Ashley is waiting just outside. She leans casually against the wall, straightening when I close the door. Her smile is kind, steady, the opposite of the chaos clawing through me. Alex is nowhere in sight. The hollowness in my chest deepens at that.
“Ready to head home?” she asks softly.
I nod. Together, we head downstairs. The mansion feels deserted—silent halls, no trace of Alex, not even the echo of his presence.
Ashley opens the car door for me, and I sink into the seat, every part of me heavy, dragging. I keep glancing back at the house, hoping, praying for even a glimpse of him. A shadow at the window. A figure at the door. Anything.
But there’s nothing.
The car rolls down the long driveway, past the towering gates that close with a metallic finality behind us. I press my hands over my face, choking back the sound that threatens to escape, and finally let myself fall apart quietly.
TWENTY-FIVE
ALEXANDER
My father’s office is as pristine as ever, silent, sterile, untouched by warmth. It’s a perfect reflection of the man who occupies it.
He doesn’t look up right away as I take a seat right across from him; he just continues writing, the soft scratch of his pen the only sound in the room.
I already know what this is about. It’s not about the company or investments.
It’s about Lucas.
Finally, he sets the pen down, folds his hands on the desk, and lifts his eyes to meet mine. The glint of his glasses catches the light, but not enough to dull the severity in his gaze.
It’s the kind of look that used to put ice in my veins when I was Eleven.
But not anymore.
Now I meet his stare with calm indifference. My expression flat and unreadable—just enough to remind him I haven’t been afraid of him since the day he handed me a gun for my eleventh birthday and told me to prove I was a Petrov.
And I did.
That was the first time I took a life.
And then my fear died; whatever warmth he expected from a son burned out of me completely.
“The boy you brought to your mother’s dinner on Saturday,” my father says, his voice sharp, clipped—like he’s trying to cut something out of me. “He’s the son of a drug addict and a former sex worker.”
I say nothing. My jaw tightens, but I hold his stare.
“I looked into him,” he adds, like it’s the most casual thing in the world. “Lucas Miller. He uses his mother’s surname because she doesn’t know the name of his father. Neither does Lucas. No birth certificate. No record. No clue who the man even was.”
He pauses. Watches me. We both know he’s not finished.
“He grew up in a run-down trailer park in Connecticut. He’s Deaf and mute, also a community college student, scraping by. Do you want me to keep going?”
Lucas isn’t mute—he’s nonverbal, but I don’t have the patience to correct him. And I almost laugh. The absurdity is too rich. I wonder what else he looked into, maybe the color of Lucas’s boxer briefs when I slid them off on Saturday and got us both off with my hands, or how he melts and moans my name in that submissive way of his.
My father’s eyes search my face, cold and expectant, waiting for a reply, maybe?
When I don’t give him one, his blue eyes darken.
He leans forward.
“Tell me what you see in that, what you heard in any of what I just said, that made you think being with someone like him was a good idea. What about that kind of background makes him worthy of being your… latest fixation that you had to bring him to your mother’s dinner party and flaunt him around?”
“He’s not a fixation,” I say, voice low but clear. “I am so clearly into him.”
