Chapter Twenty
Osip
Blyad.
I feel like I’ve had my skull crushed with a sledgehammer.
Igor Shiradze’s daughter. The masked woman who shared her pain with me, who trusted me with her grief, who came apart beneath my hands— she’s my old business partner’s daughter.
I stare at the empty vodka bottle on my coffee table, the pieces clicking together in a way that makes my chest feel like it’s caving in.
Her father, the respected gynecologist. The timing of his death.
‘Suicide.’ The way she described him— her hero, her anchor, the man who taught her that problems have solutions and hope exists in darkness.
The man I murdered in a parking lot two days ago.
Chert voz’mi!
What kind of twisted cosmic joke is this?
What the fuck have I been reduced to in just a matter of days?
I killed her father. I took the one person who made her feel safe in the world. And then she came to me— to me — seeking comfort for grief I created. She cried before me about losing the most important person in her life, while I sat there like the soulless mudak I am, pretending to offer solace.
The irony tastes like blood and betrayal.
The house around me feels like a mausoleum.
Galina’s clothes still hang in our closet, her perfume still lingering on silk blouses I can’t bring myself to pack away.
The nursery door remains closed— I haven’t opened it since that night, can’t bear to see the crib I assembled with dreams of teaching my son to be a good man. A man unlike his father.
All of it gone. My wife, my unborn child, my chance at redemption— erased while I was with Igor Shiradze’s daughter. A woman whose family I destroyed before I ever knew her.
Face it, dolboyob.
You destroy everything you touch.
You’re an accident waiting to happen.
The empty house mocks me with its silence. No Galina humming in the kitchen, no sounds of her moving through our bedroom at night, no soft conversations about baby names and paint colors and futures that will never exist.
Eto pizdets.
The guilt is devouring me from the inside out. This is all fucked beyond repair. And I— Christ, I’m the one who lit the match and watched it all burn.
My phone buzzes with another message from Stanley— the fifth one today, each more demanding than the last. He wants the money he thinks Igor stole, wants explanations for partnerships that died with a knife between the ribs.
But Stanley’s threats feel like mosquito bites compared to the cancer eating through my chest.
I lost my wife.
My son.
I killed Igor Shiradze.
And his daughter— my masked angel, the only woman who ever made me feel alive— will never know that her grief has a name. That her father’s murderer held her while she cried, fucked her, offered comfort with hands still stained by blood.
The guilt should destroy me. Maybe it is already destroying me, one shot of vodka at a time.
My brothers have been calling since Galina’s death, demanding I leave this graveyard of a city and join them in Budapest. Melor’s dry voice echoes in my memory: You have nothing left in Boston, bratan. Join us in Hungary. We’ll start fresh, build something new.
He’s right. I have nothing here but ghosts and grave dirt and the kind of guilt that ferments into madness if you let it sit too long.
Ona nikogda ne uznayot.
She’ll never know what I’ve done.
The thought should comfort me, but it doesn’t. It sits in my chest like broken glass, cutting me from the inside every time I breathe. She’ll spend the rest of her life missing a father I stole from her, wondering why good men die and monsters keep breathing.
Because that’s what I am.
A soulless monster who destroys everything he touches.
I remember the weight of her grief, the broken way she said his name like speaking it might bring him back. The trust she placed in a stranger’s hands, desperate for connection.
Ya ubil yego.
I killed him.
Just like I killed my wife and son.
And Shiradze’s daughter, she’ll never know that I’m the reason she needed comfort in the first place.
The VanishMe app glows on my phone screen, our conversation thread empty now but weighted with everything I can never tell her. She reached out today, breaking every rule, risking exposure because she needed me . The masked stranger who represents safety in a world gone mad.
If she knew the truth, she’d kill me herself.
And I’d let her.
My fingers shake as I navigate to the account settings. The delete button waits, small and red, offering the only mercy I can give her— distance from the animal who’s been masquerading as her salvation.
Prosti menya, I whisper to the empty house, to the woman who’ll never hear it, to the ghosts that follow me everywhere now.
Forgive me.
I delete the account with one tap, severing the last connection between us. Now she’s truly safe from me, protected by ignorance and geography and the kind of distance that can’t be bridged by encrypted messages.
The phone clatters onto the coffee table beside the empty bottle, and I lean back into leather that still smells like Galina’s perfume. The silence presses against my eardrums like deep water, threatening to drown what’s left of my sanity.
Budapest.
A new city, new language, new opportunities to build something that doesn’t involve trafficking orphaned babies to rich families or murdering fathers. Melor and Radimir have been there for months, setting up legitimate businesses, creating lives that don’t require violence to maintain.
Maybe I can learn to be something other than this. Maybe distance and time can scab over wounds that feel fatal right now.
But I’ll never forget her. Never stop carrying the weight of what I took from her. She’ll exist forever in my memory as she was in Room Five— vulnerable and trusting, looking for comfort from the very man who caused her pain.
Eto moya kara.
This is my punishment.
To yearn for someone I can never have, to crave absolution from someone who’d destroy me if she knew the truth. To live with the knowledge that I found my salvation in the daughter of my victim.
The cosmic joke isn’t that I fell for Igor’s daughter. The cosmic joke is that she might have saved me, if I hadn’t killed her father first.
I pull up the family group chat on my phone, the screen blurring as exhaustion and vodka take their toll. My brothers’ names glow at the top— Melor, Radimir, the only family I have left in this world.
“Arriving in two days,” I type with fingers that feel disconnected from my body. “I need a couch to crash on before I buy a house there.”
The response comes immediately from Melor: “About fucking time, bratok. We’ll pick you up at the airport.”
Radimir follows with a string of laughing emojis and: “Welcome to the land of goulash and fresh starts.”
Fresh starts. Like I deserve that luxury. The concept feels foreign, laughable. How do you start fresh when blood stains your hands, when you’re drowning in the weight of your murdered wife and son, tormented by the ghost of a woman whose family you destroyed?
But maybe that’s the point. Maybe redemption isn’t about forgetting your sins—maybe it’s about carrying them so completely that they transform you into something different. Something better. Something worthy of the trust placed in you by people who don’t know they’re touching poison.
I close my eyes and let myself remember her one last time— the way she moved beneath me, the sounds she made when she came, the trust in her voice when she asked if she could see me again.
Net, milaya . You can’t see me again. Ever.
Because if you did, if you ever learned the truth, it would destroy us both. And you’ve suffered enough damage from my hands.
I’ll carry my guilt to Budapest, to whatever new life my brothers are building in the hills above the Danube. I’ll use it as armor against ever hurting anyone else the way I’ve hurt her.
But I’ll never forget what happened here.
I’ll never forget her . I’ll never stop wanting to be the man she deserved to find in that burgundy room— someone clean, someone worthy, someone who could offer comfort without contamination.
Do svidaniya, Boston.
Goodbye.
Time to learn how to live with the ghosts I’ve created.