Chapter Three
Osip
I weave through Budapest’s evening traffic like a man possessed.
Every red light is a personal insult. Every slow-moving suka in front of me might as well be signing their own death warrant. The engine of my BMW roars as I downshift and cut between two buses, their horns blaring behind me like the soundtrack to my rage.
Ilona.
Her name pounds through my skull with every heartbeat.
The image of her pale face burns behind my eyelids.
She’s been through hell— the emergency surgery, the infection that nearly killed her, the days in the hospital where I couldn’t even see her.
And when she finally came home to the mansion, she was different.
Distant. Like she’d built walls I couldn’t see.
Fuck that.
I press harder on the gas, the speedometer climbing past one-twenty. The city blurs into streaks of neon and shadow outside my windows. My chest feels like it’s being crushed in a vise, each breath a struggle against the panic clawing at my throat.
She can’t just leave. Not like this. Not when—
Could she have found out somehow what I did to her father?
The thought slams into me like a sledgehammer to the gut.
My hands shake on the wheel for a split second before I force them steady.
No. Impossible. My brothers made sure of that.
Buried it so deep under bribes and forged documents that nobody would ever know the full truth.
They paid the right people, made sure Igor Shiradze’s death looked like suicide, case closed.
No.
I shake my head violently, cutting off that line of thinking before it can poison everything. She doesn’t know. She can’t know.
What’s more likely is the miscarriage. The way she looked when she came back from hospital— pale as death, her body exhausted from fighting for survival while grief ate her alive from the inside.
I wasn’t there when they wheeled her into emergency surgery while our child bled out of her.
The infection kept me away for days while she suffered alone, and by the time I could finally see her, something in her eyes had died.
Maybe she thinks she’s broken. Maybe she believes she can’t give me what I need, what the contract originally specified. An heir. A child to carry on the Sidorov name.
Stupid woman.
The airport exit sign flashes overhead, and I take the ramp so fast my tires scream against the asphalt.
She doesn’t understand— has never understood— that I don’t give a shit about any of that anymore.
Not since I held her in my arms and felt something inside my chest that I thought died with my childhood.
Something that made me want to be more than just a man with blood on his hands and secrets that could destroy everything.
I want her . Just her. We can adopt. We can try again.
Hell, science is advancing every day— there are treatments, procedures, miracles happening in labs across the world.
But none of that matters if she’s not here.
None of it means anything without her laugh echoing through the mansion, without her body pressed against mine in the darkness, without her stubborn arguments over breakfast and the way she challenges me like no one else dares.
Then another image crashes through my thoughts like a wrecking ball— Slava. My son. My beautiful, innocent boy with his unknown mother’s eyes and my stubborn chin. The way he looked at me— so trusting, so eager to have his papa in his life.
And now he’s gone too. Not taken, not kidnapped— adopted. By the time I found out he’d survived his mother’s murder, some wealthy Boston couple had already claimed him as their own. Perfect parents with clean money and respectable lives. Everything I could never be.
My son!
The rage that floods through me is so pure, so absolute, that for a moment I can’t see anything but red. If we could only get him back somehow! But the adoption was finalized. Legal and binding. I can’t lose both Slava and Ilona on almost the same goddamn day!
The parking garage appears ahead like a concrete mouth ready to swallow me whole.
I grip the wheel tighter, my knuckles white as bone, and press harder on the gas.
The engine responds with a growl that matches the sound building in my throat.
All I care about is getting to the airport and bringing Ilona home.
Nothing else matters. Nothing else exists.
She’s mine.
They’re both mine.
And I don’t let go of what’s mine.
The moment I reach the parking level, I’m already pulling out my phone before the car even stops. My fingers shake— actually fucking shake— as I hit Radimir’s number. The call connects on the first ring.
“Which flight?” I bark into the phone, not bothering with pleasantries. There’s no time for social niceties when my entire world is falling apart.
A pause. Then the familiar sound of Radimir’s fingers flying over his keyboard filters through the line. That sound— usually comforting, the promise of information and solutions— now feels like torture. Every second of silence is another mile between Ilona and me.
“Anything?” I roar, unable to keep the desperation from bleeding through my voice.
“Fuck.” Radimir’s voice is tight with concentration. “I can’t trace her phone anymore. She must have ditched it.”
My heart doesn’t just sink— it plummets through the earth’s core and comes out the other side. She ditched her phone. That means this isn’t some impulsive breakdown. This is planned. Calculated. This is Ilona using that brilliant mind of hers to disappear completely.
Smart woman.
Too fucking smart for her own good.
“Then get a fucking satellite image of the airport!” I demand, slamming my palm against the dashboard. “Search the fucking area!”
