Page 76 of Scarlet Chains
The silence stretches between us as she considers this. She stares at me with those blue eyes I’ve dreamed about, searching my face for something— maybe the monster she expected to find, maybe the man she thought she knew.
“I’m sorry,” I add, because the words need to be said even if they can’t undo what I’ve done.
She stares at me for what feels like an eternity, her gaze burning through me. I can see her processing it all… and again, I fight the urge to defend myself. To try to make her see why I did what I do.
Shut the fuck up, pizda.
Let her make up her own mind.
“I believe you,” she says quietly.
I stare at her, not sure I heard right. And then relief crashes over me in waves so intense I have to grip the back of the nearest chair to keep from falling to my knees.
“You do?”
“I do now.” She looks down at her hands, folded carefully in her lap like a schoolgirl in church. “I know my father wasn’t who I thought he was. I organized an investigation… and the things the investigator found…” She trails off, shaking her head. “I didn’t want to believe it. But I know now that the man I idolized was involved in terrible things.”
The enormity of my relief is indescribable. She believes me. She’s not running, not screaming, not reaching for the phone to call the police. It’s like a ton of weight has just fallen off my chest, leaving me dizzy and breathless.
“In Budapest…” she begins, licking her lips in that nervous gesture I’ve come to recognize. “When did you find out that I’m the woman from the Masked Nights?”
“After Tibor tried to… hurt you, and I brought you to my house, I knew. I recognized your voice, your story. The way you moved, the sounds you made…” I clear my throat, heat flooding my face like I’m some teenager admitting to his first crush. “After you told me who your father was. I connected the dots.”
“You knew all along?” The whisper carries the weight of betrayal, of trust broken and carefully rebuilt.
“Yes,” I admit, because there’s no point in softening it now. “I thought it was safer to keep it a secret. For you. For me.”
“Safer?” Her laugh is bitter, sharp. “How is not telling me the truth safer?”
It’s a fair question. A good question. The kind that strips away all the bullshit justifications I’ve been feeding myself for months.
“Would you have trusted me if I’d told you?” I ask. “If I’d walked up to you in that restaurant and said, ‘Hello, Ilona. I’m the masked stranger who touched you in Boston, and by the way, I killed your father in self-defense, will you have my baby’?”
She doesn’t respond, but she doesn’t need to. We both know the answer. She looks down at the floor as if she’s found something fascinating in the Turkish rug’s intricate patterns, and in that silence, I have my answer.
She wouldn’t have believed me. Hell, she probably would have run screaming, called the cops, done everything in her power to destroy me before I could hurt her again.
Then she looks up, and I see something in her eyes I wasn’t expecting— understanding. Not complete forgiveness, not yet, but the recognition that sometimes the truth is too big and too ugly to share all at once.
“And Slava?” Her voice is softer now, gentler. “Did you really not know he was alive?”
My body tenses like I’ve been struck. This is the sensitive spot, the wound that never heals no matter how much timepasses. The guilt that eats at me from the inside, growing stronger with every day my son spends with strangers instead of his father.
“When Galina died… When Stanley killed her…” The words come out ragged. “The paramedics told me there was no way the baby could have survived. I only found out he was alive right before he got adopted. That’s why I flew to Boston on the same night you disappeared from Budapest.”
She stares into the distance, processing. Her fingers drum against her thigh in a rhythm I don’t recognize, some internal song playing in her head.
“Yes,” she says finally. “The night I found out who killed my father.”
I stare at her, feeling the weight of that cosmic coincidence. Two devastating revelations on the same night, in the same city, driving us both toward truths we weren’t ready to face. The universe has a twisted sense of humor.
I know it’s best to remain quiet now. Sometimes silence speaks more than a thousand words could, and this feels like one of those moments. She needs space to think, to process, to decide whether the man sitting in front of her is someone she can live with or someone she needs to run from.
It’s her who breaks the silence.
“I’m sorry about what happened to Galina. And Slava,” she says quietly, and there’s genuine compassion in her voice. Not pity— I would have walked away if it was pity— but understanding. The recognition of one person’s pain by someone who has known her own share of loss.
I nod, not trusting my voice to remain steady. There’s nothing to say to that, no response that wouldn’t diminish the sincerity of her sympathy.
