Page 52 of The Breath Before Forever

Hannah deserved to hear it, even if no one else had the nerve to say it.

“She’s gonna cut me off,” Hannah said, shrugging like it might make the reality facing her disappear. “Starting next month, I guess. If I don’t—”

“She’s not really going to do that to you. Because you’re pregnant?”

Vera couldn’t wrap her mind around that. She was just self-aware enough to comprehend that her own loving parents gave her a different experience and outlook on parenthood and what it meant than what others had to live through.

Look at Vaslav.

He hated his mother; swore to the heavens that she despised him, too, and that’s how his own hatred had started. How could a parent look in the face of their child and treat them like trash—important and useless?

How?

Hannah stepped around Vera to swing the front door closed. Once it latched shut, she sighed and said, “No, she will, because she knows it’ll work. Or she thinks it’ll work,” Hannah corrected, wincing at her mistake. “I’m not going to kill my baby just because she’s pissed off that I won’t tell her who the father is, and I won’t move back to Italy where I can—once again—be under her thumb twenty-four seven.”

Vera cringed. “She did help you with Viktor.”

“And it came at a cost,” Hannah returned. “My dignity. A lot of pride. Do you think it was any better for me to listen to her verbally abuse me day after day as opposed to Viktor hitting me every time I turned around?”

Vera knew Hannah also hadn’t been given much of a choice. At the time, her mother was the only person in her life with any money and influence to help her out of the bad situation with her ex-husband. Not all sacrifices made a person grow.

Hannah shrugged. “It still hurts, Vera. Abuse is all the same. It still kills.”

“People who can’t love themselves shouldn’t have kids,” Vera muttered, the first thing flying through her mind to also leave her lips. “How can they love their kids if they can’t even feel that way about the person creating the baby? It’s not like an actual child that depends on you to live for the first two decades of their life is going to fix all the things wrong in someone’s life, and then what happens? People put all their pain and trauma into littler people who grow up to have bigger problems because of it.”

A whole cycle.

It wouldn’t end.

Hannah stayed quiet during Vera’s rant.

“Sorry,” she muttered to her friend after. “It’s a little close to home.”

Hannah raised a brow in question. “What, your mom and dad are—”

“No, but someone else has a not-so-great relationship with his mother, and things have happened because of that lately.”

A lame explanation, but Vera wouldn’t offer more on the topic.

Hannah’s crinkled nose and puckered brow spoke of her confusion. “Do you mean your husband?”

Vera sighed. “It just seems to be a theme, okay? Shitty parents who don’t love themselves or their kids who make grown people that don’t know or can’t manage or even understand a lot of what they feel. I’m just saying, I’ve noticed it.”

“Right,” Hannah returned.

Not like she believed it.

Vera waved a hand, and started to pull the messenger bag from her shoulder. She had yet to even kick off her boots or remove her coat, and they hadn’t even left the entry of the villa.”

“I also have practically no money without the accounts and credit cards she gives me access to,” Hannah added while Vera hung her bag and coat on a hook in the hallway. She turned to face Hannah who had chosen the floor to study. “Everything I did have, Viktor took. I didn’t even get a high school diploma out of The Swan House. She pulled the right ropes, Vera—if she cuts them, I drown.”

“Money is the last thing you need to worry about. I’ve got three cards in my wallet, and you could take any of them for six months before Vaslav would notice it probably wasn’t me spending the money.”

That was a lie.

Her husband was too obsessive with tracking their financials, even if she had an all-access pass to the wealth that was now under her name. Nonetheless, she seriously doubted Vaslav would say shit to her handling her friend’s affairs for a while. A few hundred thousand, likely less, to help Hannah get on her feet and have a healthy, loved baby was nothing. A drop in the bucket to the billions upon billions of bloodstained money that belonged to her.

Or so the paperwork said.