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“Like fuck you are,” she snaps, switching to English, her grip tightening slightly. “Maksim, you’ve started fighting in the elite circuit again?”
“I didn’t stop,” I mutter, quieter now but just as stubborn.
Her glare hits instantly, hard and dangerous, but it doesn’t last long. It never does when she’s looking at me like this. Her eyes soften again as they scan my face.
It doesn’t look that bad. At least not by my standards. Jude just happened to hit like a collapsing building, and I let him land a few more shots than I probably should’ve. Occupational hazard. Honestly, unluckily for him, he met me on a bad night. Right now, they’re probably wheeling his body somewhere cold and fluorescent, and all I can think is what a waste of a perfectly good monster.
“Come on,” my mother says, taking my arm.
I open my mouth to protest, but the look she gives me kills that idea. So I let her lead me down the hall like I’m twelve again and too stubborn to know when I’m hurt.
She takes me to her room, not the one she shares with my father, but her own. Her private one. The room she slips into when her sisters or closest friends come over for one of their sleepovers, which, yes, they still have, despite all of them being far too old to be painting nails, drinking tea, and gossiping until dawn. Then again, maybe that’s the point. Maybe some parts of girlhood don’t expire just because life gets stagnant early.
The room looks like a fever-dream Barbie designed after a nervous breakdown. Pink. White. Soft textures everywhere. Teddy bears lined up with eerie sincerity. Plush pillows. Frilled blankets. On the far side of the room is the tea area, complete with a long dining table set out in an aggressively delicate cottage-coquette style that would make strangers assume the woman who owns it has never once ordered a man killed in her life.
They’d be wrong, obviously.
Still, I’ve always understood this room.
My mother says she never had a real girlhood. I believe her. She married my father at nineteen in an arranged marriage she didn’t want, had Anton at twenty, and Alex at twenty-two. She spent those early years learning to survive a life she hadn’t chosen. She didn’t love my father then. Not even close.
From what I know, it took five years of marriage for her to fall in love with my father, and another five before they finally had me. Anton was already ten when I was born. So, in a way, I was the only child they had out of love.
“Sit,” my mother says, guiding me toward the bed.
“Mom, I swear I’m good,” I say, more stubborn than convincing, and lower myself onto the fluffy disaster of blankets anyway.
She ignores me completely and disappears into the en-suite bathroom.
I let out a slow breath and look down at my hands. They aren’t bruised, not really. The wraps did their job. But they feel numb in that deep, humming way that comes after hitting something too hard for too long. Like the bones inside them are still vibrating.
I lift my shirt, my eyes scanning the bruises spreading across my stomach and ribs, dark and already forming patterns I know will look worse by morning. Each one a reminder of how hard he hit and how harder I hit back. For a second, I just stare at them, detached, as if they belong to someone else.
Then I hear movement behind me. I drop my shirt immediately, the fabric falling back into place just as she steps out of the bathroom, and just like that I’m back under her gaze again.
She sets the first-aid box on the nightstand, then drags the vanity chair over and places it in front of me before settling into it. Her eyes move over me one more time, slow and searching, and there’s something in them that makes my chest feel too tight. It’s maternal, obviously, but it’s softer than that too, more fragile somehow. It’s the way she looks at me differently than she looks at Anton or Alex, as if I’m fragile in a way they’re not, like I might disappear if she lets me out of her sight for too long.
She lets out a quiet breath, then turns to the first-aid box and starts pulling out everything she needs. Cotton pads. Antiseptic. Gauze. Thread. Her hands are steady, practiced. She’s done this before. Not just patched-up scrapes and split lips, but deeper things too, the kinds of wounds families like mine learn to treat in silence. Still, there’s a gentleness to the way she handles everything that makes it feel less like medicine and more like care, and that somehow hurts worse.
When she leans in close, her fingers find my chin with that familiar, careful grip and tilt my face into the light, her gaze narrowing on the damage.
“This cut by your brow needs stitches,” she murmurs as she slips on the gloves, her voice steady but low, as if she’s talking herself through it as much as me. “The other bruises don’t, but they need cleaning. Can’t have you scarring more than you already are.”
My eyes lift to hers, but she looks away too quickly, as if holding my gaze for too long might crack whatever composure she’s pieced together.
Her hands are gentle, always have been. Even now, with the needle, with the careful precision of stitching my skin back together, there’s a softness to her touch that makes it hard to look away. She works quietly, efficiently. Like if she keeps it clinical, it won’t hurt as much.
When she’s done with the cut, she bandages it neatly before moving on to the bruises, dabbing antiseptic along my cheek, the corner of my mouth, my chin.
She doesn’t say a word, and the silence starts to suffocate me. It presses in from all sides, heavy and thick, until I can’t breathe through it anymore.
So I break it.
“Why are you up this late?” I ask, my voice cutting through the quiet.
She pauses for a second, glancing up at me briefly as she cleans the cut on my chin, then looks back down without answering. That somehow irritates me more than if she’d snapped. Frustration claws its way up my throat, and I almost curse just to rip through the tension. Instead, I bite it back.
“I’m sorry,” I say instead, switching to Thai because it feels safer, softer, as if it might reach her without drawing blood.
