Lena
The first time I was in this compound, I was locked in the dungeon for days and tortured for answers, called a traitor’s daughter, and was given all the reasons why I would die.
Now, I’m in the east sitting room, surrounded by velvet and mahogany, and it feels exactly the same.
It still feels like a dream, a nightmare to be more specific.
What if he lied?
I get up, pace to the window and back. Sit down. Get up again. The chair is expensive, uncomfortable and I hate it, hate this room, hate that I know this compound, I hate everything.
What if he took Theo just to get me here?
I press my fingers against my mouth and breathe.
That thought has been circling for three hours and I can’t make it stop, I can’t confirm or deny it and the not knowing is its own kind of torture.
He said he’d bring Theo home. What if all of it, the school, the police station, the men in the car park, what if it was all just—
Stop it. I sit back down. You’ll drive yourself insane. There’s no way he did this, he couldn’t find you, you made sure of that, this issue isn’t his doing and you know it.
And then there’s the damned marriage.
I put my face in my hands.
He wants to marry me. Razvan Volkov, Pakhan of the Volkov Bratva, the most feared man in Moscow, wants to marry me specifically so my life will be miserable. Not for love.
Not for Theo. For revenge. He said it himself, flat and bored, like it was the most reasonable thing anyone had ever proposed. And the worst part, the part that has been sitting in my stomach like a stone for four hours, is that I don’t see a way out of it.
I’ve walked back into prison, and this time I held the door open myself.
The heavy thud of the front doors echoing through the hallway hits me like a lightning strike. I’m moving before I can think, my injured ankle screaming as I bolt into the corridor.
“Mama!”
The sound of his voice, that high, bright, beautiful sound, nearly takes my knees out.
“Mama!”
Theo rounds the corner at a dead sprint. He looks so small against the towering marble walls of this place. I drop to my knees, my arms open, and he slams into me with enough force to rock me back on my heels.
His small arms wrap around my neck, squeezing with everything he has.
I bury my face in the crook of his neck, inhaling him.
He smells like sweat, salt, and the faint, lingering scent of the lavender soap from our bathroom in Budapest. A bathroom I’ll never see again.
A life that ended the moment I stepped through that gate.
A sob breaks from me, ragged and ugly. Then another. I can’t stop them; the dam has finally burst. I hold him and shake, my tears soaking into his dark hair.
“You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay,” I chant into his skin. It’s a prayer, a desperate, frantic mantra. I run my hands over his back, his arms, his legs, checking for breaks, for blood, for anything that would mean they hurt him.
He’s trembling, but he pulls back just enough to look at me, his eyes wide and shining with a strange, fierce light.
“I was brave, Mama,” he whispers, his own voice wobbly. “Like Superman.”
“You were. You are. My brave, brave boy.” I pull back, my hands trembling as I cup his face, franticly checking for any mark, any bruise, any hidden hurt. He looks tired—exhausted—but his eyes are bright with the kind of adrenaline only a child can summon.
I press my face into his hair, and I feel his small, sticky hand patting my back. It’s the rhythmic, comforting gesture he’s used since he was a toddler whenever he thinks I’m the one who needs saving.
“It’s okay, Mama,” he whispers into my ear. “Superman came, it’s okay, Superman came and he was so big—”
“Superman,” I manage to choke out, pulling back to look at his face, checking him over with both hands, his cheeks, his arms, his hands. “Who is Superman, baby?”
Theo twists in my arms and points.
My gaze lifts over his shoulder.
Razvan is standing at the end of the corridor.
He’s just inside the door, having closed it quietly. He’s watching us. His expression is unreadable, a complex map of shadows and rigid control. He looks from my tear-streaked face to Theo, who turns in my arms to look at the man who brought him home.
“Him!” Theo announces, his voice echoing off the marble.
“He came and he was the biggest and he picked up the bad men and he didn’t even have a cape but I said that’s okay.
” He cups his hands around his mouth, leaning in to stage-whisper against my cheek.
“I said I won’t tell anyone about the cape, Mama. ”
A sound escapes me, a jagged, hysterical noise that is half-laugh and half-sob. The absurdity of it all. Razvan Volkov, the Wrath, the man who burns cities to get what he wants, being outed as a capeless superhero by a boy who doesn’t know he shares his DNA.
I stand up, Theo’s hand in mine, and I face Razvan across the hallway. My heart is doing six things at once, relief, hatred, want, grief, gratitude, and fury all running together until I can’t separate them into anything clean.
