Chapter 2Tears for the Beast
Tears for the Beast
Isabella
No one can truly explain why we cry, why eyes meant for sight overflow with feeling.
Tears shouldn’t answer to the heart, but they do, spilling over when words are not enough.
Maybe it’s how we keep the wild in us from breaking free, how we let the beast inside ache without losing ourselves.
Because inside me, something raw and restless stirs, snarling, reaching, calling for him, for Aslanov.
I have tried to silence it, to starve it, but it lives. It lives for his touch.
I have learned over time that love is stronger than death. If you love someone, they can never really die. They live on in your mind, soul, and everything you do.
And so does he.
I sit at my desk in the dimly lit office, the city lights beyond the window blurred by the steady downpour.
My white coat hangs over the back of my chair, forgotten, the fabric still heavy with the scent of antiseptic and exhaustion.
The clinic is quiet now, the last patient discharged hours ago.
Only the hum of the late-night city filters in through the cracks, a distant siren, the rhythmic pulse of rain against glass.
My hands hover over the patient files spread out in front of me, but I’m not really seeing them. My thoughts slip through my fingers, circling the same place they always do, back to him.
Two months. It’s been two months since they declared Aslanov dead.
A breakout in an underground prison facility, a riot, a body found among the wreckage.
Burned beyond recognition. Identified only by what little remained of him.
I remember staring at the report in disbelief, unable to reconcile the finality of it. Aslanov, erased, gone. Just like that.
I spent years piecing people back together as a nurse, saving lives others had tried to take.
When I joined Aslanov to Moscow, after Trevor’s shooting, Ada quitted her job.
The department fell apart, officers were dismissed, and whatever faith she had left in the system crumbled with it.
She walked away. No more government work.
No more pretending the badge meant anything to her.
She knew I was with him, she knew Aslanov shot Trevor.
Yet she was bound to a contract which forced her to stay silent.
That’s how Ada ended up here; at a clinic for the forgotten, the ones with bullet wounds they can’t explain, the ones with broken ribs and empty eyes, the ones who carry ghosts like we do. She patches them up as best as she can, sends them back out, watches them vanish into the night.
And now, I’ve joined the clinic too. It’s not the future I imagined exactly, but it’s mine. I spend my days and nights alongside Ada, helping treat the forgotten, the broken, the ones who don’t ask questions and can’t afford answers.
After his arrest, when the grief became unbearable, the old forgotten textbooks offered a kind of silence my mind couldn’t find anywhere else.
I began studying again, obsessively. Not for grades, not for degrees, just to keep from falling apart.
Each page I turned felt like reclaiming a piece of who I used to be.
Ada saw that. And when the clinic needed more hands, she brought me in, not as a licensed physician, not yet, but as someone who knew enough and had the will to learn the rest. I work under supervision: former combat medics, trauma nurses, ex-paramedics who’ve seen more blood than any textbook can prepare you for. They trust me. I earn it every day.
Another pair of hands, another lifeline for the damned. Maybe this place is what we all need: a reason to keep going, even when the past won’t let us go. A machine I built to keep myself moving forward.
But nothing feels real anymore. Not without him.
The door creaks open, and I glance up to see Ada standing there, her arms crossed, her hair loose around her tired face. She’s always here, working beside me, keeping this place running when I can’t. She has her own past, her own debts, but she never talks about them.
‘‘You should go home,’’ she says. ‘‘Get some rest.’’
I let out a quiet laugh, shaking my head. ‘‘And do what?’’
She doesn’t have an answer for that. We both know I don’t sleep. Not anymore.
Ada steps inside, leaning against the edge of the desk. ‘‘You can’t keep pretending you’re fine.’’
I don’t answer. Instead, I reach for a patient file, flipping it open without reading it. ‘‘I have work to do.’’
She exhales sharply, running a hand through her hair.
‘‘You think if you keep yourself busy enough, it’ll go away? The grief? The doubt? You have already locked yourself in your room for weeks to study for an assignment, you don’t feel any better now, do you?
Ignoring it will never make it go away, it’ll suppress your feelings and make them arise in uglier ways. ’’
‘‘It’s better than drowning in it.’’
She shakes her head, but doesn’t argue. We’ve had this conversation before. She knows how it ends. Instead, she studies me, her voice softer when she speaks again. ‘‘You don’t believe he’s dead.’’
I feel something in my chest tighten. ‘‘Do you?’’
Ada hesitates, then looks away. ‘‘No.’’
Neither of us say what we’re really thinking. That men like Aslanov don’t die so easily. That if anyone could disappear off the face of the earth and make the world believe it, it was him.
We both refuse to accept it, but for different reasons.
Ada clings to the inconsistencies: the missing details, the discrepancies in the reports, the incorrect dates and files.
She trusts the numbers, the logic, the evidence that doesn’t quite add up.
The experiences she has from working at the police department for so long.
I hold onto something less tangible, something rawer and more unbearable; the simple fact that I cannot bring myself to believe he’s gone. Because if he is, then he died protecting me. And I don’t know how to live with that.
But in the end, either truth leads to the same cruel reality: I will never see him again.
Too many people, both in the underworld and beyond it, know what happened.
Even if he survived, it would be too dangerous, for him, for me.
He would vanish deeper into the shadows, erase himself from existence, because that’s who he is.
And I don’t know what’s worse. To think that he is dead, or to know that he is alive somewhere, living a life I can never be a part of again.
Ada insisted I move in with her. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Her home in the countryside is quiet, a world away from the chaos of New York, and maybe that’s what I needed.
Maybe she knew I wouldn’t last long on my own.
She knows everything, she knows I fell down the rabbit hole of loving a man like Aslanov.
It wasn’t until I settled in that she told me everything.
Aslanov had contacted her long before he showed up in my apartment.
The moment I joined the police department, he reached out to Ada, briefly, over text.
They never met. Never spoke face to face.
But from that moment on, she was my safety net.
Not just in relation to him, Aslanov made sure that if anything ever happened to me, whether it was his fault or not, Ada would be there.
Watching. Protecting. Keeping me from slipping too far.
All the while, as I dug into his past, as I tried to unravel the mystery of him, Ada already knew. She had been in direct contact with him. And I had no idea.
‘‘He made me sign a contract,’’ she told me one night, her voice barely above a whisper. ‘‘He gave me terms. Said if something ever happened, if he couldn’t protect you anymore, I had to step in. No matter what.’’
She never shared the exact terms he laid out, only that they were non-negotiable. He had planned for every possible outcome, even this one.
‘‘And you agreed?’’ I had asked, unable to hide the pain in my voice.
Ada only looked at me, her expression unreadable. ‘‘Of course I did. He threatened me, I couldn’t possibly deny his request. On top of that, I also felt a sense of protectiveness over you. I vowed my loyalty to the Bratva that day.’’
Now, my life is here, in the clinic we operate in together.
It isn’t government-funded. It operates under the radar, a place for those the system has failed.
We’re a small team: Ada, myself, and a few others who believe in what we’re doing.
Former paramedics, ex-military medics, people who know how to work in the shadows.
Ada is very close with them, and I can understand why.
People who understand what it means to exist outside the lines.
We treat those who can’t go to hospitals. The criminals, the victims, the ones caught in the crossfire. We don’t ask questions, and we don’t turn anyone away. The authorities know about us, of course. They just can’t touch us. Not yet.
I close the file in front of me, pushing it aside. My reflection in the window looks different than I remember. Hollowed out. Stripped of softness. The girl I was before him is long gone, replaced by someone I don’t quite recognize.
The darkness isn’t just in my head anymore.
It’s in me.