Razvan
The darkness in my study is absolute, except for the amber glow of the Scotch in my glass and the dying embers in the fireplace.
I haven’t been back to the master bedroom in two days.
I can’t. Every time I look at that bed, I see the silhouette of the woman who fled from me at dinner.
I see the way she looked at me—like I was a ghost, or a monster, or something even worse.
I shouldn’t be afraid of anything, especially not a woman’s rejection, but here I am, hiding in my own house because I’m terrified that if I lie down next to her, she’ll pull away from my touch.
The door creaks open, and I don’t even have to look up to know who it is.
Mike walks in, his footsteps heavy on the hardwood.
He’s been my right hand since we were boys, the only man who sees the person behind the title.
He doesn’t say anything at first; he just walks over to the sideboard, pours himself a drink, and sits in the leather chair across from me.
“I’m busy,” I growl, staring into the fire.
“You’re sulking,” he counters. “There’s a difference. You’ve been staring at that same stack of papers for three hours, and you haven’t turned a single page. It’s Lena, isn’t it?”
I slam the glass down on the desk, the liquid splashing over the rim.
“She hates me, Mike. She sees a murderer every time she looks at me. I forced her into this. I dragged her into my world and expected her to just…what? Fall for me? I’ve done too many bad things to her.
The dungeon, the threats, the marriage. It’s too late to right those wrongs. ”
Mike leans forward, the firelight catching the scars on his knuckles. “Is it? You saved her son. You stayed up all night when the boy was sick. You’re providing for them, protecting them. You aren’t the same man who walked into that house months ago.”
“It doesn’t matter who I am now,” I say, my voice cracking. “She remembers who I was then. She remembers her father.”
“Then change the narrative,” Mike says firmly.
“If you want her, truly want her, you have to be brave. You have to bare your heart and ask for the truth. You’re the Pakhan.
You take what you want from the world, but you can’t take a woman’s love by force.
You have to earn it. Go to her, Razvan. Ask her.
Even if the answer kills you, at least you’ll know where you stand. ”
“I’m afraid she doesn’t want me, Mike,” I admit, the words feeling like shards of glass in my throat.
“Then find out,” he says. “Stop hiding in the dark.”
He leaves me alone with my thoughts, and I spend the rest of the night pacing the floor. Mike is right. I can’t live in this limbo anymore. I can’t keep watching her from the shadows, wondering if the distance between us is a mile or a light-year.
The next morning, the house feels suffocating.
I find Lena in the solarium, sitting among the ferns and the glass walls.
She’s reading a book to Theo, her voice soft and melodic, but as soon as she hears my boots on the stone floor, she stiffens.
She doesn’t look up. She doesn’t even acknowledge I’m there.
She’s avoiding me, just like she’s been doing since the dinner.
“Theo,” I say, my voice sounding louder than I intended in the quiet room. “Go find Lyosha. I think he has that wooden sword ready for you.”
Theo’s eyes light up. “Really?” He looks at Lena, who nods slowly, her lips pressed into a thin line. The boy scrambles off the chair and sprints out of the room, leaving the two of us in a silence so heavy I can barely breathe.
“Lena,” I say, stepping closer.
She stands up, clutching her book to her chest like a shield. “I should go check on his lunch. Maria was asking—”
“Stop,” I say, moving to block her path. I corner her against a tall marble pedestal, my shadow falling over her. “Stop running. Stop looking through me as if I don’t exist. I want the truth, Lena. I want it now.”
She looks up at me, her eyes flashing with a sudden, violent heat. “The truth? You want the truth, Razvan?”
“Yes,” I demand, my hands curling into fists at my sides. “Tell me why you pull back. Tell me why you act like my touch is poison. I want to know why we can’t be what we were in St. Petersburg.”
Lena snaps. The book hits the floor with a heavy thud, and she steps into my space, her face inches from mine.
“You want to know why? Because I could never allow myself to love the man who killed my father! How dare you? How dare you think I would just forget? Every time you touch me, I feel his blood on my skin. Every time we sleep together, it eats me alive! I lie awake wondering how I can be so weak that I let the man who destroyed my family into my bed!”
