Chapter 8 #7
Then my voice faltered.
“But you,” I said softly. “When you appeared at that altar—so still, so intense—it felt like something inside me woke up. Like a switch I didn’t know existed flipped on.”
I shook my head, embarrassed, angry at myself.
“Maybe it was love at first sight. Maybe it was fear dressed up as attraction. Maybe my mind latched onto you because I needed something—anything—to survive that moment.” I swallowed hard. “But I feel it. This pull. It won’t leave me alone.”
My hands curled into fists at my sides.
“I want you, Ruslan,” I admitted, the words tasting like both truth and shame. “Not as a fantasy. As my husband. As my man. More than I’ve ever wanted anything.”
I laughed, a short, broken sound that ended in a shiver. “But then I see it—the fire in your eyes. The way you want to punish me, to destroy me for my sister’s sins... And whatever fragile dream I thought I’d built, it shatters the moment I look at you. Every hope, every moment of trust, crumbles.”
My hands clenched at my sides, nails biting into my palms. “I’m terrified of you. But I can’t stop wanting you. And that terrifies me even more.”
I looked away, blinking fast.
“I’ve been fighting it ever since. Burying myself in tasks, in worry, in fear—anything to drown you out. But you keep slipping back into my thoughts. I hate myself for it. I hate that my heart doesn’t listen to reason.”
I looked back at him, eyes burning.
“So... if you have any mercy left,” I whispered, voice trembling, barely more than a breath, “divorce me. Go back to Greece. Chase your vengeance, find my sister—whenever, wherever—but leave me out of it. I’ve done nothing wrong.
Let me go. Let me return to my life... my poverty, my invisibility. .. my small, miserable existence.”
My voice broke at the end.
“I can forget you then,” I said quietly. “Or at least... I can try.”
The room felt unbearably still afterward—like the pause before a storm decides which direction to break.
Tears streamed down my cheeks in hot, uncontrollable rivers, blurring the world until all I could see was the dark shape of him looming above me.
They fell freely, soaking into the fine fabric of Ruslan’s trousers, darkening the expensive cloth in ugly, undeniable stains.
I reached out without thinking, my hands shaking as I tried to brush them away—as if wiping the tears could undo the collapse that had already happened.
But my fingers only smeared the wetness further.
My hands slipped, useless, slick with humiliation.
The shame was almost unbearable.
I was on my knees—literally and figuratively—reduced to begging in front of a man who had stood over my grave and watched me break.
Ruslan stood.
He didn’t jerk away from me or shove me aside.
He rose slowly, deliberately, as if he were afraid of startling a wounded animal.
Each step backward felt like a widening abyss, the space between us stretching into something vast and unbridgeable.
When he looked down at me, his face was carved from stone—cold, resigned—but there was something else there too.
Not compassion.
Something closer to disgust... or pity.
“You know what, Elena?” he said quietly.
His voice was calm. Too calm. The kind of calm that came before devastation.
“If I had to choose between my late wife—whom I never loved—and you,” he continued evenly, “I would choose her. Every single time.”
The words slammed into my chest like a physical blow.
My lungs seized. My heart splintered so violently I thought I heard it crack.
I sucked in a sharp, broken breath, my body folding inward as if trying to protect what little was left of me. Tears came harder now, choking sobs ripping free as I stared up at him, my mouth open, empty of language.
There was nothing left to defend myself with.
He didn’t stop.
“Loving a man you barely know is pathetic,” he said flatly. “Don’t lie to yourself. This isn’t love. It’s desperation. A clawing need to be seen, to be chosen by someone—anyone—because you’ve never been chosen before.”
Each sentence was a blade, precise and merciless.
“And let me be perfectly clear,” he went on, his eyes locking onto mine with brutal certainty. “In this lifetime or the next, you will never have my love. Not until the day you die.”
My vision swam.
“The same way,” he finished quietly, “that I never loved my wife until the day she was lowered into the ground.”
Something inside me collapsed completely.
“Why?” The word slipped out, barely sound, torn from somewhere deep and raw. “Why are you like this?”
For a moment, I thought he wouldn’t answer.
Then he exhaled—long, uneven—like a man carrying too much weight in his lungs.
His fists clenched at his sides, knuckles whitening, tendons standing out sharply beneath his skin. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, rougher, stripped of its usual iron control.
“First,” he said slowly, “because I’m incapable of it.”
I watched his jaw tighten, watched his gaze drift somewhere far past me.
“Do you have any idea what Al-Chapo did to me after he ordered my sister’s murder?” he asked, not looking at me now. “People talk about the beating. A hundred punches. As if that was the worst of it.”
His mouth twisted bitterly.
“That part was easy. Pain heals. Bones knit. Skin closes.” He shook his head once. “What came after—that’s what broke me.”
His voice faltered—not much, just enough to make my chest ache.
“There are things a man doesn’t come back from,” he continued. “Things that don’t leave marks you can point to. Things that hollow you out until love becomes a foreign language. Until trust feels like a trap.”
He finally looked at me again.
His eyes—those ruthless, merciless eyes—were glassy now, reflecting the lamplight like shattered steel.
“They carved something out of me,” he said quietly. “And nothing ever grew back in its place.”
Silence swallowed the room.
I saw it then—not the monster, not the executioner, not the man who had ordered my suffering—but the ghost of someone who had once been human and had paid dearly for it.
“It’s not just Yannis who’s traumatized,” he said again, more quietly now—almost as if the words were meant for the walls rather than for me. “I am too.”
His voice lacked its usual edge. It sounded worn thin, scraped raw by years of unrelenting pressure.
