Chapter 107: Alcoholic Bonding
The warmth from the album and the shared stories lingered in the kitchen, a fragile new understanding suspended in the air between the four of them. Beth finished her coffee, the soft click of the mug on granite a quiet punctuation mark.
“So, you’ve survived the childhood montage,” Beth said to Damien, a wry tilt to her mouth. “Consider yourself initiated into the ‘Before’ years.”
“I’m beginning to think my own family dramas are quaint by comparison,” Damien mused, tracing a finger along the album’s worn edge.“Loud, emotional, lots of hand gestures. Straightforward.”
Dove barked a laugh, hopping down to start clearing plates.“Oh, just you wait. You think your mamma was a handful? You haven’t met the in-law yet.”
A different tension entered the room, subtle but immediate. Jackson turned back to the sink, his shoulders tightening just a fraction.Beth’s expression went perfectly still, like the surface of a deep, cold lake.
Damien glanced between them. “Your mother.”
“The Siberian Valkyrie,” Dove said, the nickname holding a complex mix of fondness and sheer awe. She leaned against the counter, crossing her arms.“Elena Novak. Born in a village so cold your thoughts could freeze before you spoke them.Trained by the old Soviet apparatus before going freelance. Then she met a loud, lanky Texas fixer at a poker game in Monaco and, according to legend, she won his money, his watch, and his heart in that order.”
Beth let out a soft breath, almost a sigh.“She spoke perfect English, but she never lost the accent. Said it reminded people not to underestimate her.Dove and I were her little devochki, her girls. We spoke Russian at home, English everywhere else. Two little Russian speakers in the middle of nowhere Texas.” A faint, real smile touched her lips. “It confused the hell out of the cattle hands.”
“She’d be singing some old folk song while cleaning a sniper rifle on the porch,” Jackson added, his voice a low rumble of memory.“Sun going down, cicadas buzzing. Surreal doesn’t cover it.”
Damien tried to picture it. The elegant, lethal woman from the few stories he’d heard, juxtaposed against this sprawling ranch. The polar opposite of his own warm, volatile, but deeply domestic mother. “They must have been… quite a pair.”
“They were fire and steel,” Beth said quietly.“He was all open spaces and big laughs. She was closed rooms and calculated silences.And they were desperately in love. It taught us that opposites don’t just attract. They can forge something unbreakable.” Her eyes found Damien’s, and the subtext hung there, acknowledging their own violent contrasts.
A timer on the oven chimed, a sharp, cheerful sound that shattered the heavier mood. Dove snapped into motion, pulling on a pair of quilted mitts shaped like bull horns. “And now, for the other thing they had in common.” She opened the oven door, and a wave of fragrant, buttery heat rolled out.Damien leaned forward. The scent was profound: baked apples, brown sugar, a caramelized crust, and underneath it all, the unmistakable, oaky burn of good whiskey.
Beth’s eyes, wide and suddenly younger, fixed on the pie as Dove set it on a trivet.The golden lattice crust shimmered, little bubbles of syrupy filling promising perfection. “Dad’s famous whiskey caramel apple,” Beth murmured, almost to herself.
“And when it’s just cool enough not to melt it,” Dove said, opening the freezer and pulling out a tub of homemade ice cream, “we top it with vodka vanilla bean. The Novak family recipe.”
Damien watched Beth.Her guardedness had dissolved, replaced by a naked, wistful hunger. It wasn’t just for dessert. It was for the memory, for the fusion of those two starkly different worlds in one dish.
“The one trait they truly shared,” Beth said, dragging her gaze from the pie to Damien.“A truly epic capacity to drink. A legacy we both, unfortunately, inherited.”
“Speak for yourself,” Dove grinned, getting out plates. “I consider it a gift.”
Jackson brought over forks.“Your dad would put away a bottle of bourbon and tell taller stories. Your mom… she’d sip her vodka, neat, and say maybe ten words all night. But they’d both be smiling in the same secret way.”
The pie was sliced, the ice cream cascading over the warm filling in creamy, melting rivers. They ate standing around the island, no ceremony, just the shared, visceral pleasure of it. The flavors were a punch to the senses: the sweet, tart apples, the rich, whiskey-laced caramel, the clean, bracing kick of the vodka in the cold, fragrant ice cream.It was delicious and disorienting, a perfect metaphor.
“Gospodi,” Damien said, the Russian exclamation slipping out before he could think.Beth froze, a fork halfway to her mouth.She stared at him. Dove and Jackson went still.Damien shrugged, swallowing.“What? I pick things up.”
A slow, deep smile spread across Beth’s face, the first completely unguarded one he’d seen all morning.It lit her up from within, chasing the last of the ice from her eyes. “Ochen’ vkusno,” she said softly, her own accent precise and melodic. Very delicious.
For a moment, it was just the two of them in the room, connected across the granite by a shared, unexpected syllable, a thread pulled from the tangled fabric of her past.
Dove broke the spell with a clap of her hands.“Okay, he passes. He appreciates the holy trinity: whiskey, apples, and implied family trauma.”
The conversation loosened after that, flowing into easier channels—ranch business, a foaling mare, the logistics for the upcoming wedding. But the undertone had shifted. Damien had been handed another piece of the codex: the mother, the language, the specific alchemy of her childhood that forged the steel in her.
Later, when Dove and Jackson had left to ride the fence line, Damien helped Beth clean up. His hand brushed hers as he passed her a plate to dry.
“Elena,” he said, testing the name. “Can I…meet her before the wedding?”
Beth’s drying towel stilled for a second on the porcelain. She looked out the window, toward the endless hills.“We try”
Beth turned her head, her green eyes searching his.“She would love to but Damien… just be you.Don’t try to impress her. She sees through everything. The only thing that matters to her is that you see me. All of me. Not the mogul, not the trophy, not the damn fixer. The devochka who liked frogs and pretty dresses and her papa’s pie.”
He took the plate and towel from her hands, setting them aside.He cupped her face, his thumbs stroking her cheekbones. “I see her,” he said, his voice low and rough. “I’m just starting to, but I see her. And I’m not going anywhere.”
She leaned into his touch, her eyes closing for a brief, vulnerable second. When they opened, the steel was back, but it was warmed, flexible.“Good,” she whispered. Then she stepped back, the moment receding but not vanishing.“Now, help me finish this. I’ve got a call with a man in D.C. who thinks his problem can’t be solved.”
“And can it?”
Beth picked up the last fork, her smile sharp and familiar. “Darling,” she said, the word a velvet-wrapped blade.“We’re the Montgomerys. We specialize in the impossible.”