Chapter Fifty-Two
Stella
I’m just out of the shower after my yoga session, my wet hair sticking to my neck, when I see it — a faint glow coming from my underwear drawer.
My pulse quickens as I stare at the light slipping through the cracks.
The phone!
I rush over, my fingers fumbling as I dig through lace and cotton until I find the source of the light. I’ve taken to moving my burner around to new hiding places every other day. It thrums faintly in my hand. The screen glows with a missed call. Hannah.
My heart leaps into my throat, stealing my breath. She never calls me — not on this number, not when we’ve been so careful. I always contact her first. The fact that she reached out… it can only mean one thing.
“She found something about Dad’s death.” Boyana chimes in.
The air feels thick and heavy as a chill ripples up my spine. My fingers tighten around the phone, tremors overtaking them. Just looking at her name on the screen, my stomach churns with a mixture of hope and dread, the toxic cocktail I’ve tried so hard to suppress.
I gnaw on my bottom lip as I struggle with what to do.
I don’t know if I’m ready for this. These past weeks with Aleksei and Bobik have been too perfect, like a fragile dream I’ve been afraid to wake from.
Afternoons spent together, the lilting sound of laughter as Bobik showed me some new wonder.
Even the quiet nights — Aleksei’s touch on my skin, the sound of his steady breathing in the dark — it’s all been surreal.
Safe, even. Something I never had the privilege of experiencing.
And now, looking at that tiny, lit-up screen, the thought of shattering my fragile peace makes me shudder.
“You have to know the truth,” Boyana whispers.
“I know,” I murmur aloud, a weak attempt to stabilize myself. The sound of my own voice against the quiet room feels thin and breakable. And yet, Boyana’s voice — her steady, infuriating command — always pushes me toward things I want to recoil from.
But doubts creep in just as fast.
Do I really want to know? Would it change anything if I found out that he was… killed?
I started this. I asked Hannah to start digging.
But right now, I’m torn. I’m not supposed to contact anyone from my old life, and I’m finally starting to understand why, given Aleksei’s position as Pakhan .
And now that we’ve slipped into this honeymoon phase, I’m not even sure I want to break the magic.
Tension hooks into my chest, snapping taut when Boyana’s derisive laugh cuts through my thoughts.
“Fuck the rules. He’s not even in the house,” she sneers, her voice sharp and cold as ice.
I hesitate, but she’s right. Once again, Aleksei’s gone. No explanations, no promises of when he’ll be back, just empty space stretching between me and the ghost of what could be a relationship. This could be my chance. My only chance.
Snapping myself out of my racing thoughts, I retreat to the bathroom.
The walls are closer here, creating the illusion of safety even though the knot in my chest tightens further.
I take off the tracker in case my heart rate betrays me, and then I turn on the shower, letting the sound of water drum against the tile, masking anything I might say.
I press my back against the cold tiled wall, trying to convince myself that this is just another call. Just Hannah, my bestie.
My fingers are shaking so hard I almost drop the phone as I dial her number.
She answers on the first ring. “Jesus, Stella, I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“I know,” I whisper, lowering myself to the edge of the tub. My grip on the phone tightens; the metal digs into my palm. “I’m sorry, I have to be careful.”
“I get it. Where you are…” she trails off, her tone growing heavier. “It’s dangerous, Stel.”
I close my eyes, resting a hand over my stomach as fear flickers through me. “Don’t worry, I’m okay. Did you find something?”
Her pause stretches across the line, pulling at me like threads unraveling a delicate seam. “Stella, I… you need to prepare yourself for what I’m going to tell you,” she finally says, her voice low. It lands like a thud in the hollow of my chest.
The ache clutches tighter, blooming into something jagged. “What do you mean? What did you find?”
“Are you sitting? I’m afraid this might…”
“Jesus Han, just spit it out already,” I snap, then exhale. “Sorry. I’m strung out.”
“It’s okay. I get it,” she says.” I hear the faint rustle of paper on Hannah’s end.
With every second that passes, it feels like she’s flipping a switch deep inside me.
“I started with your family records in St. Petersburg,” she says slowly.
“Three years before you were born, your parents had… another daughter.”
A what??
The words hit me like a splash of ice water, pulling me out of my body and slamming me squarely into buried memories — half-remembered stories punctuated by my uncle Igor’s drunken slurs, my parents’ nervous smiles as they waved those stories away as nonsense.
Oh, God.
My uncle hadn’t been making that up.
“A daughter?” My voice cracks like brittle glass.
“Yes. Boyana Larkina. Your parents were medical students at the time, Stella. They were so young, struggling…” She pauses, her voice growing softer, sadder. “They had to give her up. She was adopted.”
My hand flies to my chest, pressing down hard to hold in the ache spreading there. A phantom weight twists, sharp and painful. “Boyana,” I husk out. “She was real. Oh my God, Han…”
Boyana.
A name I’ve whispered to the wind since I was a small child, desperate for a connection I never understood. A connection, I somehow still have. All those years of my parents calling me delusional, waving away my questions with well-worn lies — they knew.
“There’s more,” Hannah says before I can gather my crumbling thoughts. Her voice turns urgent. “She was adopted by a very wealthy family. The Novikovs. Apparently, she lives here in LA… goes by Sofia Novikova.”
The Novikovs. Sofia Novikova . My mind stumbles and then shatters, pieces falling into place with horrifying clarity. That name.
Holy shit.
Holy fucking shit!
She wasn’t just some woman — I stole my own sister’s fiancé .
