A sharp knock thudded at my door. I wasn’t expecting anyone. Tristan was at the hockey house, and Alek was wherever the fuck Alek went.
When I opened the door, my mother stood in the hallway in designer clothes, wearing an expression I couldn’t read.
“Hello, darling,” she said. “Are you going to let me in?”
I hadn’t seen my mother in over a year. She hadn’t even come to my father’s funeral.
She walked into my apartment like she had every right, setting her suitcase down and looking around with those sharp blue eyes that saw too fucking much.
“Lovely,” she said, voice dry.
“How did you find me?” My voice came out rougher than intended.
“Do you think I spent thirty years married to your father without knowing how to track down a person, let alone my son?”
When I simply raised an eyebrow, she said, “Slade called me.”
That fucker. He hadn’t picked up my calls, but he had time to call my mother?
Mom’s eyes were clearer than I’d ever seen them. There was a lightness in her step I’d never seen before, and for the first time, I wondered whether she’d stayed with my father because of his wealth, or because he didn’t give her any other choices.
She studied me the same way I was studying her. What did she see? The son who killed his father? An addict in rehab? A monster like her late husband?
“You look like shit,” she said finally.
“Thanks.”
“When did you last eat?”
I shrugged. “Probably the donuts at my group therapy session last night.”
“Group therapy? On Christmas Eve?”
So her investigation wasn’t as complete as she wanted me to believe. “I’m sober,” I offered quietly, “but it’s fucking hard.”
My mother took a deep breath and moved toward me like she might pull me into a hug. I couldn’t stop myself from flinching. She hadn’t been there when I OD’d—Alek and Tristan were. She hadn’t stood between my father and me, and she hadn’t done a fucking thing to help me manage my demons.
Even if she was here now, and even if my therapist would remind me that she too had lived with my father, I wasn’t quite ready to forgive.
Mom made a soft sound and moved toward my kitchen, with the coffee maker still in its box and exactly threeprotein bars in the cabinet. “Slade said there weren’t any charges. That the bratva cleaned up after you.”
“Turns out, cops are as happy to take bribes from me as they were from my father.” Dmitri’s influence with the right people had also helped. “I’m a free man still.”
“Are you?” She turned to face me, holding up an empty protein bar wrapper. “Because this looks like you’ve just locked yourself in another cage.”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
“I also heard,” she continued, voice softer now, “that you did it all for a girl.”Fuck.“And not Delaney Hartwell, who, by the way, is the person who reached out to me.”
My throat closed. I turned away, staring at the empty wall where normal people would hang pictures. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Eva’s better off without me.” The words tasted like ash. “Without all of us.”
“Where is she?”
“Yorkfield Memorial. She’s in rehab for her heart. Her valve failed the night I—” I stopped, the agony of my own heartbreak swelling in my throat. “The night I killed Dad.”
