Page 82 of Out of Control

“Don’t do that.” She walks farther into the room.

“When I gave you a key to my hotel room to sneak in, I guess you weren’t thinking that would be the show, huh?”

“Rossi.”

“Forget it, Sofia.”

“Ollie. Talk to me?”

I grit my teeth and pinch the bridge of my nose. The need to walk away, to pull away, calls to me and yet how do I do that when she’s been so forthcoming with me about her family, about her struggle? How do I tell her my life is off limits when hers is a fucking tornado we’re both stuck in?

I pace. I lace my fingers at the back of my neck and move back and forth across the space of my suite.

“Why won’t he come to a race?” she asks softly.

“Because I fucked up as a kid? Because racing wasn’t my first love?” I spit out half-truths. “Hell if I know.”

“Come on. I’m serious.”

“So am I.” I shrug. “He’s frustrating. Always has been. Seems he always will be. It’s always work with him. All the time. And I get it. It’s my fault. I made him that way—”

“Whoa. Stop.” She shakes her head. “How did you make your dad a particular way? He’s the adult.”

“Don’t . . . just never mind.”

She walks toward me and grabs my hands. “No never minds. Remember?” Her eyes meet mine and I swear to fucking God, I feel the first brick in that wall I built around myself tumble off and hit the ground. “What happened?”

“I was in a fancy school. Private. Elite. With all the affluent kids from the area. I had gotten a hardship scholarship there somehow. I’m sure my babbo moved heaven and earth to get it for me.” I can picture it perfectly all these years later. The stone walls covered with ivy. The dark blue of the uniforms and squeak of tennis shoes on the hallway floors. The rumbling engines of the fancy cars that dropped them off. The relentless fucking bullying. That’s what I remember the most.

“What happened there?”

“I was bullied. One of these things is not like the others type of things. They liked counting their piles of cash and I liked . . .” To spend hours in the art room. To pore over books in the library on it. “To do other stuff. Stuff my father didn’t count as worthy of my time.”

“Okay.” She doesn’t ask questions. She lets me talk and that bolsters me.

“One day I snapped. I was sick of the little shoves from behind. My lunch being stolen for sport. The terror of changing in the locker room. And I fought back.”

“Go on.”

“It wasn’t a fair fight. I should have gotten my ass kicked, but there was so much pent-up rage, so many days of being teased, that once I started, I couldn’t be stopped.”

“I’m so sorry.”

I sniff and roll my shoulders. The memory of coming out of that dark rage and seeing the four boys bloody and gasping and cowering will forever stay with me. “They sued us for everything we didn’t have. They pressed charges against me. They got my babbo fired.” I swallow. “They tried to ruin our lives.”

“Surely they were in the wrong. They provoked it.”

“And you know as well as I do that when you have money, your privilege is different than everyone else’s.” I say the words quietly.

She looks at me. Studies me with those quiet eyes and that soft expression. “And that’s part of the reason you’ve always disliked my brother.”

I open my mouth to speak and then close it. Maybe subconsciously it is. Maybe it’s not. And maybe that’s part of the reason Stavros picked him all those years ago instead of me—because affluence just makes everything easier. “We came into each other’s lives when my family was still suffering from the fallout of what I did. I was angry. Resentful. Trying to make it up to my father by doing well at what he was pushing me toward—racing—and feeling like I failed. Especially when Stavros picked him over me.”

I can see the light switch go on in those expressive eyes of hers. No doubt she remembers that because Cruz has been with Stavros and Gravitas ever since then.

“We were just different. About as different as I was from the bullies who terrorized me. It wasn’t Cruz’s fault. It was Stavros’s. The cruel words he said. The justifications he used for why he didn’t pick me. Right or wrong, when you think you’re on top of the world but then have your legs kicked out from underneath you, it sticks with you. And as a sixteen-year-old kid, it crushed me and yes, I still hold a grudge over it to this day.”

“As I probably would too.”