Fifteen when I lost my virginity to a prostitute my uncle bought for my birthday. Sixteen when I got my first tattoo to cover the scars from my father’s funeral.”
Her face pales. “Stefan—”
“You asked what it cost.” I set down the glass. “That’s what it cost. Childhood. Innocence. The luxury of believing people are fundamentally good.”
Waves kiss the hull like wet fingers trying to drag us down into the depths. It’s a good reminder, because that’s the funny thing about money—it’s just a thin, gilded line separating you from a dark ocean that would swallow you whole if it could.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
“Don’t be. I got what I wanted.”
“Did you?”
Again, I don’t answer.
Because I’m not sure I know anymore.
Olivia stands and moves to the windows. Her reflection is ghostlike in the glass. “My mother used to tell me that success requires sacrifice. That you can’t have everything.”
“Smart woman.”
“Is she?” The bitterness of her laugh surprises me. “Margaret Aster, chief of surgery at Mass General. Brilliant. Ruthless. And completely incapable of loving anything that doesn’t reflect glory back on her.”
I watch her shoulders tense beneath the thin fabric of her dress. “Tell me more.”
“When I was seven, I brought her white orchids from the school greenhouse. Stole them, actually, because I thought they were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.
” She touches the window glass with her fingertips.
“She smiled. Really smiled, not the frozen fake thing she usually gave me. She said they were perfect.”
“And?”
“And so I became obsessed. Every week, I’d find new orchids. Different varieties, different colors. I learned their Latin names, their care requirements. All to chase that smile.”
The pieces click together. “The orchids in your office.”
“Yeah.” She sighs sadly, cheek pressed to the glass so that her exhale fogs the pane. “Pathetic, isn’t it? A thirty-year-old woman still trying to win Mommy’s approval with pretty flowers.”
“What happened to her smile?”
Olivia’s reflection in the window looks fragile, breakable.
“She found out I was stealing them. So she marched me back to school, made me confess to the principal, and wrote a check for damages.” Her voice drops to a whisper.
“She told me that thieves never succeed in life. That disappointment was becoming a pattern with me.”
Rage builds in my chest, hot and violent. I want to find Margaret Aster and explain to her exactly what happens to people who crush children’s spirits for sport.
“Jesus Christ.”
“The irony is that orchids became my good luck charm. Like they’ll somehow make me worthy of success.” She turns to face me. “Again, you don’t have to say I’m pathetic; I already know.”
“I wasn’t going to say that.” I stand and move to join her at the window. “You want to know what’s pathetic? Recognizing my mother’s perfume on my uncle’s collar… on the day of my father’s funeral.”
Olivia’s eyes widen. “My God, Stefan—”
“They were fucking. Had been for months before my father died, maybe longer. They planned his death together.” I haven’t said this out loud in years; it’s funny how easily it comes out now.
Utterly emotionless, really. “I knew, and I did nothing. For two years after we buried him, I sat at family dinners and pretended not to know that the woman who raised me and the man who took me shooting on weekends had murdered the only person who ever gave a damn about me.”
She shudders. “What did you do?”
“I learned. I watched. I planned.” I turn to face her. “And when I was eighteen, I destroyed them both.”
“How?”
“I exposed their affair to the family council, provided evidence of their embezzlement, and made sure every rival organization knew exactly how vulnerable they’d become.” I meet her gaze. “My uncle took his own life. My mother… Well, I wasn’t going to leave it to chance. I did the taking for her.”
Olivia stares at me for a long moment. I wait for the revulsion, the fear, the inevitable retreat that comes when people see me clearly.
It doesn’t come, though.
Instead, she reaches out and touches my arm. Her fingers are warm against my skin. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
I cringe away. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t look at me like I’m some wounded animal that needs rescuing.”
“I’m not.” Her hand doesn’t move. “I’m looking at you like someone who understands what it means to have the people who should protect you be the ones who hurt you most.”
Her hand is still on my arm. Warm. Too steady. I should pull away, but I don’t.
She blinks fast, once, twice. Her fingers flex against my sleeve, as if she’s deciding whether to let go.
“You know what that’s like,” I say. “Don’t you?”
She bobs her head, not answering. A small crease forms between her brows.
“Not family,” I add. “But someone. Someone you trusted.”
Her lips part, then press shut again. She looks at the floor, at the teak under her bare feet, anywhere but me.
“Your mentor,” I push. “Walsh. She burned you.”
That does it. Her shoulders tense up, sharp under the thin straps of her dress. She breathes out through her nose, a short, angry sound.
“Rebecca Walsh,” she whispers. The name comes past her lips utterly broken, like shards of glass catching in her throat.
