Chapter Twenty-Seven
Osip
She stares at me, her lips pursed into a tight line that carves shadows across her face.
I can read the tension in every muscle— the rigid set of her shoulders, the way her fingers curl against her thighs like she’s bracing for impact. But she’s listening. Her ocean eyes are locked on mine, and that’s all I need right now.
I just need to make sure I don’t fuck this up.
Blyad.
I’ve never been good at this shit. Never had to be.
In my world, bullets and silence solve most problems. But there’s so much on the line right now— more than money, more than territory, more than the careful empire I’ve built.
There’s her. There’s us. There’s the possibility of something real in a life that’s been nothing but shadows and smoke.
Just fucking do it, mudak.
So I spill it. All of it. Starting from the moment I met her in this very room, surrounded by velvet and secrets and the kind of desperate longing that drives people to hide behind masks.
“I came here that night, over a year ago, my head was messed up. I wasn’t sure what I would find.” I pause, remembering that impulsive decision all those months ago. “And then, I walked in here… and there you were. My absolution.”
Her breath catches, so subtle I might have missed it if I wasn’t watching her face like my life depends on it. Which, in a way, it does.
“There was something so… pure about you.” I picture her eyes behind the mask. The simple honesty there. “And you just seemed to hurt so much.” I raise my shoulders into a shrug. “Easing your pain made me… feel good about myself.”
“So that’s what this was about?” She sweeps an arm around the room. “Making you feel good?”
“Yes.” There’s no point in denying it. “You remember what you told me? About your endometriosis diagnosis, about feeling broken?” I reach out a hand to stroke her cheek. “I wanted to be the one to fix you.”
Her hand flies to her throat, fingers pressing against the pulse point like she’s trying to hold herself together.
“I never believed in… soulmates, thought it was all govno … bullshit.” I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment. “But in the dark, with nothing but honesty between us, for the first time in my goddamn life, I did.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” The question comes out broken, fragmented. “In Budapest, when we— Why didn’t you tell me you knew who I was?”
This is where it gets ugly. Where the fairy tale crashes into reality like a speeding car into a brick wall.
“Because I knew what it would mean. What I would have to tell you.” I run a hand through my hair, feeling every one of my thirty-two years settle into my bones like lead. “About your father. About what I did.”
She goes statue-still. Her face drains of color until her skin looks like porcelain, delicate and liable to shatter at the slightest touch.
“Why? Why did you do it?”
The question hangs in the air between us, heavy with the weight of everything that’s about to change. There’s no going back from this moment. No pretty lies or careful omissions that can soften what comes next.
I tell her about the business. About how Igor Shiradze and I were partners in something that skirted the edges of hell— baby trafficking, using his medical connections and my network to move infants from desperate mothers to wealthy couples who didn’t ask questions.
How we made millions from other people’s desperation.
“He was skimming money,” I continue, watching her face for any sign that she’s going to bolt. “Taking more than his share, thinking we wouldn’t notice. When I confronted him about it…”
I pause, remembering that night in the restaurant parking lot. The way Igor’s face had transformed from guilty embarrassment to cold calculation when he realized I knew. The knife he’d pulled from his coat— the same knife that ended up buried in his chest.
“I went there to talk. To get him to come clean about where the money went, to work something out. He was a good businessman once. A part of me hoped he could find his way back to that.” I shake my head.
“But when I showed him the evidence, he got malicious. Started threatening me, threatening my operation. Said he’d bring us all down if I didn’t back off. ”
“So you killed him?” she whispers, her eyes huge, unblinking.
Blyad.
This is it. The moment that decides everything— whether she can forgive the unforgivable, whether love can survive the weight of the truth.
I can’t lie to her. Not anymore. Not even if it means losing her forever. She deserves better than the pretty fiction I’ve been feeding myself about learning to be a good man. She deserves the truth, ugly and blood-soaked as it is.
“He tried to kill me first,” I say, not sugarcoating it. “He had a knife. Came at me like a wild animal when he realized I wasn’t going to let him walk away clean. I was stronger. I defended myself.”
The explanation sounds so fucking feeble but there’s no way around it that won’t seem like I’m trying to excuse what I did. Because there is no excuse.
The silence stretches between us as she considers this. She stares at me with those blue eyes I’ve dreamed about, searching my face for something— maybe the monster she expected to find, maybe the man she thought she knew.
“I’m sorry,” I add, because the words need to be said even if they can’t undo what I’ve done.
She stares at me for what feels like an eternity, her gaze burning through me. I can see her processing it all… and again, I fight the urge to defend myself. To try to make her see why I did what I do.
Shut the fuck up, pizda.
Let her make up her own mind.
“I believe you,” she says quietly.
