The past (2)

'No, don't!' Nicolai exclaimed with a worried look. He said to his mother, 'They will all call me a mama's boy if you go and interfere with this matter, Mom! Jeez, can you not? I am hated enough already. I don't want to be called names anymore.'

He muttered under his breath and noticed the flicker of hurt in his mother's eyes. 

Nicolai cursed himself for being too impulsive. He knew that his mother blamed herself for everything that was happening in their lives. 

'It's nothing that I cannot deal with mom, you don't have to worry about it,' Nine-and-a-half-year-old Nicolai said to his mother. 

He was young, just a child according to many, but because of his bloody father who only knew how to act like a father when it suited him just right, Nicolai grew up much too soon. 

He had to.

Because if he didn't then the alternative would be to see his mother die.