Chapter 4 Stefan
STEFAN
No “beloved husband.” No “loving father.” Just a name and dates. Even in death, he gets the unvarnished truth and nothing more.
I crouch beside the stone as my breath mists in the November cold. My head is in a thousand places at once—here in the graveyard, back in the mansion, out wherever the fuck my mother is hiding.
Taras wants me to seduce Mikayla, to weaponize her feelings against her.
The thought makes bile rise in my throat.
Not because Mikayla doesn’t deserve it—fuck knows she does; she betrayed me, endangered Olivia—but because it feels like becoming the very thing I’ve spent fifteen years trying not to be.
My mother, the manipulator.
“I need your clarity tonight, Papa,” I tell the stone. “Preferably without the weakness that killed you.”
But even as I say it, I know I’m lying. I already have his weakness. It’s five-foot-six with amber eyes and carries my child. And now, my mother has her.
An unwelcome memory crashes over me without warning, dragged up by this place, this moment.
I’m sixteen, home from a friend’s house. The house feels wrong—too quiet, like it’s holding its breath. I find my father in his study, eyeing a glass of vodka that stands untouched on his desk.
“Stefan,” he croaks. “You should not be here.”
“Why? Is something—” It’s then that I see the gun, laid out on the leather desktop alongside the liquor. “Papa—”
“Your mother thinks I’m stupid.” He laughs, but never in my life have I heard such a horrible, grating sound. It’s the opposite of laughter.
“What’re you—?”
“She thinks I don’t know. About him. About the baby.”
I freeze one step inside the doorway. “What baby?”
“The one she carries. It sure as fuck is not mine. Could not be mine—I had a vasectomy years ago, after you were born. You were enough. You were everything.” He picks up the gun, weighs it in his hand, looks down the sights, exhales. “But for her, nothing is ever enough.”
“Papa, put the gun down. We’ll figure this out—”
“She’s upstairs with him now. In our bed.” His eyes meet mine, and I see he’s already gone, already decided. “Your uncle. My own brother.”
The sound of laughter drifts down from above. My mother’s tinkling laugh, then a deeper rumble. Uncle Vasily.
“Leave, Stefan. Take the car, go back to school. Forget this family.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“Then you’ll watch me die.” He raises the gun to his temple. “Because I will not live as less than a man.”
“Papa, please—”
The gunshot cracks through the house like thunder. But his hand shook at the last second, the bullet tearing through his jaw instead of his brain. Blood everywhere, so much blood, and he’s choking on it, drowning in it, eyes wide with panic because this isn’t the quick death he wanted.
Footsteps on the stairs. My mother’s voice, sharp with annoyance: “Matvey, what was that noise?”
I grab the gun from his twitching fingers. He’s trying to speak through the ruin of his face, but I understand. His eyes beg me.
“I’m sorry, Papa.”
The second shot is cleaner. A mercy.
My mother finds me kneeling in his blood, the gun still in my hand. Uncle Vasily behind her, shirtless, his face draining of color.
“Stefan?” Her voice is too calm and controlled for the horror she just walked into. “What have you done?”
“What needed doing.”
She steps forward, careful to avoid the blood pooling across the Persian rug. “You killed your father.”
“He killed himself. I just... helped.”
“The police won’t see it that way.”
“Then I’ll tell them why. About you. Both of you, actually.” I gesture at Vasily with the gun, and he flinches. “About the baby that isn’t Papa’s.”
Her face hardens into something I’ve never seen before. Or maybe I have—maybe I just never wanted to recognize it. “You have no proof.”
“Papa had a vasectomy. Medical records exist.”
“Records can disappear. Witnesses can be bought.” She squints at me. “Or sons can inherit their father’s business empire, keep their mouths shut, and everyone wins.”
“Except Papa.”
“Your father was weak. He let emotion rule him. Don’t make the same mistake.”
I stand, still holding the gun. “Get out. Both of you. Leave and never come back.”
“Stefan—”
“I said fucking leave!” The gun swings toward them, my hand surprisingly steady. “Or I’ll finish what Papa started.”
They left that night. They thought that was the end of it.
They thought wrong.
The memory fades, leaving me kneeling on frozen ground. I thought my mother was dead, as dead as the body six feet beneath me. But she’s not. She’s back.
And she has Olivia.
I stand, brushing dirt from my knees. “I won’t let her poison what we have, Papa. I won’t let her turn Olivia against me the way she turned you against yourself.”
The walk back to my car feels endless. Each step carries the weight of what I’m about to do. Taras is right—Mikayla’s feelings for me are the key to finding Olivia. But using them makes me more like my mother than I want to admit.
For Olivia, I tell myself. For our child.
I know it’s the same rationalization that let my mother do all the nightmarish things she did. The ends justifying the means, emotion sacrificed for enjoyment.
No. This is different. I’m not betraying someone who loves me—Mikayla already betrayed me. I’m not destroying a family—I’m trying to save one. The family Olivia and I could have, if my mother doesn’t destroy it first.
By the time I reach Safonov Holdings, the sun is rising. The city looks gilded, though some pockets of shadow remain black as sin. Taras waits in my office with a steaming cup of coffee in his hand.
“Did you decide?” he asks.
“Have Mikayla moved to one of the guest suites. Give her decent food, fresh clothes, and medical attention if she needs it.”
His eyebrows rise. “Going soft?”
“She’s more likely to break if she thinks there’s hope. If she believes I might forgive her, might even want her, she’ll tell us everything.”
“And you can sell that? After what she did?”
I think of Olivia, somewhere out there, afraid and alone with my mother’s poison dripping in her ears. “I can sell anything if it brings Olivia home.”
Taras studies me for a long moment. “Your father would be proud.”
“No,” I correct him. “My father would be fucking horrified. But he’d understand.”
“What’s the difference?”
I pour myself a vodka. “My father loved too much and it killed him. I’m choosing to love just enough to keep everyone alive.”
“That’s a dangerous game, brother.”
“It’s the only game there is when my mother’s involved.” I down the vodka in one burning swallow. “She wrote the rules. Now, I have to play by them.”
“What if Mikayla doesn’t believe you?”
“Then I’ll make her believe. I’ll become whatever I need to become.
” I set down the empty glass and taste the stinging liquor on my lips.
“My mother thinks she knows me, thinks I’m still that sixteen-year-old boy.
But she’s wrong. That boy died with his father.
What’s left is something else. Something she created but can’t control. ”
“Something dangerous.”
“Something very fucking dangerous,” I agree. I meet his eyes. “Have Mikayla cleaned up and brought to the Blue Suite in an hour. And Taras? Make sure she knows I asked about her injuries. That I was... concerned.”
He nods and leaves. Alone, I stare out at the city waking up below. Somewhere out there, Olivia is probably wondering if I’m looking for her. If I care. If anything between us was real.
Everything was real, I want to tell her. Everything except the man I’m about to become.
But that’s the thing about truth: sometimes, you have to swaddle it in lies to keep it alive. My mother taught me that, though she never meant to.
I pull out my phone and scroll to a photo of Olivia, taken that morning on the yacht when she didn’t know I was watching. She’s laughing at something, hand resting on her stomach in that unconscious way pregnant women do, even before they’re showing.
“I’m coming for you, lisichka,” I tell the photo. “Both of you. And I’ll become whoever I need to become to bring you home.”