Chapter 5 — Her Mother’s Hand

POV: Beatrix

The slap was still ringing in my ears when I finally managed to focus on the woman standing in my doorway.

My mother’s chest heaved, her hand still raised where it had struck me, her face twisted with anger I’d seen a thousand times before, just never delivered like this.

A hot, sharp sensation pulsed from my jaw to my ear, making the hallway seem to tilt briefly, as if the floor had shifted beneath me.

I pressed my palm against the stinging skin and just stood there, breathing, waiting for the room to stop tipping.

I had heard my mother yell at me my entire life. I had absorbed decades of her remarks about my weight, my choices, my usefulness, until the words barely registered as anything more than weather.

But no one had ever hit me.

Not once, not even when I was a teenager and gave her every reason to.

There was a strange, ringing clarity to standing in my own doorway and understanding, for the first time, that some invisible line I hadn’t even known existed had just been crossed.

“You ungrateful, disgusting” Martha started, already winding up for round two, her voice rising to the pitch she used when she wanted the whole building to hear her.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done to this family?

Splashed across every entertainment blog in the city, looking like some desperate, fat little …..”

Her voice stopped.

Mid-word. Mid-breath. I watched her gaze drift past my shoulder into the cramped living room behind me, settling on the man standing there in his charcoal suit, arms crossed, completely still, as if he’d been carved out of the same cold air as the doorway itself.

The transformation was instant.

The rage didn’t fade so much as evaporate, pulled out of her all at once, replaced by something much more familiar to me, something I recognized from a lifetime of watching her work a room full of donors, in-laws, anyone whose opinion she’d decided mattered more than mine.

Her raised hand dropped to her chest. Her spine straightened slightly. Her mouth formed a bright, brittle smile that never reached her eyes.

“Mr. Ashcombe.” She breathed his name like it was a prayer, smoothing a hand down the front of her blouse, patting at hair that hadn’t moved.

“I am so sorry, I didn’t realize you were there.

I would never usually raise my voice like this, it’s just, a mother worries, you understand.

Beatrix has been under so much stress lately, haven’t you, sweetheart? I only came to check on her.”

Her eyes flicked around my small living room, cataloguing it the way she catalogued everything, and I watched her decide, in real time, that the space was beneath her but that this was not the moment to say so.

I flinched. Sweetheart. She hadn’t called me that since I was seven years old and standing next to her at a charity gala, useful for exactly as long as the cameras were on us.

Nikolai didn’t move from where he stood. He didn’t smile, didn’t extend a hand, didn’t offer her a single one of the small courtesies she was so clearly waiting for.

He just looked at her the way I imagined he looked at a failing quarterly report — cold, assessing, already three steps past whatever she was about to say next.

“Does she do this often?” he asked.

He wasn’t asking Martha. His eyes hadn’t left mine since the door had opened wide enough to show him what had happened.

“It’s fine,” I said quickly, the words tumbling out of me before I’d even decided to say them, some old, well-worn reflex firing off on its own. “She didn’t mean it, we just had a misunderstanding, it’s really not—”

“That wasn’t the question.”

His voice cut clean through mine, flat and final, and the rest of my excuse died somewhere in my throat. I felt my face heat, humiliation layering on top of the sting already spreading across my cheek.

He’d asked me a direct question and I’d tried to hand him a smaller, softer lie instead, the same way I’d been doing since I was old enough to understand that the truth cost more than I could afford.

“How long?” he said, quieter now, and somehow that was worse than if he’d shouted it.

“Nikolai—”

“How long, Beatrix.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.

He read it off my face anyway, and something shifted behind his eyes, something colder settling in where a stranger’s polite disinterest had been standing a moment ago.

Martha’s smile flickered, sensing the ground moving beneath her before I did.

“Now, let’s not make this into something it isn’t,” she said, laughing lightly, reaching a hand toward my arm like she could smooth this over with touch the way she’d smoothed over every scene she’d ever caused in public.

“Families argue, Mr. Ashcombe. It’s completely normal, I’m sure a man in your position understands the pressure of appearances—”

“Don’t touch her.”

He hadn’t raised his voice. He didn’t need to.

