Chapter 6
ELENA
My stomach twisted. He had anticipated me.
I had underestimated him.
That realization burned worse than rage.
Rage collided with panic — and training responded before emotion could drown it.
I dropped my center of gravity instantly.
FBI defensive tactics drilled into muscle memory.
Knees bent.
Hips driven back to break his balance.
I used the momentum to launch an explosive upward elbow strike aimed directly at his solar plexus.
The impact connected.
He grunted — air forced from his lungs — his grip loosening just enough.
I twisted hard. Wrenching my wrist free.
I spun out of his hold in one fluid motion, using the rotation to create distance.
My Glock slipped from my hand in the chaos.
It clattered against the marble floor and skidded across the polished surface.
Straight toward his feet.
Shit.
I staggered backward two steps, breathing heavily, chest rising and falling in sharp bursts.
The situation had shifted. Cover blown.
Operational disguise compromised.
He had allowed proximity.
He had orchestrated my return.
He had tracked my movements.
He had placed his own network around me for years.
A man who called himself a legend while still breathing.
I felt humiliation coil tightly in my chest. I spat directly at his polished shoes.
The saliva landed on the leather — stark, defiant.
“I will forever hate you.”
He lowered his gaze slowly, looked at the mark. Then lifted his eyes back to mine.
There was no immediate retaliation.
Only a quiet intensity.
“And I will spend the rest of my life trying to earn your forgiveness,” he replied softly. “On my knees, if I have to... my woman.”
The phrase ignited another surge of fury.
“I am not your fucking woman,” I snapped.
The words tore through my throat — reopening scars that had healed poorly after prison.
Pain flared physically as I spoke. Emotion made it sharper.
He exhaled slowly through his nose. Almost regretful.
His jaw tightened slightly.
“I sent you to prison because I believed you were still in contact with your sister.”
His voice shifted — no longer possessive, but measured and almost explanatory.
“I intercepted communications. I found what appeared to be proof — messages that showed you feeding her intelligence. Helping her avoid my operations. Setting traps for my men.”
My pulse spiked.
He stared at me directly. “And in my world, betrayal like that earns execution. But I couldn’t bring myself to kill you.”
His voice lowered. “Not the way I would kill any other traitor.”
My stomach turned.
“So you chose prison,” I said bitterly.
“Yes.” He swallowed. “I will never forgive myself for what happened to you there.”
His tone lost its arrogance. “And I will spend the rest of my life trying to undo what my decision caused.”
My breathing remained uneven. “Undo?”
I shook my head. “You can’t undo trauma. You can’t resurrect a dead baby. You can’t erase the nights I begged God to let me die.”
His gaze flickered.
The mention of the child hit harder than anything else.
He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t deny. He absorbed.
“I never knew your uncle was one of the prison guards,” Ruslan continued quietly. “He later confessed how much he pressured you — repeatedly — to go into corners of the prison where the cameras couldn’t see.”
His jaw tightened.
“And when you rejected him... he weaponized the inmates. He ordered them to target you. To break you.”
My jaw tightened.
Images flashed through my mind — not because he described them explicitly — but because I had lived them.
Dragged through corridors.
Shoved into locked rooms.
Surrounded.
Cornered.
Bruised.
“He told me those women would do anything for him because he helped them move drugs outside the prison,” Ruslan went on quietly. “He admitted how they singled you out”
His jaw tightened.
“They’d drag you into the showers or the laundry room, inflict pain so severe it left you curled on the floor, gasping for air. Beatings that targeted your ribs, your back, places that bruised but didn’t show under clothes.
His jaw tightened. “They shoved filth at you... slapped you awake... and then it got worse.”
He swallowed. “They denied you medical care when you were bleeding. They starved you for days to weaken you. And they forced you into prolonged isolation — cutting off contact, light, and any chance of protection — so you had no one to defend you.”
Ruslan’s eyes darkened, gaze distant as if replaying the scene in his mind’s theater.
“Hearing it made me want to crawl out of my own body. I want to peel my skin away, to suffer the way you suffered. I would trade my life to undo it.”
His voice cracked. “I committed the unforgivable against you, Elena.”
“Would you like to know how I ended Harlan?” When I gave him no response — not even a flicker — he continued anyway.
“I tied that bastard with his head pulled back to his ankles, body arched in a brutal U-shape—naked, exposed, every muscle screaming in protest. His asshole glaring up like a target, vulnerable and pathetic.”
