Page 30 of One Last Shot

“Unless you told her, she has no idea that money is coming from me.” Petra is a lot of things, but manipulative is not one of them.

“You sure about that?” he asks, steepling his fingertips together while his elbows rest on his desk.

“I’m positive.” She wouldn’t do that.

“Well, one way or the other, she’s yours now.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. You don’tbuya girl like Petra, youearnher. Her mother was the same way, and that was always your mistake. You assumed you could buy her like you do everyone and everything else.” I pause and he doesn’t respond. “Petra doesn’t want to be bought. She wants to be loved.”

“Well, as her husband, you’ll be in a position to do that too”—his voice carries notes of boredom, as though he’s already tired of this conversation—“if that’s what you want.”

How could I ever earn Petra’s trust—or more importantly, deserve it—after the role both my father and I played in her mother and brother’s deaths? And if I told her the truth, there’s no way she would ever want to get involved with the son of the man her mother was allegedly having an affair with.

“I’m not marrying Petra under these circumstances,” I say, slamming the papers down on the desk. “How do we undo this?”

“We don’t. Everyone has already signed.”

“This can’t be legal.”

“It will be once the paperwork is filed.”

“What would make Petra’s father agree to this?” I ask. He only knows Russian, which is why this once-brilliant engineer couldn’t get a job in Austria and has worked as our property’s caretaker since fleeing political persecution in the motherland before Petra was born. He obviously knows what that paperwork said. What would make him sell his daughter off like this?

My father just shrugs. “I’m sure he had his reasons.”

My hand curls into a fist where it rests on top of the paperwork on the desk, and my father eyes it like he’s daring me to punch him. As many times as I’ve had that desire in my lifetime, it’s never been quite this strong.

“The marriage license will be filed tomorrow, and the contract in three days’ time. Unless ...” He lets the word hang there between us, and it’s obvious he’s not going to tell me what I have to do to prevent it unless I ask.

“Unless what?”

“I won’t file them if you swear to never see Petra again. Let her go. Let your obsession with her go”—his voice is as hard and cold as ice—“or it will ruin you like my feelings for her mother ruined me.”

I take in the lines around my father’s eyes, the deep grooves across his forehead from the perpetual frowning. He looks like a man who, despite having everything money can buy, is exhausted from life. He looks like a man who’s never known happiness.

Is that the path I’m on?

“What makes you think I’d follow the same road you have?” I ask. I want to believe I’m emotionally tougher than he is, but my pull toward Petra is unequivocally strong no matter how much I try to repress my feelings.

“Because you are more like me than you want to admit. Once you commit to something, you’re all in. I don’t want to see you commit to a lost cause that will destroy your happiness.”

Even though everything he’s saying goes against everything I want, I see the truth in his words. I think about Petra all the time—what it could be like between us if she wasn’t so much younger and if she felt the same way. I’d hoped that maybe now that she’s sixteen things might change between us, but with me headed back to Russia and her headed to Switzerland ... how much longer can I torment myself? Maybe cutting things off between us entirely is the safest course of action. She gets to go to chase her Olympic skiing dreams, and I can focus entirely on my hockey career instead of dividing my attention.

You’ll both be better off that way, I tell myself.

“I’ll say goodbye to her tonight.”

“A permanent goodbye,” my father says. “You need to break things off in a way that she won’t keep trying to revive the friendship.”

The knife in my stomach twists. The pain is unbearable and I haven’t even ended things yet. I’m not sure I’m strong enough to do this, but I have to do it anyway. I can’t marry her under these circumstances. She deserves better than this. “I understand.”

“Good,” my father says, “because if you try to see her again after this, I’ll have to tell her where the money for her schooling came from. And why.”

My eyes bulge at his words. Petra would leave school if she knew I was paying for it. She’d never accept a gift like that from me—I still can’t believe she accepted help from my father. “You wouldn’t.”

His eyes are ice. “Oh, son. I would.”

I thought it would be impossible to hate him more than I do, but I was wrong.

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