I stare at her, not sure I heard right. And then relief crashes over me in waves so intense I have to grip the back of the nearest chair to keep from falling to my knees.
“You do?”
“I do now.” She looks down at her hands, folded carefully in her lap like a schoolgirl in church.
“I know my father wasn’t who I thought he was.
I organized an investigation… and the things the investigator found…
” She trails off, shaking her head. “I didn’t want to believe it.
But I know now that the man I idolized was involved in terrible things. ”
The enormity of my relief is indescribable. She believes me. She’s not running, not screaming, not reaching for the phone to call the police. It’s like a ton of weight has just fallen off my chest, leaving me dizzy and breathless.
“In Budapest…” she begins, licking her lips in that nervous gesture I’ve come to recognize. “When did you find out that I’m the woman from the Masked Nights?”
“After Tibor tried to… hurt you, and I brought you to my house, I knew. I recognized your voice, your story. The way you moved, the sounds you made…” I clear my throat, heat flooding my face like I’m some teenager admitting to his first crush.
“After you told me who your father was. I connected the dots.”
“You knew all along?” The whisper carries the weight of betrayal, of trust broken and carefully rebuilt.
“Yes,” I admit, because there’s no point in softening it now. “I thought it was safer to keep it a secret. For you. For me.”
“Safer?” Her laugh is bitter, sharp. “How is not telling me the truth safer?”
It’s a fair question. A good question. The kind that strips away all the bullshit justifications I’ve been feeding myself for months.
“Would you have trusted me if I’d told you?” I ask. “If I’d walked up to you in that restaurant and said, ‘Hello, Ilona. I’m the masked stranger who touched you in Boston, and by the way, I killed your father in self-defense, will you have my baby’?”
She doesn’t respond, but she doesn’t need to. We both know the answer. She looks down at the floor as if she’s found something fascinating in the Turkish rug’s intricate patterns, and in that silence, I have my answer.
She wouldn’t have believed me. Hell, she probably would have run screaming, called the cops, done everything in her power to destroy me before I could hurt her again.
Then she looks up, and I see something in her eyes I wasn’t expecting— understanding. Not complete forgiveness, not yet, but the recognition that sometimes the truth is too big and too ugly to share all at once.
“And Slava?” Her voice is softer now, gentler. “Did you really not know he was alive?”
My body tenses like I’ve been struck. This is the sensitive spot, the wound that never heals no matter how much time passes. The guilt that eats at me from the inside, growing stronger with every day my son spends with strangers instead of his father.
“When Galina died… When Stanley killed her…” The words come out ragged. “The paramedics told me there was no way the baby could have survived. I only found out he was alive right before he got adopted. That’s why I flew to Boston on the same night you disappeared from Budapest.”
She stares into the distance, processing. Her fingers drum against her thigh in a rhythm I don’t recognize, some internal song playing in her head.
“Yes,” she says finally. “The night I found out who killed my father.”
I stare at her, feeling the weight of that cosmic coincidence. Two devastating revelations on the same night, in the same city, driving us both toward truths we weren’t ready to face. The universe has a twisted sense of humor.
I know it’s best to remain quiet now. Sometimes silence speaks more than a thousand words could, and this feels like one of those moments. She needs space to think, to process, to decide whether the man sitting in front of her is someone she can live with or someone she needs to run from.
It’s her who breaks the silence.
“I’m sorry about what happened to Galina. And Slava,” she says quietly, and there’s genuine compassion in her voice. Not pity— I would have walked away if it was pity— but understanding. The recognition of one person’s pain by someone who has known her own share of loss.
I nod, not trusting my voice to remain steady. There’s nothing to say to that, no response that wouldn’t diminish the sincerity of her sympathy.
She turns to face me fully then, shifting on the couch so her body is angled toward mine. Takes a deep breath that makes her chest rise and fall beneath the silk robe she’s still wearing. When she speaks, her voice is steady but quiet, like she’s sharing a secret with the walls themselves.
“I’m pregnant.”
I stare at her like an idiot, blinking stupidly while my brain tries to piece together what she’s just said. For a moment, I wonder if something’s gone wrong with my hearing, if the stress of confession has finally driven me completely insane.
“What?”
“I’m pregnant,” she repeats, and this time there’s no mistaking it. No room for misinterpretation or wishful thinking. “About ten weeks by now, according to the doctor.”
I stop breathing. Everything I thought I knew about my life, about our situation, about what’s possible between us, suddenly rearranges itself into something entirely new. Dangerous.
Beautiful.
A baby. Our baby.
The child I never thought I’d have, growing inside the woman I killed for, carried by the daughter of the man whose death haunts my dreams.
I open my mouth to respond, but no words come.
Just the sound of my own breathing, harsh and uneven in the suddenly quiet room.