Chapter Forty-Nine
Osip
“I’m bleeding!”
The words rip through the hum of construction schedules and contractor bullshit spread across my desk as the door flies open with a crash. Every muscle in my body locks rigid as I snap my head up to find Ilona standing in my office doorway.
Bozhe moy!
Her face is chalk-white, that beautiful porcelain skin now the color of fresh snow. Dark circles bruise the delicate skin beneath her eyes, and she’s swaying slightly— like someone fighting to stay conscious.
Blood.
She said bleeding.
The baby!
“ Yob tvoyu mat’! ” The curse tears from my throat as I launch myself from behind the desk, papers scattering. My hands find her shoulders, steadying her trembling frame before she can collapse. “How much blood? How long?”
“I—” Her voice wavers, thin and frightened. “It started an hour ago. It’s getting worse.”
Jesus. This isn’t supposed to happen. Not again. Not to another woman carrying my child.
“We’re going to the hospital. Now.”
My voice sounds foreign— raw and desperate. But losing control is a luxury I can’t afford when the woman carrying my child is bleeding in my arms.
I sweep her up before she can protest, cradling her against my chest as I stride toward the garage.
She weighs nothing— fragile as a snowflake and a million times more precious.
Her head falls against my shoulder, and I can feel the rapid flutter of her pulse through the thin fabric of my shirt she’s wearing.
“Stay with me, malyshka ,” I murmur against her hair, Russian endearments spilling from lips that rarely speak anything soft. “I’ve got you.”
The BMW roars to life under my hands, cylinders screaming as I tear out of the driveway. Budapest’s winding roads become a blur of streetlights and speed limits that mean nothing when you’re racing death itself.
My hands shake as I speed-dial Dr. Varga, the phone cradled between my ear and shoulder while I navigate traffic like a man possessed.
“Dr. Varga.” His voice is calm, professional— everything I’m not right now.
“It’s Osip. Ilona’s bleeding. We’re en route to the hospital— meet us there. Emergency.”
A pause that lasts forever. “How much bleeding?”
“I don’t know— she’s pale, weak. Bozhe , what if—?”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes. Drive carefully, Osip. Accidents won’t help anyone.”
The line goes dead, leaving me alone with the engine’s roar and the sound of Ilona’s labored breathing. I steal glances at her in the passenger seat, watching the way her hand rests protectively over her abdomen. The same gesture I remember from another woman, a lifetime ago.
Galina.
The memory steals my breath. The paramedics working frantically while I stood frozen… useless.
Nyet!
Not again. Never fucking again.
“Ilona.” I reach over, covering her hand with mine. Her skin is ice-cold, clammy with shock. “Talk to me. Stay awake.”
“I’m scared,” she whispers, and something inside my chest cracks. “What if we lose—?”
“We won’t.” The words come out sharp with a conviction I don’t feel. “I won’t let that happen.”
The hospital’s emergency entrance blazes with fluorescent light as I skid to a halt in front of the doors.
Orderlies appear like magic— professional efficiency taking over where my panic threatens to consume everything.
They transfer Ilona to a gurney with smooth movements that speak of too much experience with emergencies like this.
Dr. Varga materializes beside me, his usually calm expression etched with concern. “Talk to me— when did the bleeding start?”
“An hour ago.” I’m walking briskly beside the gurney, my hand wrapped around Ilona’s fingers. “She came to my office, said it was getting worse.”
“Any cramping? Pain?”
“I don’t know.” Blyad , I should know these things. Should have been watching her more carefully, monitoring every symptom. “Ilona?”
But she’s slipping away from us, eyelids fluttering as shock takes hold. The orderlies push through double doors marked ‘SURGICAL UNIT — NO ADMITTANCE’, and suddenly I’m standing in an empty hallway with the taste of copper fear coating my tongue.
“Mr. Sidorov.” Dr. Varga’s hand settles on my shoulder. “We’ll take good care of her. But you need to wait here.”
Wait?
Pizdets!
Waiting is what you do when you’re powerless, when all the money and connections and carefully constructed control mean nothing against the chaos of biology failing.
I sink into a plastic chair that’s probably seen too many moments like this, elbows on my knees, hands buried in my hair.
The hospital smells like disinfectant and fear—the same smell that haunted my dreams after Galina died.
Sterile whiteness that can’t mask the reality of bodies breaking down, hope bleeding out onto surgical tables.