I go completely still, the air leaving my lungs as if she’s physically driven a blade between my ribs. The hallway, the marble pedestal, the flickering shadows of the evening—it all fades into a dull, grey blur.
There is only Lena.
Her chest is heaving, her face flushed with a beautiful, devastating rage. She looks like a recording of a lightning strike—pure, destructive energy. And for the first time in my life, I am the one standing in the center of the storm, defenseless.
“I saw you!” she screams, her voice cracking with the force of her pain.
“I saw you kill my innocent father! I saw the black suits, the guns. I saw him fall! You think because you saved Theo and you’re nice to me sometimes that I’ll just fall in love?
I would die before I love you, Razvan! I would rather be back in that dungeon than give my heart to a murderer! ”
“You saw me?” I whisper. My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It’s thin. Brittle. The voice of a man watching his world collapse in real-time.
“I saw you!” she screams again, the sound echoing off the high ceilings like a physical blow. “I saw the black suits. I saw the guns. I saw him fall!”
In her mind, I am the bullet. I am the gun. I am the monster that ended her father’s life.
I reach out, my hand trembling—a weakness I would have executed a soldier for an hour ago. I want to touch her, to steady her, to tell her the truth. But as my fingers ghost near her arm, she flinches so violently it’s as if I’ve tried to burn her.
I pull my hand back, tucking it into a fist at my side. The rejection is a physical ache in my marrow.
“Lena,” I say, and her name feels like glass in my throat. “I didn’t…I wasn’t the one.”
“Don’t lie to me!” she barks, a harsh, jagged laugh tearing out of her. “Don’t you dare lie to me now. You were there. You led them. You took me. You own the blood on those floors just as much as you own this house.”
She tries to storm past me, her shoulder hitting my chest, but I reach out and grab her arm.
I’m forceful, my grip tight enough to keep her rooted to the spot.
My heart is hammering against my ribs, but it’s not from anger.
It’s from the realization that she’s been living a lie—a lie that I allowed her to believe because I was too blinded by my own family’s narrative.
“Look at me,” I growl, my voice vibrating with a dangerous intensity.
“Let me go!” she shrieks, clawing at my hand.
“Look at me, Lena! Look at the mark!” I yank up the sleeve of my shirt, exposing my forearm.
I point to the black serpent tattooed into my skin—the Volkov blood mark.
It’s intricate, dark, and unmistakable. “This is the mark of the direct Volkov bloodline. Every man in my family carries it. Viktor carries it. I carry it.”
She freezes, her eyes darting to the tattoo. Her breathing is shallow, her chest heaving in short, panicked bursts.
“The men who came to your father’s house that night, they wore the suits.
They carried the mark. But it wasn’t my hit, Lena.
It was Viktor’s.” I let out a breath I’ve been holding for months.
“I didn’t even know your father had died until my uncle came back and broke the news.
He told me he killed the ‘traitor’ in the same breath he told me my father was gone.
Viktor killed your father, Lena. Not me. ”
The silence that follows is deafening. I watch the shock ripple through her face, the anger vanishing so quickly it leaves her features hollowed and raw.
She doesn’t move. She just stares at the tattoo, her brain visibly trying to reject the words. She begins to hyperventilate, her gasps coming so fast they sound like a wounded animal. Her eyes go wide, darting around the hallway as if searching for a way to rewrite the last three years.
“No,” she whispers, the word catching in her throat. “No, you’re lying. You have to be lying. I saw…I saw the serpent. I saw the tall man in the shadows. It was you. It had to be you.”
“I was at the docks, Lena. I was half a city away when the door was kicked in,” I say, my voice low and steady, trying to anchor her even as she unravels.
“No, no, no…” Her voice rises into a fractured monologue, her words spilling out between jagged, desperate breaths.
“If it wasn’t you, then I hated you for nothing?
I spent every night… I made myself cold.
I pushed you away because I thought… I thought I was honoring him.
Papa, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Viktor? Viktor killed him? ”
She starts to shake—a violent, full-body tremor that rattles her bones.
It’s the sound of a foundation cracking.
She looks like she’s dying, her face turning a ghostly, translucent white.
The relief of knowing I’m not his murderer is there, but it’s being crushed under the weight of the betrayal she feels toward her own memory.
