Chapter 20
MOLLY
Things shift so quickly between Samuil and me that it makes my head spin. Our one talk turns into so many other talks. Days go by, and my favorite part of each day, after making progress with Anya, is when he gets home.
We eat dinner together and talk about our days. He doesn’t tell me the grittiest stuff, but he does open up more. We start planning things for our baby, like daycares and private schools. He’s already spoken to a lawyer to make sure our child has a nice trust fund.
It’s overwhelming, if I’m being honest. I came from nothing and never had anyone looking out for me. I would never let my child go without, but knowing my baby will actually have more than I’ve ever dreamed of is beautiful. It takes care of a lot of my fears for the future.
One afternoon, I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of Anya while she colors quietly beside me, her small shoulder brushing mine every few minutes.
She’s gotten so unabashed about being in my space these days.
She chooses me. And the more time I spend with her, the more I feel myself thawing in places I didn’t know were still frozen.
I tap a pastel crayon on the page of her coloring book, purposely singing the rhyme wrong.
“The wheels on the bus go upside down,” I sing, perfectly serious.
Her head snaps up, eyes wide in that soft, owlish way she has, a tiny crease appearing between her brows. I gasp dramatically.
“Wait, was that wrong?” I ask.
She nods her head once. Slow. Deliberate.
“Can you tell me the right words?”
“Round and round,” she says after a long moment.
She stares me down like she knows I’m doing it on purpose. She’s so perceptive. Still, she speaks. She does what I ask, and it’s ridiculous how proud I feel. A warmth blooms in my chest, and I sing the line again, this time the right way. She sings the words carefully under her breath.
We’ve been doing this every day for a week now, working on songs and nursery rhymes a little more each day.
I pick anything predictable enough that she notices when I deliberately break it.
She’s even started saying “that one” or “this one” when I ask what crayon she wants.
It seems small on the surface, but it’s a huge accomplishment.
I sing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” again, a song that’s definitely become her favorite. I stop mid-verse, letting the melody hang unfinished between us. Anya stares at me, blinking once, then again. Her lips part and she sings, “Up came the sun and dried up all the rain.”
The joy is so sharp it hurts.
I send Samuil a message immediately. I have to. He needs to know what just happened.
She sang the line I left out. She’s progressing so well!
You’re extraordinary. Don’t forget that you’re magic.
I read it several more times until the words seep into my bloodstream. He thinks I’m extraordinary.
By the time Davyd arrives to pick her up, Anya is humming whole stretches of the song while clutching my sleeve like she’s afraid I’ll vanish if she lets go. When he walks in, she’s practically glued to my side.
“Malyshka?” he says gently.
She lifts her head, watches him for a long moment, and then she sings the same phrase from “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.” He smiles and claps, pretending that he’s just a proud father, not that his world has shifted on its axis.
It’s important to Anya that we don’t react too much to her progress or she shuts down.
To me, though, he says, “Thank you,” and his voice breaks on the word. His daughter is slowly coming back to him.
“She’s a great kid,” I say, reminding him gently that she’s the one doing all the work.
He nods, unable to speak, and scoops her into his arms. She lets him, laying her head on his shoulder, still humming softly, and something inside me melts all over again.
When the door closes behind them, I sit down slowly on the couch and let myself soak it all in. Being a parent is such a hard job. Maybe that’s why my own parents were so shitty, not to mention all the foster parents who saw me as a paycheck and not a child who needed love and nurturing.
I get up and go to the room we’re working on for the nursery.
I stare up at the paint swatches we’ve chosen but haven’t narrowed down yet.
We don’t know the sex, and we’ve decided we’ll do a gender-neutral room either way.
I’m partial to a pastel mint for the walls, but Samuil is still stuck on a bright white. He’s ridiculous.
My phone buzzes and I see Kelly’s name on my screen. She’s just checking in, the way she has many times over the last few weeks. At first, I was so sad I didn’t have the capacity to give her much more than one-word responses.
Since I’ve been working with Anya, though, I feel more like myself. I decide to finally talk to her and let her know what’s going on. To a small extent, anyway.
With a deep breath, I call her.
“Molly?” she answers, voice sharp with worry. “Are you alive? Did you get kidnapped? Are you in a ditch somewhere?”
I let out a tired laugh. “I’m fine, Kel. Really. I just had to step away for some family things.”
“Oh, good,” she says on a long exhale. “Because I was ready to file a missing persons report.”
“I’m okay,” I reiterate, smiling despite myself. “Actually, I’ve been tutoring a little girl lately. She’s been through a lot, but she’s amazing. Today she sang a whole line of a song we’ve been practicing together.”
“Aww,” Kelly says, softening. “Of course she did. You’ve always been an amazing teacher. You work best with the most traumatized kids.”
I can’t help but smile at this. I feel so aligned with my purpose.
“So,” Kelly continues, voice brightening wickedly. “You told me a few weeks ago you’d met some ridiculously hot guy. Spill the tea.”
