Chapter 10 #4
A buzzer shrieked, sharp and final, and steam rose from the cold ground as the mechanism clanked to life.
And then—
There she was.
Elena.
My wife.
She stepped out slowly, clutching a small plastic bag of belongings like it was the only solid thing left in the world.
Her movements were cautious, almost tentative, as if she expected the ground to betray her.
She looked thinner. Smaller. Like something vital had been shaved away.
Her shoulders were drawn in, chin lowered—not broken, but guarded in a way that made my chest ache.
Behind her, a guard loomed—Harlan, name stitched across his chest, broad-shouldered, the authority of the uniform doing nothing to hide the weight of his stare.
His eyes crawled over her as she moved, lingering too long, and his lips muttered something low under his breath.
Every step she took, he matched just enough to remind her he was there, to make it clear she wasn’t leaving unnoticed. The badge and belt on his waist only sharpened the menace—he was meant to control her, but his presence carried something darker.
Something inside me snapped.
My vision went red. My body tensed, every instinct screaming to cross the distance and crush him where he stood. To show him exactly what happened to men who thought they could touch what was mine.
But I didn’t move.
This wasn’t about me anymore.
So I stayed where I was, fists clenched at my sides, swallowing violence like poison, and watched as Elena stepped fully into the open air—out of hell.
She walked toward me alone.
No escort. No hand guiding her forward. Just Elena, moving through the open space between the prison gates and me as though the air itself were hostile.
Each step was careful, deliberate, as if the ground might collapse if she trusted it too much.
Her shoulders were slightly hunched, not in submission, but in defense—like someone who had learned the hard way that the world struck without warning.
I didn’t move.
For the first time in my life, my body betrayed me.
The man who had stared down gun barrels and execution orders stood frozen, shame anchoring my boots to the gravel.
My legs trembled, muscles locking and unlocking uselessly, knees threatening to give out beneath the weight of what I was seeing.
I forced myself to lift my gaze.
When she stopped a few feet away, the distance felt immeasurable.
Her eyes met mine—and something inside me shattered.
There was no fire there. No fear. No hatred, even.
Just emptiness. A flat, hollow void that swallowed everything it touched.
I’d seen rage. I’d seen terror. I’d even seen brokenness.
This was worse.
This was absence.
Like whatever made her Elena had retreated somewhere unreachable, leaving behind only a shell that breathed because it had to.
The cold in that gaze cut deeper than any accusation could have. I would have welcomed screaming. Spitting. A slap across my face.
This silence was a sentence.
My eyes dropped despite myself, cataloging the damage with a horror I couldn’t stop.
Her shoulder was dark with dried blood, the fabric of her prison shirt stiff where it had soaked through. Fresh crimson bloomed beneath it, slow and insistent. She hadn’t bothered to hide it well—only to endure it.
Her left arm was tucked behind her back.
Too carefully.
I stepped closer, instinct overriding reason, and caught a glimpse of her hand. My stomach dropped.
The fingers were swollen, bent at unnatural angles, the knuckles bruised purple and green.
Not a fresh injury. Not old enough to be healed.
Deliberate.
I sucked in a breath that burned all the way down. My eyes drifted lower, and the full scope of it hit me like a physical blow.
Her legs.
Scars layered over scars, crisscrossing from ankle to thigh. Jagged, uneven lines—some thin and pale, others angry and red, still healing. Whips. Blades. Improvised weapons. Pain inflicted not once, but repeatedly.
Because of me.
A sound tore out of my chest, half breath, half sob.
I staggered back a step, bile rising in my throat. This wasn’t punishment. This was systematic destruction.
Someone had taken their time with her.
I turned back to her face, my vision swimming.
“Elena...” My voice barely survived the word. It came out hoarse, fractured, like my throat had forgotten how to form her name. “I’m—” I swallowed hard. “I’m so sorry.”
Sorry was nothing. Sorry was an insult.
“I’ll do anything,” I continued, the words tumbling out desperate and raw. “Anything. I’ll burn the world down if that’s what it takes. I swear to you—” My knees bent despite my will. I was seconds from kneeling in the dirt, pride finally dead, reduced to dust. “Please. Let me fix this.”
She didn’t move.
Didn’t blink.
Didn’t react.
Her gaze stayed locked on mine, empty and endless, like she was looking through me instead of at me. As if I were just another shadow passing through her ruined world.
That broke something final inside my chest.
