Page 8 of Tattooed Heart

That night, I had a dream about Dimitri. Not locked behind bars but standing in the sunlight, his arms around me, our child between us. It was a dream of a future that seemed impossibly distant. But as I woke to the cold emptiness of my bed, I made a silent vow. I will make that dream real, no matter what it takes or who I have to become.

For Dimitri. For our family. For our future.

I will burn the world to ashes if I have to.

3

DIMITRI

Prison changes a man. Not all at once or in the way people think. It doesn't shatter you in some sudden burst of clarity. No, it's slower than that. Quieter. Like rust eating through steel or rot spreading beneath the surface of a polished floor.

You don't notice it until the walls start pressing in on you. Not the physical ones, but the kind built from silence and the echo of what you’ve lost.

I lean against the cold cement wall of my solitary cell, a thin stream of light slanting in through the small window cut high into the wall. I haven’t seen the sun in full for days. It just peeks through wire mesh or flashes through the reinforced glass during transfers. But that light, pale, sterile, too weak to offer warmth, still finds a way to crawl over my bruised skin and into my bones.

Every movement hurts. My back aches where a guard's baton slammed into me last night. It was “accidental,” he said. My jaw still throbs from the fist that broke the skin on day five. My knuckles are raw from the fight I started on purpose. Better to strike first than wait for the knife in your back.

But none of that compares to the real pain of being without Sandy. Every hour without her, every minute without her voice or the touch of her hand, eats away at me.

I don’t deserve her. But I'll die to protect her. And right now, death doesn’t seem like such a distant possibility.

I close my eyes, letting memories of her wash over me. The curve of her smile in the morning light, the way her hair spilled across my chest as she slept, the fierce determination in her eyes when she told me she was pregnant. Our child. My legacy. The thought of them both pulls at something deep inside my chest that I buried long ago when I first took the oath of the Bratva.

Hope.

In this concrete box, hope is a dangerous thing. It makes you soft and vulnerable. But for Sandy and our child, I'll risk it all.

The scrape of my fingernails against the rough wall keeps me grounded. Seven days in this hole already feels like five years. Time stretches and contracts without rhythm or reason. The only constants are the meals shoved through the slot three times a day and the bruising rounds of “questioning” that come without warning.

I trace the lines of graffiti etched into the wall beside my cot. Names, dates, prayers, curses. The desperate marks of men who'd sat exactly where I sit now. Some made it out. Others didn't. I wonder which I will be.

Heavy boots echo down the corridor. I don’t move from the cot. You learn not to react unless there is a reason to. Half the time, it's some rookie guard swinging his authority around. The other half, it's a test. Today, it feels like neither.

The footsteps stop outside my cell. The small slot at the door slides open. Then, a voice, low and measured and unmistakably Russian, cuts through the quiet.

“Open it.”

The lock disengages with a loud mechanical clunk. The door creaks open, and the light from the hallway blinds me for a moment.

Then I see him. Aleksandr.

He steps inside like he owns the place. The walls don’t matter, and the grime of the prison can’t touch him. He wears his suit like a crown, his expression like a mask carved from ice.

“Brat,” he says.

“Pakhan,” I murmur, standing slowly. My ribs protest the movement, but I push through it. The pain is irrelevant. I won’t let him see me weak.

His eyes sweep over me, cataloging the damage. “You look like hell.”

“Yeah?” I rasp. “You should see the other guy.”

He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t even flinch. He just walks farther in and glances around the cell like he might order someone to have it burned down out of spite. When he finally turns back, the tension between us isn’t just about bruises and blood.

Aleksandr's jaw ticks. “Talk.”

I sit back down on the cot, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees. “They sent a guy after me. Yard scuffle. Shiv to the throat if I hadn't seen it coming. He said Morozov gave the order. ‘You don't make it out,’ were his exact words.”

The memory flashes before me.The glint of metal, the burning slice across my cheek, the copper taste of blood filling my mouth. I'd moved on instinct, years of training kicking in before my mind could even process the danger. One moment, I was standing in the yard. The next, I was driving my attacker into the concrete wall, his makeshift blade clattering to the ground between us.

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