Chapter 8 #3
Not even the story had kept them away.
I set the tray down quietly on the nightstand, the clink of porcelain sounding far too loud in the stillness. I reached out, brushing damp hair from his forehead, my fingers lingering just long enough to soothe him back into stillness.
My chest burned.
What in the world had Ruslan been doing all these years?
How could a man with this much power—this much reach—allow his son to suffer like this? Night after night, alone with his fears, haunted by memories too heavy for a child to carry?
Anger flared sharp and sudden, cutting through my exhaustion.
I straightened slowly, jaw tightening.
Enough.
I turned and marched out of the room, leaving the tray behind, food cooling, forgotten. I didn’t care. Yannis needed more than sandwiches and stories. He needed a father who saw him—not just as an heir, not as a weakness, but as a child in pain.
I stormed down the hallway, past marble statues and woven tapestries that depicted gods and wars and triumphs carved in blood. Down the grand staircase, my footsteps echoing too loudly in the vast, empty space.
The kitchen was empty when I returned.
As I closed the door, the sensation hit me—stronger this time.
Eyes on my back.
I spun.
Ruslan stood in the doorway.
The white suit was immaculate, every line crisp, every button perfectly in place.
The sunglasses were gone, revealing gray eyes that fixed on me with unnerving intensity—like twin storms held barely in check.
He stepped inside slowly, deliberately, his gaze flicking once to the spotless counter where I’d worked. The faint scent of peanut butter and cocoa still hung in the air, soft and domestic, absurdly out of place in a house built on power and fear.
Then his gaze returned to me.
The room felt suddenly smaller, the air heavier, like the walls themselves were leaning in to listen.
“Are you aware Yannis has recurring nightmares?” I asked, forcing the words past the tightness in my chest. I kept my voice low but steady, even as my pulse raced. “The boy lives in constant fear. He wakes shaking, sweating, crying out for his mother. And it seems you’ve done nothing about it.”
The accusation hung between us—fragile, dangerous.
For a heartbeat, Ruslan didn’t react. His face remained carved from stone, unreadable, composed. But then something shifted behind his eyes. A flash—dark, volatile. Like lightning beneath ice.
“You’ve known Yannis for barely forty-eight hours,” he said quietly, each word measured, lethal in its restraint, “and somehow you think you can stand there and rebuke me about how I’ve raised my son?”
The weight of his gaze pressed into my chest.
I swallowed. My courage wavered—not gone, but thinner now, stretched to its limit.
“I just...” I faltered, glancing away, suddenly aware of how far I’d overstepped. “He’s not happy.”
The silence that followed was suffocating.
It stretched. Thick. Punishing.
I almost wished he would shout. Rage would have been easier to bear than this controlled stillness, this gathering storm.
Then he spoke.
His voice dropped—lower, rougher—stripped of polish and power, edged with something raw and exposed.
“I’ve tried every single fucking thing to make him happy.”
The words hit hard.
“The best child psychiatrist in Los Angeles—three sessions a week for two years,” he continued, pacing now, slow and restless. “The top trauma specialist from Boston—I flew her in monthly. Art therapy. Music therapy. Equine therapy.” A bitter huff of breath. “I bought him a damn horse.”
He laughed once—short, humorless.
“I built him a playroom bigger than most houses. Imported toys from Europe. Tutors who spoke five languages. I read him stories every night until he stopped asking. Until he stopped wanting me there.”
His voice tightened.
“I held him through every panic attack,” he said. “Sat on the floor outside his door when he wouldn’t let me in. Listened to him cry on the other side while I stayed quiet so I wouldn’t scare him more.”
He stopped moving.
“You think it doesn’t hurt?” he asked softly, dangerously. “Never hearing your own son speak to you for three years?”
My chest constricted.
“The first time he spoke after Maria’s death,” Ruslan went on, voice lowering further, “was yesterday. He called me. Told me to get dressed and come to a church.”
His jaw flexed.
“I didn’t know he was arranging a wedding for me,” he admitted. “But the joy in my heart when I heard his voice again—after all that silence—was unquantifiable.”
For a moment, the man in front of me wasn’t a tyrant.
He was just a grieving father.
Then he looked at me again.
Sharp. Focused.
“It’s obvious now you’ve played a role in that,” he said.
I dropped my gaze, throat burning. I hadn’t meant to do anything. I’d just listened. Held. Stayed.
“I don’t know what you’ve done to make him warm up to you,” he continued, taking a step closer, “when he won’t warm up to anyone—male or female.”
