Page 155 of Dirty Grovel

“I’m not in the mood for a lecture tonight, Maman. I suggest you go back to your own home.”

“While my son’s house is on fire?” she replies. “I think not.”

Oleg takes a swig of vodka. His eyes are red-rimmed, his gestures jarring, broken, sloppy.

His cracks are splayed out in front of me, ready for viewing.

I feel sick. He’d never want me to see this.

“Fuck,” he thunders. “It’s hot in here.”

He sets down the tumbler long enough to rip his shirt off. A pantheon of muscles stares back at me. For a moment, I can swear I hear a chorus in the background, the voices of a dozen angels raised in praise for the man I’m ogling with pathetic longing.

Maybe it’s when things are at their breaking point that they look the most beautiful to me.

“Look at you!” Oksana rages at him. “Look at the state of you. You’ve survived far worse than this and yet, that pint-sized pantomime has managed to reduce you tonothing.”

“Enough,” Oleg snarls, grabbing his tumbler again. “I’ve done my duty tonight. I buried the fucker, I made a sad speech, Ilooked suitably mournful, I shook every fucking hand in that cathedral?—”

“And yet still, you managed to come up short,” Oksana hisses, her black skirt swishing with every step she makes.

Even rumpled and tipsy, the two of them look like royalty.

By comparison, I’m the court jester who can’t walk in a straight line without tripping over.

Give me a big red nose and a funny hat and my transformation will be complete.

“I’m done talking,” Oleg booms, his presence looming over Oksana. “All I want to do is sit here and have a fucking drink.”

But she doesn’t give him the chance to do that. Bolder than I’d ever be, she reaches up and snatches the drink from his grasp.

Vodka splashes onto her black dress, but for once, she doesn’t seem to care.

Face skewed in an awful grimace, she raises the drink high in the air. “You want to drink? Fine. We’ll fucking drink. Here’s a toast: To my son and his crumbling empire. I didn’t think it was possible to destroy what your father built so quickly. But once again, you’ve proven me wrong.”

“Don’t…”

But Oksana has just gotten started. She circles the countertop like an angry vulture, her eyes reduced to flat, backlit disks under the kitchen lights.

“Raise your glass to the choice you made that set the ship on fire.”

I freeze, eyes widening from the sheer cruelty of her casually flung words.

Oleg is a statue, riveted in place, speechless, motionless, heartless.

“Raise a glass to me, too. To motherhood. I’m so glad my son was able to put aside all that well-honed training, maturity, forethought and cunning I bred in him in order to choose a woman who not only makes him look weak, but is also enough of a liability that she has managed to drag down both him and his reputation in one fell swoop.”

My vision blurs behind a fog of tears. I try to brush them away but every time I do, there’s more to replace them.

Oleg finally moves.

But it’s only to crumble downwards.

The tension goes out of his jaw, his shoulders, his eyes. The cracks I see in him are widening. It’s terrifying to glimpse the heartbreak beneath.

He glances at his mother. “Are you done?”

Oksana raises her glass a little higher. “One last thing: A toast to Sutton Palmer—an unworthy, uneducated, uncultured, white trash gold-digger. Daughter of a father who abandoned her at birth and a mother who landed herself in prison. Sister to an idiotic killer. What a family. Truly, you chose well, son.”

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