“We both wake up screaming,” he went on, staring at nothing.
“Night after night. The same nightmares, dressed differently. The same terror that never loosens its grip. I fear sleep the same way my son does.” His jaw tightened.
“I fear the moment my eyes close, because that’s when the past finds me again. ”
He let out a bitter breath.
“That’s why I’ve failed him,” he said flatly. “Because I’m no better than he is. Because I’m just as broken.”
The admission hung in the air, heavy and suffocating.
“Life doesn’t take everything at once,” he continued, voice hollow. “It takes it slowly. A piece at a time. It lets you think you can survive the losses—until one day you look down and realize you’re bleeding from places you didn’t even know could be wounded.”
For a moment, there was nothing but silence.
Then—without warning—he turned away from me.
His fist slammed into the wall.
The sound was explosive, violent enough to make me flinch hard.
The entire suite seemed to shudder—the framed artwork rattled against the walls, the chandelier above us swayed, crystal chiming softly like bones knocking together.
A sharp crack echoed as plaster fractured beneath the force.
Blood bloomed instantly across his knuckles, bright and shocking against his skin.
It dripped onto the marble floor in thick, crimson drops.
He didn’t react.
Didn’t curse. Didn’t inhale sharply. Didn’t even look at his hand.
“That man...” he growled.
He spun back toward me, pointing into empty space as though his enemy stood right there between us—solid, breathing, waiting. His face was twisted with a fury so raw it was almost unrecognizable.
“He did things to me,” Ruslan said, his voice breaking apart. “Things I will never speak aloud. Not to you. Not to anyone. Not even to myself.”
His throat worked visibly as he swallowed.
“There are memories that rot you from the inside,” he went on. “Memories you don’t survive—you just learn how to carry them.”
He dragged a hand down his face, smearing blood across his skin.
“And second,” he said, his tone hardening again, snapping back into place like a blade sliding into its sheath, “how could love ever exist between us?”
He looked at me then—really looked at me—with something close to hatred.
“Your sister didn’t just kill my sister,” he said. “She slaughtered my pregnant wife too. Both of them. In ways so calculated, so cruel, I still can’t think about it without wanting to burn the world down.”
My stomach twisted violently.
“And you,” he continued, stepping closer, his voice dropping to something lethal and intimate, “are the daughter of a man who serves my greatest enemy. Al-Chapo’s loyal dog. A man who helped build the empire that destroyed me.”
His chest rose and fell in harsh, uneven breaths.
“All of it is tangled together,” he said hoarsely. “Blood on blood. Betrayal stacked on betrayal. And you stand in the middle of it and ask me for love.”
Something inside him finally snapped.
“I wish I could kill him again!” he roared. “I wish I could rip him apart with my bare hands—slowly—until there was nothing left but dust!”
He turned and stormed toward the door, slamming his bloodied fist into it once—twice—again and again. Each impact thundered through the suite, splintering wood, cracking the frame. With a final violent blow, the lock gave way.
The door burst open with a sharp, brutal crack.
It hung crooked on its hinges afterward—broken, jagged, a violent wound carved into the elegance of the room.
“Ruslan,” I called after him, the name tearing out of my throat like a wound being reopened.
My voice sounded small, brittle—nothing like the woman I’d once imagined I might be.
He paused at the threshold.
Just for a heartbeat.
He didn’t turn fully. He didn’t need to. The partial angle was enough for me to see his face in profile—the rigid line of his jaw, the tension carving shadows beneath his cheekbones.
When his eyes met mine, they were bloodshot, feral, stripped of reason or restraint. There was no humanity left in them in that moment. Only survival. Only vengeance.
“You deserve to be in the grave beside them, Elena,” he said.
Not shouted.
Not snarled.
Spoken with quiet certainty.
Then he turned away and disappeared down the hallway, his footsteps heavy, unhurried, echoing like the retreat of something lethal that had chosen—for now—not to strike.
The sound of him faded.
The silence afterward was worse.
I stayed where I was, sinking back to my knees.
The carpet bit into my skin, rough fibers embedding themselves painfully into my flesh, but I barely felt it.
My body felt alien—like it belonged to someone else entirely, a vessel carrying nothing but exhaustion, fear, and despair.
I tried to breathe.
The air wouldn’t come properly.
Tears spilled from my eyes in relentless streams, soaking the fabric of my dress, dripping onto the floor.
It felt as though something inside me had finally cracked wide open, and everything I’d been holding back for years—decades—was pouring out all at once. I wasn’t just crying for myself.
I was crying for him.
For the man who had been brutalized beyond repair and still kept walking.
For a little boy sleeping somewhere down the hall, trapped in a world where safety had vanished before he could understand what it meant.
And for me.
Because no matter how many times I’d told myself I was strong, no matter how many nights I’d survived alone, this—this was too much.
The pain wasn’t separate anymore.
It braided together—Ruslan’s rage, Yannis’s grief, my own long-buried terror—until it felt collective, shared, impossibly heavy. Three shattered lives colliding in the aftermath of violence none of us had chosen.
A sound ripped from my chest before I could stop it.
A scream.
Raw. Broken. Animal.
It tore at my throat until my lungs burned and my voice dissolved into nothing but air. It didn’t bring relief. It didn’t loosen the stone lodged in my chest. It only left me empty, shaking, weak.
My strength abandoned me completely.
I folded forward, my body giving up at last, and collapsed face-down onto the marble floor.
The cold seeped into my cheek, grounding and cruel.
My fingers curled uselessly against the stone as sobs tore through me in ugly, wrenching waves—no grace, no restraint left.