Claim
“How is that?” he asked.
She took a drink from her glass. “She’s like you. A climber. An opportunist. Her future was empty as Viktor’s only child — a daughter can never rise in the bratva. I don’t blame her for seeing her chance in you. You and she aren’t very different from your father and I that way.”
The words sank into him like a sharp blade. “Kira is nothing like you.”
She was smart, yes, and ambitious. But she’d shown him warmth even in the early days of their marriage when he’d done nothing to deserve it, and she’d opened her heart to him long before he’d had the courage to do the same.
His mother’s laughter echoed through the room. “Oh, my. You are your father’s son indeed. He was always a secret romantic.”
The implication — that Kira was still working him, that Lyon was a fool for believing in her — trickled through his blood like a toxin.
He ignored it. He wouldn’t allow his mother to poison his happiness.
“I feel sorry for you,” Lyon said. “You’ve become a sad old woman. Alone. For all your money, all the apartments and handbags, alone.”
Her eyes turned flinty. “Why have you come?” she asked. “What do you want?”
“I want nothing from you,” he said. “Because I know you have nothing to give. You’re empty, as empty as that glass in your hand. I came here for myself. To be honest about who and what you are once and for all, and to tell you — to tell myself — that I won’t allow you to live inside my heart and head another second.”
He was finally starting to believe that he deserved to be happy.
That he deserved to be loved.
Kira had given him that, and he wouldn’t repay it by being a shadow to the past. He would give her what she was giving him.
Everything.
“Goodbye, Mother.”
“Do you want some motherly advice, Lyonya?” He didn’t, so he kept walking, forcing her to fling the words at his back. “You can never trust anyone like you can trust yourself. Not even her.”
He let the door of her suite shut behind him as he made his way to the elevator. His hand shook as he punched the button for the lobby.