Page 75 of Scarlet Chains
She stares at me, her lips pursed into a tight line that carves shadows across her face.
I can read the tension in every muscle— the rigid set of her shoulders, the way her fingers curl against her thighs like she’s bracing for impact. But she’s listening. Her ocean eyes are locked on mine, and that’s all I need right now.
I just need to make sure I don’t fuck this up.
Blyad.
I’ve never been good at this shit. Never had to be. In my world, bullets and silence solve most problems. But there’s so much on the line right now— more than money, more than territory, more than the careful empire I’ve built. There’s her. There’s us. There’s the possibility of something real in a life that’s been nothing but shadows and smoke.
Just fucking do it, mudak.
So I spill it. All of it. Starting from the moment I met her in this very room, surrounded by velvet and secrets and the kind of desperate longing that drives people to hide behind masks.
“I came here that night, over a year ago, my head was messed up. I wasn’t sure what I would find.” I pause, remembering that impulsive decision all those months ago. “And then, I walked in here… and there you were. My absolution.”
Her breath catches, so subtle I might have missed it if I wasn’t watching her face like my life depends on it. Which, in a way, it does.
“There was something so… pure about you.” I picture her eyes behind the mask. The simple honesty there. “And you justseemed to hurt so much.” I raise my shoulders into a shrug. “Easing your pain made me… feel good about myself.”
“So that’s what this was about?” She sweeps an arm around the room. “Making you feel good?”
“Yes.” There’s no point in denying it. “You remember what you told me? About your endometriosis diagnosis, about feeling broken?” I reach out a hand to stroke her cheek. “I wanted to be the one to fix you.”
Her hand flies to her throat, fingers pressing against the pulse point like she’s trying to hold herself together.
“I never believed in… soulmates, thought it was allgovno… bullshit.” I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment. “But in the dark, with nothing but honesty between us, for the first time in my goddamn life, I did.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” The question comes out broken, fragmented. “In Budapest, when we— Why didn’t you tell me you knew who I was?”
This is where it gets ugly. Where the fairy tale crashes into reality like a speeding car into a brick wall.
“Because I knew what it would mean. What I would have to tell you.” I run a hand through my hair, feeling every one of my thirty-two years settle into my bones like lead. “About your father. About what I did.”
She goes statue-still. Her face drains of color until her skin looks like porcelain, delicate and liable to shatter at the slightest touch.
“Why? Why did you do it?”
The question hangs in the air between us, heavy with the weight of everything that’s about to change. There’s no going back from this moment. No pretty lies or careful omissions that can soften what comes next.
I tell her about the business. About how Igor Shiradze and I were partners in something that skirted the edges of hell—baby trafficking, using his medical connections and my network to move infants from desperate mothers to wealthy couples who didn’t ask questions. How we made millions from other people’s desperation.
“He was skimming money,” I continue, watching her face for any sign that she’s going to bolt. “Taking more than his share, thinking we wouldn’t notice. When I confronted him about it…”
I pause, remembering that night in the restaurant parking lot. The way Igor’s face had transformed from guilty embarrassment to cold calculation when he realized I knew. The knife he’d pulled from his coat— the same knife that ended up buried in his chest.
“I went there to talk. To get him to come clean about where the money went, to work something out. He was a good businessman once. A part of me hoped he could find his way back to that.” I shake my head. “But when I showed him the evidence, he got malicious. Started threatening me, threatening my operation. Said he’d bring us all down if I didn’t back off.”
“So you killed him?” she whispers, her eyes huge, unblinking.
Blyad.
This is it. The moment that decides everything— whether she can forgive the unforgivable, whether love can survive the weight of the truth.
I can’t lie to her. Not anymore. Not even if it means losing her forever. She deserves better than the pretty fiction I’ve been feeding myself about learning to be a good man. She deserves the truth, ugly and blood-soaked as it is.
“He tried to kill me first,” I say, not sugarcoating it. “He had a knife. Came at me like a wild animal when he realized I wasn’t going to let him walk away clean. I was stronger. I defended myself.”
The explanation sounds so fucking feeble but there’s no way around it that won’t seem like I’m trying to excuse what I did. Because there is no excuse.