“Thank you for bringing my son back.”
Razvan’s jaw works. He gives a single, stiff nod. He looks…lost. It’s the only word for it. The most feared man in Moscow, standing awkwardly in his own foyer, unsure what to do with his hands. He finally shoves them into his pockets.
He looks at Theo.
Theo looks at him.
“Do you live here?” Theo asks, his voice bright with curiosity. “Because it’s very big. Our house is not this big. Our house has a crack in the ceiling in the kitchen and Mama says she’ll fix it but she hasn’t yet.”
“Theo,” I start, a flush of heat rising to my neck.
“It’s a big crack,” Theo tells Razvan seriously. “You could fit your finger in it.”
Razvan opens his mouth. Closes it. His hands come out of his pockets and hang helplessly again. The most feared man in Russia, undone by a crack in a kitchen ceiling in a Budapest apartment he’ll never see.
Something aches in my chest, a sharp, mournful pang for my son, who is trying to make conversation with a man who has already decided to own his mother.
Razvan clears his throat. The sound is rough, slightly too careful. “I’ll have someone look at it,” he says. His voice is wrong—it lacks the edge, the lethal certainty.
Theo nods, satisfied, and leans against my leg.
“Are you Mama’s friend?” he asks, breaking the suffocating tension.
Razvan’s eyes snap to mine. A dark, ironic question in them. Are we, Lena?
“He’s…someone who helped us,” I say, my voice hoarse. I stand straight, wincing as my injured ankle protests, and pull Theo closer to my hip. “We’re going to stay here for a little while. Isn’t that right?”
I direct the last part at Razvan, a challenge of my own. You got what you wanted. You have us. Now tell us where the cage is.
“Yes,” he says, the word clipped. “Your room is ready. Lena, you will stay in the guest wing for now. Theo’s room is being prepared. It will be ready tomorrow.”
“Come on, sweetheart,” I say, steering Theo toward the hallway. “Let’s get you to bed.”
“But I’m not tired! Superman and I have to plan the next mission!”
Somehow, I get him upstairs, through a bath with borrowed toiletries, and into a borrowed soft t-shirt that hangs to his knees. The mundane routine is an anchor.
Theo sees the bed and launches himself onto it face first and announces that it’s the softest thing he’s ever felt in his life and he’s never leaving.
I stand in the doorway and look at my son bouncing slightly on an expensive mattress and I think about the fact that there is a room somewhere in this compound currently being decorated for him.
That his father lives here. That in some number of days I will be married to Razvan Volkov and this will be my life.
I almost cry again. I swallow it.
“Come on, young man, time to sleep.”
I tuck him into the large bed in the guest room, sitting beside him until his excited chatter about superheroes slows and his eyelids droop. I watch him sleep, my hand on his small chest, feeling it rise and fall. The relief is so profound it’s painful. He’s here. He’s safe.
For now.
The door opens softly. Razvan stands there, a silent command. “My study. Now.”
My stomach tightens. I kiss Theo’s forehead and follow him out, closing the door with a soft click.
The study is a dark room, leather and wood and books that look read rather than decorative, and he’s behind the desk when I come in. He doesn’t offer me a seat. I don’t take one.
“The marriage,” he says, without preamble, “it will happen in three days.”
The finality of it steals the oxygen from the room. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am always serious.”
“I could just…walk away.” I step closer to the desk, my voice shaking with a sudden, frantic hope. “I could take him and disappear. Abandon the contract.”
He tilts his head, watching me with the detached interest of a predator considering a bird in a glass box. “Do you think I would ever let you escape me again? You? And my son?”
The way he says my son—with a possessive, territorial ferocity—makes the hair on my arms stand up.
“You’d track us,” I whisper.
“I would find you before you reached the city limits,” he says, his tone as matter-of-fact as if he were discussing the weather. “And this time, Lena, there would be no guest wing. There would be a leash. For you, and for him, to ensure your compliance.”
He leans forward, his palms flat on the dark wood of the desk.
“But that is not your only concern, is it, zayka? You have him back, but you do not know who took him. Or why. They saw you. They know your face. You need what I have. Walls. Guards. Power. You need my protection, whether you wish to suck on that bitter truth or not.”
He’s right. That’s the most agonizing part. It’s a perfect trap, and I walked into it with my eyes wide open. My shoulders slump, the weight of the five years finally crushing me. “I hate you for this.”
“Your hatred is of no consequence to me.”