Page 54 of Inked Adonis

I skip out on the shower and dinner, if only so I don’t slip up and say something even more embarrassing than the nuggets I’ve already given him.

But a little past midnight, my door creaks open, and Rufus paws his way into my room. He hunkers into bed beside me, and I wrap my arms around him.

“I’m surprised you’re not with Sam,” I tell him accusingly, snuggling his neck.

He looks over his shoulder at me, and I swear his big, brown eyes reply,I could say the same to you.

18

SAMUIL

Until I was seven, I only had one image of my mother.

I found it wedged in the back of a drawer in my father’s very off-limits office a few years earlier. There was no name or explanation, but I felt it deep in my chest: the connection.

Her hair was dark honey waves—just like mine—and her eyes were silver—just like mine.

I’d always wondered why Ilya got to have a mother while I didn’t. At least I had the photo. One perfect snapshot of the woman who gave me life. She’s smiling and radiating joy, and I could pretend that wherever she was, she was still happy. And that maybe, one day, she’d come back for me.

Then my father found me looking at the picture late one night.

His blue eyes are chipped like ice as he snatches it out of my hands. His nostrils flare and his teeth grind together. For a moment, he looks like Reaper, the most vicious of all of his dogs.

Not coincidentally, also his favorite.

“Where’d you get this?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer. “She was young here. Sweet. You love her just looking at you, don’t you? I sure did. She looks innocent.”

I nod like the scared little boy I am, too frozen to form actual words.

The next thing I know, he throws the picture frame to the floor. Glass shatters. His eyes bore into mine as he leans close, too close, too fucking close. Cigarettes and vodka wreath his breath as he exhales one word: “Wrong.”

He drags me by the arm down the hall, unlocks the door to his office, and throws me into the leather chair in the corner. I look around the room in awe. I’ve been in here before, but always with the lights off. It’s always been a stolen few seconds—in and out—before I could be caught.

Now, I have time to take it all in.

But all I can focus on is my father as he wrenches open his desk and pulls out a videotape.

“Let this be a lesson to you, boy. Your eyes will always deceive you when it comes to women. She may have looked like an angel, but, well… see for yourself.”

He slides the tape into the VCR. Static at first. Like dirty snow. Then a woman appears on the screen. She’s bone-thin and shaking in the middle of the frame. Her hair hangs in limp, greasy tangles around her hollow face.

But when she lifts her chin, I see the same silver eyes from my photo.

My mother.

“P-please,” she rasps. “Please, Leonid. I’m suffering.”

My father’s voice booms through the speakers. I flinch instinctively, even as the present version of him looms silently at my side. “You brought this on yourself. You’re a slave to your addictions, Natalya.”

“Just one more time,” she begs, her lips cracked and bleeding. “A little more money, and then I’ll… I’ll get clean. I’ll come back.”

“Listen to me.” His voice turns gentle, which somehow makes it worse. “I’ll offer you a choice.”

My mother goes still, aside from the constant twitching of her hands.

“I’ll give you twenty-thousand dollars to use as you see fit?—”

“I’ll take it!” she blurts, eyes wild. “I want it.”

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