“God,” I rasp, my mouth falling open, as though I can toss the truth away if I deny it hard enough. “Are you sure? If you’re wrong—”
“I’m pretty sure, Stell. I’m sending you a photo from before her surgeries,” Hannah says. “Check your email.”
Desperation takes hold. Abandoning my previous caution about being caught, I push myself off the tub and stumble to my desk.
My legs feel hollow, like they might give out at any second.
My fingers tap the keyboard furiously, navigating to my limited email access.
The photo loads slowly, pixels resolving into a familiar face — younger, softer, but undeniably her .
The same eyes that glared at me with such venom.
Because I ruined her life.
I ruined her life.
“Oh, fuck.” The words slip out as the room tilts and warps, my thoughts shattering and reforming with sharp, jarring clarity.
The pieces slot into place with a sickening click.
My imaginary conversations with Boyana, the magnetic pull I’d felt toward her so inexplicably… Was some part of me trying to remember?
Did some part of me already know?
I stretch toward her now, out of instinct, reaching for the solace of her voice, but all I get is silence. An oppressive, gnawing void.
“Oh my God.” The words stick in my throat, jagged and raw. My stomach lurches, twisting into a tighter knot.
“Strange coincidence,” Hannah’s voice crackles over the line like a live wire, “…is that Sofia used to be engaged to none other than your baby daddy, Aleksei Tarasov.”
I grip the desk, hard enough to feel the blood rush to my knuckles. “I know,” I groan, the admission dragged out of me like a confession. My head drops forward, heavy as an anchor.
“I’m guessing you’ve met her?” Hannah ventures, her tone measured, like she’s navigating around sharp edges.
“You could say that,” I mutter, the memory crawling up, unbidden. Sofia’s eyes, cold and cutting, scald me even now. Her distaste had been immediate, tangible — an invisible dagger aimed at my throat. If looks could kill… “Fuck,” I hiss, dragging trembling fingers through my hair. “This is… how?”
“Stella,” Hannah says, her words suddenly weighted with hesitation, “I’m afraid there’s more.”
There’s a beat. Two. The silence stretches thin and taut, suffocating.
“What do you mean there’s more?” My voice cracks, dreading what I can already feel coming.
When Hannah finally speaks, her voice is soft, deliberate. “Your mom… she was right.” She exhales, but it doesn’t sound like relief — it sounds like resignation. “Your father’s death wasn’t an accident. I’m so sorry, babe.”
My head snaps up with a jolt, ice spreading down my neck, freezing me in place.
“What do you mean?” My tongue is thick, nearly tripping over the words. Somewhere in my mind, I’ve already started unraveling. “What are you talking about?”
She doesn’t soften the blow — what would be the point? The truth drops, cold as iron and twice as hard.
“It was staged. A professional hit,” she says tightly, the words stark and final. “Your father was running from men who’d been sent… for him.”
Blood roars in my ears, louder than her voice.
“A hit?” I echo, and my voice barely sounds like my own.
Pitchy, foreign, choking on disbelief. “But that doesn’t make sense, Han.
Why? Who would anyone want to hurt my dad?
He… he was no one.” My words tumble over one another, a desperate scramble to make sense of it, to will it into being anything but true.
My mind reels, yanked between memories and impossible implications.
The wreckage of my dad’s car. My mother’s quiet, endless despair, the blank vacancy of her eyes that had once brimmed with life. Her lifeless form in her bedroom…
Everything I thought I knew suddenly makes no sense.
“Stella…” There’s a tremor in Hannah’s voice when she says my name, the hesitation lined with the kind of pity that makes my stomach turn. “I need you to be strong for this one. The hit… it was ordered by Aleksei Tarasov.”
The phone slips from my fingers, clattering to the desk with a sharp noise I barely register over the deafening rush of blood in my ears. Then silence. Somewhere, far away, the shower beats against tile, muffled and relentless.
And then it hits me.
Images barrel into me, unrelenting. My father — his body twisted and mangled in the accident. My mother, folding into herself, crushed under the weight of our loss. Her pale body splayed under cold sheets.
No.
But the images twist, smearing into something grotesque the moment Aleksei’s face intrudes. Wide hands gripping my hips. His lips, soft yet firm, and familiar, brushing against mine. His voice, low, laughing, sweet against my ear. The child growing in my womb — our child.
His child.
The child of my father’s killer.
Bile bubbles up in my throat, hot and acidic. I stumble to the bathroom, the world spinning and spiraling in tilting planes, and I fall to my knees in front of the toilet. My stomach convulses violently as my body betrays me, purging everything at once — my shock, my confusion, my horror.
Beside me, the shower continues, but I barely hear it anymore.
“Stella? Babe, are you there?” Hannah’s voice crackles faintly from the fallen phone, muffled but insistent. I can’t answer her. Can’t think. Can’t string together a single coherent thought through the oppressive, choking fog.
Wiping off my mouth, I sink to the floor. My arms wrap around my middle, my stomach firm under my palms. The baby shifts, a faint flutter against my hands, a tiny pulse of life reaching out to me.
The movement breaks me. Splinters me. My sobs come fast and breathless, shaking my entire frame. Tears blur my vision, spill down my cheeks.
I can’t do this.
I can’t face this.
This can’t be real.
Except it is. It is as real as me sitting here on the cold tiles, crushed by the weight of everything Hannah told me.
Somewhere in the suffocating silence of my mind, I whisper a name, a desperate plea, clinging to the hope of her voice to ground me.
“What do I do now, Boyana?”
Silence answers me. A crushing, suffocating silence. For the first time since I was a little child, she’s gone.
And I’m completely alone.