I was already lowering myself when Petros appeared at my side, his presence tentative, almost fearful. I barely registered him until he spoke.
“Sir...” His voice wavered. “She—she can’t answer you.”
I turned to him sharply. “What do you mean?”
Petros swallowed. His face was pale, his eyes unable to meet mine. “She lost her voice in there. Completely.”
The words didn’t make sense at first.
“Lost...?” My mind rejected them. “Temporarily?”
He shook his head once. Slowly. Gravely. “The medical report says it’s psychosomatic. Severe trauma. The guards said it started after... after prolonged screaming.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “She hasn’t spoken since the third month.”
The world tilted.
Sound drained away, replaced by a roaring emptiness.
I tasted blood where my teeth sank into my lip. My vision blurred, tears burning hot and unwelcome, a humiliation I didn’t care to hide.
Six long, hollow months. Completely mute. And I... I had caused it.
I had stolen her voice along with her freedom.
I turned back to Elena, my chest caving in as the truth settled like a coffin lid. She hadn’t been silent by choice. Silence had been all that survived.
I reached for her—stopped myself an inch away, terrified of what my touch might do.
How could I ever atone for this?
How could a man who had taken everything ask for forgiveness?
My stomach lurched violently, acid scorching my throat as fear and grief tore through me in equal measure.
I had known—God help me, I had known—about her speech difficulty. She had told me once. Just once. One of those rare, fragile moments when the walls between us thinned enough for truth to slip through.
When she grew too anxious, too afraid, the words would snag in her throat like barbed wire.
Sometimes she would force them anyway, pushing until blood flecked her lips from the strain.
I remembered how she’d tried to hide it, wiping her mouth quickly, embarrassed, as if pain were a personal failing.
Her voice had been quiet. Fragile. But it carried weight.
Even when she stuttered, even when the words came broken and uneven, the melody of it had wrapped around my anger like silk around a blade. It had calmed me in ways I hadn’t earned. In ways I didn’t understand.
And now it was gone.
Not damaged.
Not weakened.
Gone.
Stolen.
And I was the thief.
I was the monster who had silenced her forever.
Petros’s voice cut through the roaring in my ears, hesitant, burdened, as though he hated himself for being the one to finish the execution. “And... the baby,” he said quietly. “It’s gone, sir. They’re calling it an accident.”
The world snapped sideways.
I turned on him so fast the ground blurred beneath my feet. “What baby?” The words came out strangled, barely audible over the thunder of blood in my ears.
Petros swallowed hard. He still wouldn’t meet my gaze. “She was pregnant. About three weeks along when she was taken in.”
I couldn’t breathe.
My gaze snapped back to Elena.
She stood motionless before me, small and terribly still against the massive gray wall of the prison.
Her expression hadn’t changed—still that empty, distant stare—but now I saw what I had refused to see before.
The unnatural pallor beneath the bruises. The way her free hand hovered near her abdomen, not protectively anymore, but instinctively, as if her body hadn’t yet learned the loss.
And there—subtle, devastating—the faint hollow where life had once been.
No.
The memory surged up, violent and undeniable.
It hadn’t been a dream.
The night came back to me with brutal clarity—the one I’d dismissed as a drunken fantasy, a distortion born of too much whiskey and too many months of denying the pull she had on me.
She had stumbled into my study after one of her solitary nights at the club. Her cheeks had been flushed, eyes glassy but sharp, anger lending her a reckless courage. Instead of retreating upstairs like she always did, she’d come straight toward me.
“You,” she’d said, pointing an unsteady finger at my chest. “You’re a monster, Ruslan.”
I’d been drunk too. Too far gone to hide behind discipline. And the sight of her—disheveled, furious, hair loose around her shoulders—had ignited something I’d spent months suffocating. Desire had always been there, simmering beneath the hatred, tangled with it, feeding off it.
She had stepped closer.
I had risen from my chair like a man pulled by a rope around his throat
The hunger for her had built up over days, unbearable, a fire I could no longer contain. Every part of me ached to claim her, to consume her completely, to pull her into me right there and then.
I felt like a wild beast, reckless and raw, even under the haze of drink.
I remembered asking—slurring, barely coherent—if she wanted this.
Even through the haze of alcohol and anger, something stubborn and human had clawed its way to the surface.
A final instinct of decency. Consent mattered. It always had.
Even when we were both drowning, even when rage and desire tangled so tightly I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.