The plastic cracks under the impact, but I barely notice. My entire focus is on the sound of Radimir typing again, faster now, probably pulling strings with contacts in places that don’t officially exist.
“What the fuck do you think I’m doing?” Radimir fires back, his own frustration bleeding through. Good. At least he understands the stakes.
“Found anything yet?” I yell back, knowing I’m being unreasonable, not caring.
“You think it’s that fucking easy to find one person at an international airport?”
His words hit me like a physical blow. Of course it’s not easy. The airport is massive— tens of thousands of people pass through those gates every day. She could be anywhere. She could already be gone.
Without responding to Radimir, I slam the heel of my hand against the steering wheel one final time and explode out of the car. My legs are moving before my brain catches up, carrying me through the parking garage and toward the terminal like they have a mind of their own.
But instead of heading for the departure boards or ticket counters, something pulls me toward the viewing patio. Call it instinct. Call it the same sixth sense that’s kept me alive through fifteen years in the Bratva. Call it desperation so complete it’s turned into something else entirely.
The viewing patio is nearly empty— just a few families with children pressed against the windows, watching planes with wide eyes.
The sight of their innocent excitement makes something twist in my gut.
This should be me and Slava someday, watching planes together, maybe planning trips to places where no one knows the Sidorov name.
But I push past them without a glance, my eyes scanning the tarmac below.
The massive aircraft sit like sleeping beasts under the harsh airport lights.
Some are boarding, their jetbridges extended like mechanical umbilical cords.
Others are already pulling back from their gates, beginning the slow taxi toward the runway.
And then I see it— a plane lifting off. The aircraft rolls slowly toward the runway, its engines building to a rumble that I can feel in my bones even through the thick glass. The sound is like thunder, like the promise of storm and destruction.
That’s when it hits me.
The feeling comes from somewhere deeper than logic, deeper than rational thought. It settles in my chest like a stone, cold and heavy and absolutely certain.
She’s already gone.
You’re too late, dolboyob.
I don’t know how the fuck I know it, but I do. Maybe it’s the way the plane moves with such purpose, such finality. Maybe it’s the timing— how long it took me to get here, how long she’s been gone, how efficient she is when she sets her mind to something.
She’s up in the air already. She’s not here. And we can’t track her. My phone is useless in my pocket, Radimir’s efforts suddenly feeling like trying to catch smoke with bare hands.
My hands find the metal railing, gripping it so tight the cold steel bites into my palms. I watch planes disappear into the clouds, and somehow, I know with absolute certainty that she’s not on any of them.
Could I be wrong? Could she be on one of them? That Lufthansa flight banking left toward Western Europe? The Emirates jet climbing toward the Middle East? The Aeroflot heading to God knows where?
My chest tightens with every second that passes. The pressure builds until I can barely breathe, until each heartbeat feels like it might be my last. The plane— whichever one she might be on— becomes smaller and smaller until it’s just a silhouette against the Budapest sky.
And then it’s gone completely.
Just like she is.
And I might never see her again.
The thought doesn’t just hurt— it destroys me.
It reaches inside my ribcage and tears out everything that matters, leaving me hollow and bleeding and broken in ways that bullets and blades never could.
I’ve been shot seven times, stabbed four, beaten unconscious more times than I can count.
But none of that— none of it— compares to watching the sky swallow the woman I…
What?
The question stops me cold. What is she to me? More than a contract. More than the surrogate who was supposed to carry my child. Something that defies every category I understand, something that makes me want things I’ve never wanted before.
I’ve never felt this way about anyone. This crushing need to protect, to possess, to keep someone close, not because they’re useful or profitable, but because the thought of existing without them feels like death itself.
Whatever this is— this feeling that’s eating me alive— it’s rewritten everything I thought I knew about myself.
The irony would be funny if it weren’t so fucking tragic.
Osip Sidorov, who’s spent his entire adult life taking what he wants, who’s built his fortune on the principle that everything has a price and everyone can be bought or broken— and the one thing that matters most to him has just walked away on her own two feet.
The viewing patio suddenly feels like a cage. The families with their children, their normal lives, their simple problems— they’re all too much. Too bright. Too innocent for the darkness that’s eating me alive from the inside out.
I turn away from the window, away from the sky that took her from me, and start walking. I don’t know where I’m going. Don’t care. All I know is that standing still means accepting defeat, and I’ve never accepted defeat in my entire fucking life.
This isn’t over, I tell myself, the words echoing in my skull like a prayer.
This can’t be over.
Because if it is— if she’s really gone for good, if Slava is really lost— then what’s the point of any of this? What’s the point of the money, the power, the fear I inspire in lesser men?
What’s the point of being Osip Sidorov if I can’t protect the people who matter most?
The answer settles in my bones like winter cold:
There isn’t one.