“Then I took a baton—thick, wrapped in thorns I’d harvested from the garden hedges, jagged barbs sharp enough to draw blood on touch—and forced it into his asshole. Slow at first, letting him feel every inch. The thorns ripped into him, tearing flesh with a wet, shredding sound.”
“Blood poured out in rivers—hot, sticky, mixing with mucus and shit as I thrust harder, deeper. He screamed—high-pitched, guttural howls that echoed through the chamber—like his soul was being clawed out.”
“I twisted it, pulled back only to ram it in again, over and over. His anus became a mangled ruin: tissue hanging in bloody strips, internals spilling in a grotesque slurry of gore and waste, blood spraying in arcs with each withdrawal, his body convulsing like a puppet on broken strings, veins bulging in his neck as he begged for mercy that never came.”
“It was the least of what he deserved—for every torment he inflicted on you.”
“For violating you twice: first after your mother’s death, when you were grieving and forced to live under his roof with that spineless wife of his who looked the other way.
And second, when you trusted that therapist to heal your scars—only for him to betray you, slipping something into your drink, leaving you helpless as Harlan took what he wanted again. ”
My chest caved inward, a hollow ache spreading like ice through my veins.
Ruslan pressed on, his tone hardening with remembered fury.
“Fucking his ass with that thorn-wrapped baton until his anus was unrecognizable—shredded beyond repair, a pulsing mass of raw meat and exposed nerves—was just the beginning.”
“The agony was drawn out, deliberate: He voided himself uncontrollably—bowels emptying in spasms of blood and filth—as his screams turned to whimpers, his body shuddering in shock.”
“In his next life, he won’t even think of sex, let alone forcing it on a woman. He’ll remember the burn, the violation, the endless torment.”
Tears welled at the corners of my eyes—hot, insistent—despite my best efforts to hold them back.
The memories collided like storm waves: twelve years of hell since turning fifteen.
Abandoned, manipulated, tortured, violated—over and over.
Streets that swallowed my youth.
A marriage built on deceit.
Prison cells that stole my voice, my hearing, my child.
“Elena...”
“I don’t need the grotesque details of how you ended Harlan,” I cut in coldly. “It changes nothing. You’re no better. Your revenge speeches don’t justify your sins.”
My voice didn’t rise — but it trembled with restrained fury.
“Hearing about his suffering won’t erase what happened to me. It won’t fix the nights I wake up screaming without making a sound — feeling phantom hands on my skin, prison walls closing in on my lungs.”
I swallowed hard. “It won’t bring back my child.”
I looked him dead in the eye. “So spare me the theatrics. Just open the fucking door... and let me see my sister.”
That was the only thing that mattered.
Ruslan’s expression didn’t shift at first. Cold. Controlled.
“I already gave you the terms,” he replied flatly.
His tone wasn’t aggressive — it was final.
As if negotiations had already closed.
His posture softened slightly. His voice lowered.
“I never once hated you, Elena.”
The statement surprised me.
He stepped closer — not aggressively, not invading space, but deliberately shrinking the distance between us.
“From the moment I saw you in that church...”
His gaze drifted somewhere distant. “...when Yannis tugged on my sleeve, wide-eyed, whispering that we should marry...”
A faint flicker crossed his face. “...that instant, I felt something.”
His jaw tightened.
“But fate twisted everything. It placed the sister of the woman who destroyed my life under my roof.”
His eyes returned to mine.
Heavy. Regret layered over something deeper.
“I loved my sister,” he continued quietly. “Amy.”
He said her name like invoking a memory that still had power over him.
“She was careful. Quiet. Beautiful.”
A faint smile — almost invisible — touched his lips.
“She was always my shadow and my shield.”
He exhaled slowly. “We survived our childhood in the States together.”
His voice painted the memory.
“We walked to school hand in hand. She used to pack my lunches.”
His gaze drifted, as if he could still see it.
His lips pressed together. “I walked her home every day.”
“Fending off street boys who mocked her for being quiet. Protecting her from strangers who saw vulnerability and tried to exploit it.”
His eyes darkened. “She didn’t choose that life. The military. The CIA. She was too young. It was never what she wanted.”
His voice hardened. “My father made sure she had no choice. Shaped her into something she hated.”
His jaw flexed. “And I promised myself — if it ever came to a choice between us — who lives and who dies — I would sacrifice myself without hesitation.”
“That’s how deep it ran.” His voice dropped — colder now. “And I watched her die.”