“I loved you,” she gasps, the words coming out as a strangled cry of agony. “I started to love you and I felt like I was killing him myself…and it was all a lie? He’s gone and the man I’ve been punishing is…is…”
Her knees buckle. She doesn’t just fall, she crumbles. I catch her before her head can hit the stone, lowering us both to the floor. She doesn’t lean into me yet. She stays rigid in my arms, her hands flying to her face, a deep, gut-wrenching wail of pure, unadulterated agony tearing through her.
I pull her against my chest, my arms wrapping around her like a cage, like a shield. I don’t say a word. I just hold her while the lie she’s been carrying—and the burden of hating the man she was secretly longing for—collapses into a heap of broken, beautiful wreckage on the floor.
“I thought it was you,” she gasps through her tears, her fingers clutching at my shirt. “He was an innocent man, Razvan. He wasn’t a traitor.”
“I’m going to find out the truth,” I murmur, my hand finding the back of her head, pulling her closer.
I don’t care about the Pakhan’s dignity anymore.
I don’t care about being the monster. I just hold her as she falls apart.
“I’m so sorry, Lena. My uncle…he told me your father killed mine.
He said it was justice. But I knew your father, and he wasn’t that kind of man.
I’ve had my doubts, and I promise you right now—I will get to the bottom of this.
I will find out exactly what happened that night. ”
“I hated you,” she cries, her voice muffled against my heart. “I spent every day telling myself you were the devil. I thought I was a traitor for wanting you. I thought I was spitting on his grave.”
“I should have investigated it the moment it happened,” I say, my own eyes burning. “I let my uncle’s word be law because I was grieving. I let you suffer because I thought I was the one who deserved the justice. I was wrong.”
“You let me believe it was you,” she says, pulling back slightly to look at me, her face a mask of grief and confusion.
“Because I was a fool,” I admit. “I thought that even if I didn’t pull the trigger, the blood belonged to me. He’s my blood. My uncle. And I let him walk into your home.”
“But you didn’t order the kill?”
“No, he acted on his own. I didn’t even know until he reported it me.”
She doesn’t say anything for a long time. She just sits there in my arms, crying until she’s empty. The solarium is quiet, the sun beating down through the glass, but the world outside doesn’t exist. There is only us. There is only this terrible, beautiful truth that has finally changed everything.
I shift her so she’s sitting in my lap, her legs draped over mine. She doesn’t pull away. She leans her head against my shoulder, her breathing slowly evening out. Her hand reaches out and traces the serpent on my arm—the mark she used to fear, the mark that kept us apart.
“I’m going to make this right,” I say, my hand cupping her cheek. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life making it right. Viktor will answer for this. If he lied about your father, he’ll wish he’d never been born.”
She closes her eyes, a single tear sliding down her cheek. “I just want to know why.”
“I’ll get you the answers,” I promise.
We sit there on the floor for what feels like an eternity.
The walls I built, the cage she lived in—the dynamic has shifted.
I pick her up, cradling her against my chest as I stand.
She wraps her arms around my neck, clinging to me as if I’m her only anchor in a storm.
I walk out of the solarium and toward our bedroom. This time, I’m not afraid of the door.
I lay her down on the sheets and climb in next to her, pulling the duvet over us both. She tucks herself into my side, her hand resting over my heart.
“Stay,” she whispers.
“I’m never going anywhere,” I promise.
I watch her as she finally drifts off into a fitful sleep. The weight in my chest hasn’t fully vanished—it has transformed into a cold, burning purpose. Viktor is still out there. My uncle, the man who raised me into this life, might be the greatest traitor of them all.
I close my eyes, the sound of her steady breathing the only thing keeping me grounded.
Tomorrow, the world will return. Tomorrow, I will start the hunt for the real story of that night.
But tonight, there is only the heat of her body against mine and the knowledge that the woman I’ve been chasing finally knows I didn’t pull that trigger.
I hold her close, the silence of the room heavy with the tasks ahead. We are two people standing in the wreckage of a lie, and I will be the one to clear the debris.
I drift off, my arm tightening around her. The serpent on my arm doesn’t feel like a mark of pride anymore. It feels like a target.
A target for the vengeance I owe her.