I groan. “I never said ridiculously hot,” I complain.
“You didn’t have to. It oozed from the text.” She lowers her voice. “So who is he?”
I try to brush it off with humor. “Well, apparently his nickname is The Devil.”
I say it scandalously, expecting her characteristic naughty humor.
Despite my complete lack of love life in the time I’ve known Kelly, it hasn’t stopped her from making the raunchiest jokes and telling me to “use it while I’ve got it.
” I don’t think anything of telling her Samuil’s nickname, but she goes quiet. Uncomfortably quiet.
“Kel?” I say slowly. “It was a joke. You can laugh now.”
She inhales sharply. “It’s just…” she trails off, her breath catching. “I’m probably being stupid and paranoid. But what’s his real name?”
The alarm bells go off instantly.
“What?” I ask in shock. “Why?”
“Molly,” she says again, voice low now. “Tell me his name.”
A cold sensation crawls over my skin despite the warmth of the apartment.
I swallow. “Samuil,” I whisper. “His name is Samuil Volkov.”
The silence on the other end is suffocating.
Then, softly, barely audible, she says, “No. No, no, not him.”
My heart stutters.
“What do you mean ‘not him’?”
She doesn’t answer immediately. I hear her shuffling around, typing, maybe pulling something up.
“Molly, I’m sending you some links. Read them. Right now.”
“Kelly—”
“Please.”
My phone vibrates over and over. Five links come in, then six, then seven. My stomach twists before I even click the first one:
Ruthless Bratva Leader Suspected in String of Unsolved Homicides.
The headline punches me in the gut. The article talks about evidence that’s never strong enough to convict him, witnesses disappearing, prosecutors backing off cases at the last minute.
There’s a photo of a charred warehouse and references to people burned alive inside.
The word alleged is used a lot, but never convincingly.
I click the next one:
Massacre of Rival Crew Leaves Nine Dead—Investigators Theorize Professional Hit.
There are pictures. Horrible pictures. And even though Samuil’s name isn’t printed outright, everyone knows. The comments section certainly does:
The Devil strikes again.
He won’t stop until he owns the whole city.
Don’t cross him unless you want to disappear.
My throat closes. I scroll faster. Another link:
Inside the Mind of the City’s Most Feared Crime Boss.
There’s a blurry photo of Samuil stepping out of a black SUV, sunglasses on, jaw set in that cold, unshakeable way of his. Beside it, a chilling quote from an ex-cop:
“He doesn’t kill for fun. He kills because he thinks it’s his purpose. And that’s worse.”
My vision swims. I can’t breathe. I click another article. Then another. Every one paints the same picture of a violent psychopath, obsessed with power. But the worst is the stories of the victims.
I knew all of this in the abstract, but seeing it in print, seeing the faces of people who’ve been hurt by his crimes, is too much.
And then I read this line:
Volkov is considered a person of interest in the death of Lena Melnikov, wife of his known associate, Davyd Melnikov.
I try to think about everything I know about Anya. What did he tell me about her? She saw her mother die, and she’s traumatized because of it. She hasn’t spoken since. But he never, not once, said that he was somehow involved.
Fury surges through my veins as I think of that poor, sweet girl. I don’t know what she was like before, but she’s a husk of a child now. Every accomplishment with her feels monumental, but she’s too young to be going through any of this. It’s not fair that she has any trauma at all.
“No,” I whisper. “No, this can’t… This isn’t—”
“Molly,” Kelly says gently through the phone, “you need to get away from him. Whatever you think he is, he’s worse.”
I can’t respond.
My eyes are glued to a photo of a man. He’s young, maybe twenty at most, lying on concrete, blood pooling beneath him. The caption says he was part of a rival group, killed in a “suspected retaliation killing.”
Retaliation. Meaning someone hurt Samuil, and he hurt them back. He killed this man, who was barely even a man. He had no time to live, to become someone.
The truth is so much bigger and darker than I imagined.
“I should go,” I whisper to Kelly.
“Molly, wait—” she protests, but I don’t have it in me to wait.
I hang up and pull the phone to my chest like I’m trying to press the world back into place. But nothing settles. Nothing stops spinning.
I pick the phone back up. I try to breathe slowly but my hands won’t stop trembling. I click the next article. Then the next. Then the next.
One image is burned into my memory: a child’s shoe lies in a pool of blood on a sidewalk. Another shows security footage stills of masked men storming an apartment building. One headline refers to “collateral damage.”
I’m shaking so hard I have to press both palms to the mattress just to steady myself. The walls feel too close. The air feels too thin.
I think of the way Samuil kissed me yesterday, gentle and reverent, like he finally understood something he’d been fighting for years, and of the way his voice broke when he said he wanted to be better than the people who raised him.
And none of it changes the truth. He is still who he is. People die because of it. My baby could die because of it. Will my baby be called “collateral damage?”
I don’t intend to stick around long enough to find out.