Chapter 126: Down to the Bud
The slammed doors had been Isaak, storming off to his study with a bottle of vodka. The party, somehow, reconstituted itself in the main salon—a feat of sheer social willpower. Someone put on old jazz. Crystal glasses chimed. Laughter echoed, a little too sharp, a little too loud.
Polina held court by the fireplace, holding a glass of champagne like a scepter. Beth moved through the room, a ghost in a silk dress, exchanging meaningless pleasantries with cousins whose names she barely remembered. Her skin felt too tight. Every nerve was still live from the lunch, from the raw look on Damien’s face in the grove.
He was across the room now, talking low with an uncle about shipping routes. His eyes found hers every few minutes. A silent check-in. She gave a slight nod. I’m okay. We’re playing the game.
But she wasn’t okay. The word ‘half-breed’ hadn’t been spoken yet, but she could feel it forming in the air around Polina, a toxic potential. It was the old, unspoken curse of her mother’s side—Elena, the beautiful weapon who’d dared to love an American. Beth was the living proof of that transgression. Too Russian for Texas, too Texan for Russia. A permanent guest in both houses.
She needed air that wasn’t poisoned with perfume and politics.
Slipping through a set of French doors, she found herself on a narrow balcony overlooking the sea. The music muffled instantly, replaced by the rhythmic sigh of waves on the cliffs below. The wind was cold. It felt clean.
She pulled a silver case from her clutch. A single, slender cigarette. She hadn’t smoked in years, but the case was her father’s—a relic, a habit for when the pressure had no other release valve. The flare of the match illuminated her face for a second. She inhaled, the smoke hitting her lungs with a familiar, aching burn.
“I should have known.” Polina’s voice came from the doorway. “You only smoke when you’re emotional.”
Beth didn’t turn. “Go back inside, Polina.”
“We’re not finished.”
“We were finished ten years ago.” Beth took another drag, watching the ember glow. “You just didn’t get the memo.”
Polina stepped onto the balcony, closing the door behind her. The sudden silence was profound. “You think you’ve won. With your ranch, your fortune, your… reprobate husband reclaimed. You swan in here and pass judgment on my grief? On how I remember my family?”
“I told you to drop it.” Beth’s voice was flat.
“Or what? You’ll set your guard dog on me? He’s already leashed and muzzled, Betsenka. He knows what happens to men who bite here.”
Beth turned then, slowly. The green of her eyes was almost black in the moonlight. “You keep talking about him to get to me. It’s transparent. And boring. If you have something to say, say it to my face without using him as a prop.”
“Fine.” Polina took a step closer. The champagne had made her cheeks flush, her eyes bright and vicious. “You are a sentimental fool. Your mother was a legend, and you’ve spent your life running from what that means, chasing normalcy with cowboys and then with mafia princes. You think because you’ve built walls of money, you’re safe. You think because he looks at you now like a penitent, it erases what he is. The blood he’s responsible for. The attention he brings. You are a security risk to everyone in this house simply by being linked to him. Again.”
The cigarette was burning down to Beth’s fingers. She ignored it. “My safety is my concern. Not yours.”
“It is when your poor choices put Dimitri’s legacy at risk!” Polina’s composure snapped, her voice rising. “This isn’t a game of mergers and acquisitions! This is the real world. The one your mother understood. The one you have always, always been too soft to live in. You are a…”
She stopped, but the word hung between them, heavier than the sea air.
Beth let it hang. She took one last, long drag, the smoke curling from her lips. “Say it. You’ve been wanting to all day.”
Polina’s lips thinned. She looked old suddenly, and bitter. “A civilian.”
Beth laughed, a short, harsh sound. “Try again.”
Silence.
Then, quieter, laced with a venom that was pure, undiluted resentment: “Half-breed.”
The word landed. Not as an insult, but as a verdict. A final, irrevocable casting out.
Beth dropped the cigarette. She ground it beneath the heel of her stiletto, twisting until it was nothing but pulp and scattered tobacco. When she looked up, all the ice in her had solidified into something diamond-hard and absolute.
“When we were kids,” she said, her voice terrifyingly calm, “I excused it as grief. I made allowances. I told myself you were just hurt, just lost. Now?” She shook her head, a slow, dismissing movement. “Now you’re just a pathetic bitch.”
Polina’s breath caught.
“Fuck you,” Beth continued, the words clean and precise as a scalpel. “Fuck you and Isaak. I’m done.”
She straightened her spine, clasping her hands in front of her. A CEO ending a disastrous board meeting. “As far as I’m concerned, Elena will always be your aunt, and Dimitri will always be my uncle. But you?” She met Polina’s stunned gaze. “You’re no longer my family. And you are not worth one more second of my time.”
She didn’t wait for a response. She turned, pulled the balcony door open, and stepped back into the noise and the light.
The warmth of the room hit her like a wall. She didn’t stop. She moved through the crowd, a fixed point in the swirling chaos. She saw Damien detach from his conversation, his eyes scanning her face, reading the tectonic shift in her expression.
He was at her side in three strides. He didn’t ask. He just took her hand, his fingers threading through hers, an anchor.
“We leaving?” he murmured, his body angled between her and the rest of the room.
Beth looked past him, to where Polina was still frozen on the dark balcony. She saw the silhouette, small and alone.
“No,” Beth said, squeezing his hand. She turned toward the center of the room, her chin lifting. “The party’s just starting.”