Page 35 of Dark Embers

She spins and storms out.

I stand there, cheek burning, shame creeping into my gut like poison.

Syd still hasn’t moved.

“You’ve got nothing to say?” I snarl, turning on her. “What the fuck do I pay you for?”

“To tell you when you’re being an asshole?” she says coolly. “Because right now? You’re being a fucking giant one.”

I growl. “If you’ve got something to say, Syd—just fucking say it. Everyone else has today.”

She pushes off the wall and walks toward me slowly, her eyes deadly calm.

“First, I agree with Judy. Setting Sabrina up? That was next-level twisted. Even for you.” She shakes her head. “And as for Judy…”

She stops in front of me. “Are you really this blind, Oleksi?”

I frown. “Blind to what?”

“The truth?” she replies. “It’s been right before your eyes for the past what… twelve years.”

“What truth would that be?” I rub my stinging cheek. Judy always did have a mean right hook.

Syd stares at me like I’ve grown a second head.

“You say you can do math?” She snorts. “Jesus, Oleksi. You need to go back to school.”

“My math is fine,” I bite out.

“No, it isn’t,” she says flatly. “Judy’s right, you know. You only ever see what you want to see. And let me guess—you never even questioned why Maxim was born a month early, huh?”

I blink.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying Maxim was born one month premature,” she says slowly. “And Viktor? He had a football injury when he was seventeen that left him sterile. He and Judy only started dating when he was about twenty.”

The world tilts beneath me.

“What?”

“You and Judy never had sex,” she continues, voice softening now. “So if Viktor can’t have kids… and it wasn’t you…”

Her words slam into me like a truck.

Maxim.

Maxim isn’t Viktor’s son.

But he isn’t mine either.

Which means if Judy really was still a virgin when my father and uncle raped her because she refused to marry me... A punishment for daring to turn down the next head of a bratva family.

I stagger back, breath catching in my chest as I redo the math and maybe Syd’s right I should go back to school.

My heart beats like a war drum in my ears. I can’t breathe. I can’t think.

I feel sick to my stomach as the thoughts churn through my head—my father and uncle had brutalized Judy and Viktor—because of me and then they made me believe she betrayed me.

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