Chapter 52
STEFAN
The bottle’s empty and I’m still too fucking sober for what comes next.
I push up from the VIP table. Try to, at least, but the leather is sticking to my skin like it’s trying to hold me back.
Maybe it knows better than I do. Maybe I should stay put.
The club’s bass reverberates through my bones, but all I hear is Taras’s voice on repeat: You’re in love with her.
Wrong. Love is for men who haven’t watched their fathers choke on their own blood. Love is for people who believe in happy endings instead of shallow graves.
The leather finally releases me with an obscene sound. I’m halfway to standing when Taras materializes through the smoke and strobe lights like a ghost I’ve conjured from vodka fumes and self-loathing.
My brain stutters stupidly. He left. I watched him walk away twenty minutes ago. Or was it longer? I can’t remember.
“Blyat’.” I blink hard, but he’s still there. “How much did I drink?”
“Not enough if you think I’m a hallucination.” Taras drops into the seat across from me, his face carved from stone. No trace of his earlier smirk.
“Come back to continue the lecture?” I scowl. “Let me save you the trouble. I’m not in love with her. I don’t need a therapist. And I definitely don’t need my lieutenant playing matchmaker like some geriatric babushka with too much time on her hands.”
“No more lecturing.” He pulls out his phone, the screen casting harsh light across his scarred knuckles. “I brought news.”
“Unless it’s about the feds backing off or Iakov choking on his own tongue, I don’t—”
“You’re gonna want to see this.” His face does that thing—that careful nothing that means everything’s about to go to shit.
“See what?”
He turns the screen toward me. “This just went live.”
The headline punches me in the throat: Aster Fertility Solutions: A Baby Making Business Built on Sex.
My blood runs cold as I scan the article. It’s filled with photos from the gala and baseless speculation about our “arrangement.” Thinly veiled accusations about Olivia trading her body for funding.
Every word is designed to destroy her.
“It’s already spreading.” Taras scrolls through his phone to show me hundreds of comments. “Three gossip sites picked it up. Boston Business Journal’s running it tomorrow.”
“Kill it.”
“I can’t, Stef. It’s everywhere already. Besides—” He shrugs. “—it might work in our favor. Tank her reputation, make the acquisition easier—”
My hand closes around his throat before I register moving. “She’s carrying my child, motherfucker.”
Taras doesn’t fight back. Just meets my eyes, waiting.
I release him, step back, try to remember how to breathe. “Get Mikayla home safe.”
“Fuck that. She can—”
“That’s an order.”
His jaw works, but he nods. Smart man. He knows when I’m past the point of negotiation.
I leave through the back exit, past dumpsters and alley rats. The cold hits like a baptism, but it doesn’t wash away the image of Olivia reading that article. I can already picture it: Her face will crumble. She’ll look at me and wonder if I orchestrated this, too.
Because I could have.
Would have, three months ago.
The drive home blurs past. Red lights become suggestions. Speed limits become jokes. All I can think about is getting to her before she sees it. Before the world caves in on her.
The house is too quiet when I enter. Security cameras track my movement, but even they seem judgmental tonight. I step into the kitchen and—
“Enjoy your big night out?”
A light clicks on, and there she is: my babushka, perched on her favorite stool like a czarina holding court. The scent of honey cake mingles with the patchouli incense she burns for her arthritis, creating a cloud of nostalgia that makes my chest ache.
“You’re drunk.” She doesn’t look up from slicing the medovik, each layer precise despite her trembling hands.
“Not drunk enough for this; that’s for damn sure.”
“Sit.” She pushes a plate toward me. “Eat.”
I obey because refusing her is like refusing gravity—pointless and exhausting. Plus, I’m fucking starved.
The cake is perfect, sweet and dense, but it sits in my stomach like cement.
“You look like your father tonight.” Her cloudy eyes pierce through me anyway. “Same hollow expression. Same smell of failure.”
I start to argue back, but she holds up a hand.
“Don’t lie to me, Stefushka. I changed your diapers; I know when you’re full of shit.
” She reaches across the counter, her papery hand covering mine.
“That girl upstairs? The one you’ve moved into your bedroom but won’t touch?
She’s trying to save you if you’d stop being so thick-headed. ”
“She’s a business arrangement.”
Babushka’s laugh says what she thinks of that. “Business. That’s what your father called it when he married your mother instead of following his heart. Look how that ended—with his blood on your mother’s hands and her in bed with his brother before the body was cold.”
The medovik turns to sand in my mouth. “That won’t happen to me.”
“Because you’re stronger? Smarter?” She purses up her lips. “Or because you’re too much of a coward to even try?”
“I’m protecting myself.”
“God forbid you are forced to reckon with the possibility that someone might actually give a damn about you beyond your money and your violence, Stefushka.” Her voice cracks, and for a moment, I see how old she really is.
How tired. “You haven’t smiled—really smiled—in years.
Not since you started building these walls around yourself. ”
“The walls keep me alive.”
“The walls keep you alone.” She stands, joints creaking. “Your father wrote in journals, did you know that? Every night, filling pages with things he couldn’t say out loud. I found them after he died.”
I know this already, but for some reason, my throat closes. “What did they say?” I croak out.
“That he loved the wrong woman. He was too weak to choose Antonia, but he hoped his son would be braver.” She cups my face with both hands, forcing me to meet her eyes. “But here you are, making the same mistakes. Pushing away love because you’re terrified of being vulnerable.”
“I’m too damaged for love.”
“Oh, Stefan. Sometimes,” she sighs, pressing a kiss to my forehead, “you talk out of your ass.”
She shuffles toward the door, leaving me alone with the half-eaten cake and the weight of her disappointment. The kitchen feels smaller without her. The walls press in.
I spy a notepad and a spare pen lying by the refrigerator. Tools for the kitchen staff to keep groceries stocked, but it feels like the universe put them for me and me alone. The pen feels foreign in my hand as I press it to paper.
She’s right, I write. I am my father’s son.
I tried this before and it didn’t work. This time, though, the words flow like blood from a wound. I write about Olivia. About myself. About pasts forgotten and futures foreclosed.
I write until my hand cramps, filling pages with confessions I’ll never speak aloud. This is what my father did: wrestled with demons on paper because saying them out loud would make them real.
But they’re already real. The way I need her is real. The way I’m destroying her is real.
I don’t know how long I sit there or how much I write. I just bleed onto the page, even as I wonder what good this is going to do. It’s not until sunlight starts to peek through the curtains that I finally run out of things to say.
I close the journal, but the last words remain burned into my brain:
I think I love her.
And I think it’s going to kill us both.