“She was my attending when I was a resident. Everyone worshiped her. Brilliant, polished, the doctor you wanted to be. Or at least, I wanted to be her. And she let me. Took me under her wing. Drinks after shift, late nights in the lab. I thought—”
She cuts herself off, shakes her head. “I thought she was my friend.”
She starts pacing. “I gave her everything. My notes, my research, all my brilliant ideas. I told her about my plan—how I wanted to open my own clinic, do it my way. She smiled and told me it was so bold and brave.”
Her mouth twists. “Six months later, she launched it. My clinic. My work. She stole the whole fucking thing.”
I stay quiet. She doesn’t look at me.
“When I confronted her, she laughed. Said I was naive. That friendship doesn’t mean shit when money’s on the table.”
Olivia stops pacing. Her eyes are bright now, angry and wet at the same time.
“She was right, wasn’t she? Look at me. I had to start over from nothing while she built an empire on my bones.
” Her voice drops. “She’s still doing it.
Running the biggest clinic in Boston, circling the Mass General partnership like a vulture.
Ready to swallow my practice whole. And I swore I’d never give anyone that much power over me again. ”
Finally, she looks up. Her gaze snags on mine. “Until you.”
I nod in grim understanding. “You don’t trust me.”
“Of course I don’t fucking trust you.” Then, softer: “But I can’t seem to stay away from you, either.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. It’s like…” She hesitates. Her fingers brush her arm, restless. “Like we recognize the same damage in each other. Different wounds, but… same ache.”
“We’re a hell of a pair,” I mutter. “Crime boss and fertility doctor. It’s a setup for a bad joke.”
“What’s the punchline?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Olivia smiles, and it transforms her entire face. “Maybe that’s the point. Maybe some jokes don’t need punchlines.”
“Everything needs an ending, Olivia.”
“Does it?”
The yacht rocks gently beneath us, and I realize we’ve been standing here for minutes, just looking at each other.
She must realize it, too, because she half-turns away from me to look out the window again. But I despise the silence and the sadness in her eyes. I’m not done with this yet. Revealing scars. Showing each other where the knives went into our backs.
I consider what I want to know about her, what pieces of Olivia Aster I haven’t yet collected. There are dozens of questions, but one rises above the rest.
“Why fertility medicine? With your grades, your family connections, you could have done anything. Surgery like your mother, research, private practice. Why choose something so…?”
“Messy?”
“Emotional.”
“Because I know what it feels like to want something so desperately that you’d do anything to get it.
The lengths people will go to create the families they dream of, the hope they carry even when the odds are impossible…
Mostly, to not be alone.” She looks back at me.
“And because I know the other side, too.”
“The other side?”
She shrugs one shoulder, pretending to be unbothered. “I was Plan B. The accident that stuck.”
I frown. “Your parents…?”
“They spent three years trying to conceive. Fertility treatments, specialists, the works. They’d given up completely when my mother got pregnant with me.” She shrugs again, but her mouth pulls tight. “I grew up knowing I was the consolation prize.”
“That’s not—”
“True? Of course it is. They never said it outright, but children know. We always know.” I can see the old pain in her eyes.
“So when I help a couple see their first viable embryo, or when I hand them a positive pregnancy test after years of trying, I’m giving them something I never had: a child who was loved and wanted from the very beginning. ”
I feel that in my chest, like someone just jammed a scalpel between the ribs.
“That’s why you couldn’t just find me any surrogate,” I realize. “It wasn’t about the money.”
“No. It was about making sure that if you were going to bring a baby into this world, it would be wanted. Planned. Loved.”
“And now?”
“Now what?”
“Do you still believe that? About the child being wanted?”
Olivia’s breath catches, and I realize I’ve asked the question that’s been haunting both of us since the moment we signed that contract.
“I think,” she says carefully, “that wanting something and being ready for it are two different things.”
“And which one am I?”
“I don’t know yet. But I’m starting to think you might be both.”
Quiet follows. Neither one of us is in a particular hurry to break it. Maybe it ought to be tense, standing here like this, talking like this, but it isn’t. If anything, it feels less tense than most of my life has ever been.
“We should eat,” I say, because the alternative is pulling her against me and kissing her until neither of us can think straight.
“Don’t tell me you’re running away from a serious conversation,” she teases.
“In my business, we call it ‘strategic retreat.’”
Olivia laughs. “At least you’re honest about it.”
“I’m always honest with you.”
“Are you?”
“More than I’ve ever been with anyone else.”
She peers at my face for a long moment, as if trying to decide whether to believe me. Finally, she nods. “Okay. But Stefan?”
“Yeah?”
“Next time you want to take me somewhere, maybe lead with ‘floating palace’ instead of ‘boat.’ A girl likes to pack appropriately.”