Page 28 of Scarlet Chains
And I am powerless to save the only people who matter.
“Chert voz’mi,” I growl, scowling out through the blood-streaked window. How did everything get so fucked up?
Twenty minutes later, I hear Melor’s key in the front door, followed by the sound of his heavy footsteps on the stairs. I’m still standing by the window, still bleeding, still staring out at a city that holds no answers.
“Yobani urod,” he mutters as he appears in my bedroom doorway, taking in the scene— the broken mirror, the blood, my half-naked form silhouetted against the windows. “What the fuck is going on with you, Osip?”
He stalks into the room, his face carved with the kind of concern that comes wrapped in anger. We learned early that worry was a luxury we couldn’t afford, so we disguised it as rage instead.
“I know you’ve been through hell,” he continues gruffly, “but you’re a fucking wreck. You can’t keep living like this. We’re worried about you.”
I snort and toss my head. My brothers— these men who’ve killed without blinking, who’ve built empires on the bones of our enemies— are worried about me. It would be funny if it weren’t so goddamn tragic.
I can’t lie to him. Haven’t slept in days, haven’t eaten anything solid since Stanley’s call turned my world into a wasteland. I’m too tired to maintain the facade, too broken to pretend I’m still the unshakeable man they’ve always looked up to.
I drop my head into my hands, feeling the weight of every decision, every death, every moment that led me to this precipice. “We have to find her before Stanley does. Who knows what that fucker is capable of?”
“Brat, you know Stanley.” Melor’s voice gentles slightly, the way it used to when we were kids and I’d wake up screaming from nightmares about our father. “He talks shit. He could be bluffing?”
“And what if he isn’t?” The words explode out of me with enough force to make him step back. “I’m not fucking taking any chances!”
Melor studies my face in the dim light filtering through the windows, and whatever he sees there makes his expression shift from irritation to something closer to fear. Not fear of me— fearforme.
“Osip,” he says quietly, and there’s something in his tone that makes me look up. “When’s the last time you looked in a mirror?”
I gesture toward the bathroom with my bloodied hand. “Just did. Had to break it to get an honest reflection.”
“This isn’t sustainable.” He moves closer, and I can see the genuine worry etched into the lines around his eyes. “You’re falling apart, and if you fall apart, everything we’ve built falls apart with you.”
The truth of his words hits hard. Iamfalling apart— have been since the moment I realized I was in love with the daughter of a man I killed in cold blood. Since the moment Stanley’s voice crawled through my phone like poison, promising to destroy everything I care about.
“Nobody is untouchable in this fucking life,” I say, the words coming from some deep, honest place I usually keep locked away. “Not even a man like me. The older I get, the more I realize that. And maybe this is karma. Maybe this is how I’m paying for all my sins.”
Melor doesn’t respond immediately. He just stands there, my brother who’s seen me at my best and worst, who’s watched me build an empire and now watches me tear myself apart over a woman who’d destroy me if she ever learned what I’d done to her father.
The silence between us is heavy with the weight of everything unsaid— all the bodies we’ve buried, all the choices that led us here, all the reasons why love has always been a luxury we couldn’t afford. Until now. Until her.
“We’ll find her,” he says finally, and there’s something in his voice I haven’t heard in years. Not just loyalty or duty, but understanding. He knows what she means to me, even if he doesn’t understand why.
I nod, not trusting my voice, and watch as he moves toward the door. But he pauses at the threshold, his hand on the frame.
“Osip,” he says without turning around. “When we do find her— and we will— you’re going to have to decide what kind of man you want to be when she looks at you.”
The door closes behind him with a soft click, leaving me alone with the broken mirror and the truth that cuts deeper than any shard of glass.
Because we both know that when Ilona learns what I’ve done, the man she sees won’t be the one she made love to in the darkness of a Boston club.
He’ll be the monster who killed her father.
Chapter Eleven
Ilona
Two weeks have dissolved into something I never expected— a rhythm of small hands reaching for mine, tiny giggles echoing through marble halls, and the devastating realization that I’ve fallen completely, irrevocably in love with a child who isn’t mine.
Slava has carved himself into the hollow spaces of my heart with the efficiency of a surgeon, filling voids I didn’t even know existed. Every morning when he wakes, those eyes— too knowing for a one-year-old— search for my face first. Not his mother’s. Not his father’s.
Mine.