Another step.
“But whatever it is,” he said quietly, “keep doing it.”
My heart hammered.
“Because that,” he finished, “is the only thing keeping you alive.”
The words landed like precision strikes—soft, controlled, devastating.
“As long as my son needs you,” he said, “my hands are tied. You get to live.”
I swallowed hard, my mouth dry.
He stepped even closer now—too close. I could feel his presence like heat, like gravity.
“And do not ever—ever—judge me again about how I’ve raised my son,” he said, voice deadly calm. “Understood?”
I nodded quickly. Small. Instinctive.
“Yes.”
For a long second, he searched my face, as if deciding whether I was worth the air I breathed.
“Now come with me,” he ordered.
He turned and left the kitchen without another glance, his stride unhurried, certain I would follow.
I did—heart hammering, steps uneven—as the corridor closed around us, long and dim, swallowing sound and thought alike. My pulse roared in my ears, each footstep echoing with questions I didn’t dare voice.
As I struggled to keep pace, my mind betrayed me, drifting to the one person at the center of all this—my sister. Elena Senior. The reason his hatred had found a home in me.
Could she truly have done what he claimed?
Or was this another error, another piece of evidence twisted until it fit the shape of his grief and rage?
The accusations replayed themselves, relentless. One of them—brutal, undeniable—had been proven true. His sister. Dead. Beaten beyond recognition.
But his pregnant wife?
That accusation splintered differently. What would Elena gain from that? From killing an unborn child? From destroying a woman who had never wronged her?
That wasn’t my sister.
Was it?
I quickened my steps, dread coiling tighter with every pace.
Love had always defined us—fierce, unshakable, forged long before the world taught us how cruel it could be.
Blood, loyalty, protection. We had survived too much together for me to believe she could be capable of something so calculated. So monstrous.
Yet doubt crept in anyway, poisonous and unwelcome.
I followed him faster now, uncertainty clawing at my chest, not knowing where he was taking me... or whether I was walking toward answers, or the final burial of everything I believed about my sister—and myself.
I remembered my sister at fourteen—not as a headline or an accusation, but as a living, breathing presence that once filled every quiet corner of my life.
Elena Senior stood barefoot in our old kitchen, her long hair pulled into a messy ponytail that refused to stay neat no matter how often she retied it.
The linoleum floor was cold beneath our feet, the kind of cold that seeped upward and lingered, but she didn’t flinch.
She never noticed discomfort when she was happy.
Sunlight slanted in through the narrow window above the sink, catching dust in the air, turning it into something soft and almost magical.
She was laughing—full-bodied, careless laughter that came from deep in her chest—as she whisked eggs far too aggressively in a chipped white bowl we’d owned for years.
The fork clanged against the porcelain, egg splattering onto the counter, onto her wrist, onto the front of her shirt as I reached for the salt shaker.
“You always add the salt at the end, Elena Junior,” she said, tapping my forehead lightly with the back of the spoon, her smile crooked and fond. “Otherwise it gets tough.”
I rolled my eyes, but I smiled too. With her, it was impossible not to.
We burned three batches that night. Three.
The smoke alarm shrieked like we were under attack, and we panicked, waving dish towels wildly beneath it, coughing through the haze while laughter spilled out of us uncontrollably.
My eyes burned.
My chest hurt from laughing too hard.
She bumped her hip into mine, steadying me when I bent over, and flashed that grin—bright, reckless, unburdened—like the world was still simple and kind and incapable of cruelty.
That was her. Joy, unguarded.
When she got accepted into the military academy—because of Jake, her boyfriend, already enlisted, already calling her brave—I pretended to be proud without reservation. But the night before she left, she broke.
She cried in my arms, quiet, shaking sobs she tried to swallow back, her face buried in my shoulder. Her fingers clutched my shirt like she was afraid I might disappear if she loosened her grip.
“I just want to keep seeing you,” she whispered, voice breaking. “Promise you’ll visit.”
I promised.
It broke my heart to let her go, but I did. I had to. She was Elena Senior—my shield when the world got sharp, my compass when I felt lost, my first home before I understood what the word home truly meant.
A year later, she called.
The line crackled badly, static chewing through her voice, turning it distant, fragile. I pressed the phone tighter to my ear, afraid I might lose her if I didn’t listen hard enough.
“Elena...” she said. “Me and Jake—we’re part of a twenty-one-member specialist team.”
My stomach tightened.