Page 232 of Reckless Obsession

“Maksim was an adult when anything happened between you. He came to you. He chose you.” Pavel’s expression turns colder. “That is your only saving grace.”

The room seems to narrow around us.

“I am disappointed in you because you lied to me,” Pavel says, his voice quiet, carrying the cold weight of a sentence already passed. “I asked you in this very room months ago whether anything was going on between my son and you. You looked me dead in the eye and said nothing was happening.”

The accusation hangs in the heavy silence between us. I don’t drop my gaze. I don’t flinch.

“Would you have taken the truth lightly?” I ask evenly.

Pavel’s jaw tightens by a fraction of a millimeter. “You know I wouldn’t have. But a hard truth from an ally is business. A lie from someone inside my house is a betrayal.”

“I didn’t lie to deceive you, Mr. Petrov,” I reply, my voice steady, stripped of defensiveness. “I lied because, at the time, I was still trying to convince myself I had the discipline to walk away from him. I thought I could control it. I thought I could keep him at arm’s length and protect the boundaries we’ve upheld for decades.”

“And now?” Pavel asks, leaning forward, resting his forearms flat on the polished mahogany. “You’ve decided that boundaries no longer apply to you?”

“Now I know that walking away from Maksim is impossible.”

His eyebrows rise by a fraction.

“I have spent most of my life making decisions based on what was sensible,” I say. “What was expected. What created the least damage. I stayed in a marriage long after it stopped being honest because leaving seemed harder. I protected people because I thought responsibility was the same as love. I built my life around discipline and control until I could barely recognize the things I actually wanted.”

The air in the room turns razor-sharp.

I take a slow, unhurried breath and hold the gaze of one of the most dangerous men in this city.

“I apologize for mixing business with personal sentiment,” I say, keeping my tone respectful, calm, and grounded in absolute certainty. “I respect you a lot. I respect the empire you’ve built, and the thirty years of trust between our families. But I love your son. And there is not a single thing you can say in this room that will make me end things with him.”

The quiet after that statement feels almost ceremonial.

Pavel’s jaw shifts once.

“You speak as though you believe this will not cost you.”

“I believe it may cost me everything.”

“And that does not concern you?”

“It concerns me.” I keep my voice level. “It simply does not change my answer.”

Pavel looks down at the closed folder on his desk. Then he opens it.

Inside are documents I recognize immediately: contracts, ownership structures, retainer agreements, records of the relationship between the Petrov organization and Sinclair’s Legal Group. Thirty years of trust reduced to signatures, seals, and clauses.

“If I remove the Petrov business from your firm,” he says, “your firm will survive. But it will not emerge unchanged.”

“I know.”

“If I make it known that I have ended our relationship because I no longer trust the man running it, other clients will ask questions.”

“They will.”

“Some will leave.”

“Probably.”

Pavel lifts his gaze.

“If I pull the Petrov family’s retainer from Sinclair’s Legal Group,” Pavel says, the threat delivered with surgical precision. “Your firm will lose forty-five percent of its revenue overnight.”