The two words landed in the room like something breaking, and Martha’s hand froze mid-air before dropping back to her side, her manicured fingers curling into a fist she didn’t seem to notice she’d made.

Nikolai crossed the small living room in four unhurried strides and stopped beside me, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him, close enough that Martha had to physically retreat a step back into the hallway to avoid being crowded entirely out of her own daughter’s doorway.

She looked, for the first time in my memory, genuinely uncertain of her footing.

“Let me be very clear,” he said, and his voice had gone dangerously quiet, the kind of quiet that made the fine hair on my arms stand up.

“As of a little over an hour ago, Beatrix is my wife. Legally. Publicly. Which means that, as of a little over an hour ago, she is no longer someone you can raise your hand to and then call it a misunderstanding in front of witnesses.

Martha’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened again, searching for an angle and finding none.

“You will not come near her again,” he continued, each word landing with the same flat, immovable weight.

“Not to her apartment, not to my home, not to a single event either of us attends, unless I personally extend the invitation.

Is that understood?

“You can’t just do that”, Martha’s voice cracked down the middle, real panic finally bleeding through thirty years of performance.

I’m her mother! You have no right to tell me I can’t see my own daughter!

“You’re trespassing.” He didn’t even look at her when he said it.

His head had already turned toward the hallway, where a man in a dark suit I hadn’t noticed arrived and was standing a respectful few feet back, hands folded in front of him, patient, clearly waiting for exactly this cue.

“Marcus. Escort Mrs. Holloway to her car.”

The man called Marcus stepped forward without a flicker of hesitation, one hand extending toward my mother’s elbow, the kind of practiced, unhurried movement that told me this wasn’t the first time he’d removed someone from a building who didn’t want to be removed.

“Don’t you touch me,” Martha snapped, yanking her arm back so hard she nearly stumbled into the doorframe, but she was already being steered backward, out of my apartment and into the corridor, her heels scraping and catching against the cheap linoleum.

Whatever composure she’d rebuilt in front of Nikolai cracked wide open the second she realized it wasn’t working.

“Beatrix! Beatrix, you tell him he can’t do this! Say something! I am your mother; I raised you.”

I said nothing. I couldn’t.

My cheek was still throbbing in time with my pulse, and my chest felt hollowed out and strange, like something had been scooped clean out of it, and I just stood frozen in the middle of my own living room while a stranger’s bodyguard walked my mother out of my life one dragging step at a time.

Nikolai reached past me and shut the door.

The click of the latch was very loud in the sudden quiet.

But Martha wasn’t finished.

Her voice came through the wood, muffled now but unmistakable, sharp with a desperation that turned my stomach in a way her anger never quite managed to.

“You call me by morning, Beatrix Holloway, or I swear to God, I will call every reporter in this city and tell them exactly who you really are!”

I stood very still, my hand still pressed to my burning cheek, listening as her footsteps finally faded down the hall, dragged along at Marcus’s unhurried pace, further and further away until the building swallowed the sound completely.

Then nothing. Just silence, and the low, distant hum of the city outside, and the two of us standing in a living room that suddenly felt much too small for everything that had just happened in it.

I became aware, slowly, that I was still holding my hand against my cheek, and that my fingers had gone slightly numb from how hard I was pressing.

I made myself lower it.

The skin underneath felt tight and overly warm, and I knew without looking that there would be a mark there by morning, some faint proof that today had actually happened and I hadn’t simply imagined the whole thing.

Nikolai hadn’t moved from beside me.

I could feel him there, close, silent, watching the door like he expected my mother to try the handle again.

“I’m sorry,” I said, before I could stop myself, the apology as automatic as breathing.

“You shouldn’t have had to see that.”

He turned his head, and for a moment his expression wasn’t cold at all—just unreadable, like he was recalculating something he’d already decided he understood.

He didn’t tell me it was fine.

He didn’t tell me not to apologize.

He just studied me for a long beat, then looked back at the door.

I stared at the closed door for a long moment and realized, with a strange, hollow kind of clarity, that I had absolutely no idea what my own mother thought “the truth” about me even was, or how much of it she was actually prepared to sell.