Minutes crawl by like hours. Each tick of the wall clock echoes marks time I’ll never get back. Time when my child might be dying inside the woman I—
Cut it out, mudak.
The voice in my head sounds like Melor’s pragmatic tone, cutting through emotion.
You killed her father, dolboyob.
This is all business.
You can’t get attached.
But the rules I’ve lived by all my life— the careful distance, the emotional armor, the safety of treating everyone as temporary— crumble to dust against the reality of Ilona’s blood on hospital sheets.
I think I might love this woman.
The admission steals breath from lungs that already burn with panic. Love. The word I’ve forbidden myself my entire life now comes to me without warning. Without permission.
Ilona, with her gentle strength and beautiful eyes. Ilona, who carries my child like she’s already claimed both of us as her own.
Ilona, whose father I put in the ground with my own hands.
Hours pass. Or maybe minutes— time becomes meaningless when you’re suspended between hope and hell. Hospital staff move past like I don’t exist, their faces carefully neutral in the way medical professionals perfect when dealing with families who might shatter at the wrong expression.
“Mr. Sidorov?”
Dr. Varga’s voice cuts through the fog of my spiraling thoughts. I look up to find him standing in surgical scrubs that are somehow too clean— no blood, no obvious signs of crisis. But his face…
Khrenov , his face tells me everything before he speaks.
“We had to save Ilona’s life, Osip.” He sits beside me, voice gentle but clinical. “And she’s still not out of the woods. We had to perform an emergency procedure to stop the hemorrhaging.”
The words hit like bullets, sharp and merciless, dropping me to my knees before I even realize I’m bleeding.
Save her life.
Still not out of the woods.
Emergency procedure.
“And I’m afraid…” He pauses, the silence stretching until I want to wring the words from him. “She lost the baby.”
The world goes dark around me.
The baby.
Lost.
Another child gone. Gone before I could hold them, protect them, prove I could be better.
My vision narrows to a pinpoint of light surrounded by crushing darkness. The hospital chair beneath me might as well be a cliff’s edge.
“Let me see her.” The words scrape out in a voice I barely recognize.
“I’m sorry, you can’t right now. Maybe in a few days.” Dr. Varga’s voice seems to be distorted by the roaring in my ears.
“Why the fuck not?” I snarl, my hands curling into fists to stop myself from grabbing him by the throat.
It’s not his fault.
This isn’t his fault.
Still, I can’t help wanting to kill him.
The bearer of bad news.
That’s all he is.
Don’t shoot the messenger.
Old habits die hard.
“We’re still doing checkups,” he’s saying, his voice seeming to come from a distance, “and she’s heavily sedated. She has a severe infection— we need to keep her in a sterile environment. Go home and get some rest.”
Rest.
As if sleep is possible when your world has just collapsed into rubble.
I don’t remember leaving the hospital. Don’t remember the drive home or walking through my front door. The next thing I’m aware of is the familiar fire of vodka down my throat— premium Russian poison that promises numbness but delivers only deeper pain.
Half the bottle disappears before my body finally surrenders to exhaustion. I collapse onto the living room sofa still wearing yesterday’s clothes, my expensive suit wrinkled and stained with the sweat of panic.
The nightmare comes immediately.
I’m back in that Boston house, the one I shared with Galina before everything went to hell. But this time the details are sharper, more vivid— horror in high definition.
Galina lies on our cream sofa, positioned with that terrible serenity that only comes with death. A hand over her belly, the other dangles toward our Persian rug. Beautiful. Peaceful. Gone.
But the movement beneath her dress is stronger now, more desperate. My son— fighting for life inside his murdered mother with the kind of determination that tells me he’s a fighter.
“Hold on, malysh ,” I whisper, reaching for her belly. “Papa’s here. Papa’s going to save you.”
The masked figure materializes from shadow like my personal demon, black leather covering features I’ve never seen but somehow know by heart. His hands move quickly as he produces that gleaming blade, the one that’s carved my sanity into ribbons night after night.
But this time when he cuts, when he reaches inside and pulls out my child, the baby isn’t the tiny, faceless infant from months of identical nightmares.
This time he has features. A perfect little face with Dénes’s dark eyes and determined jaw— Péter’s son from the construction site, the boy who builds skyscrapers from blocks and dreams of creating things that last forever.
“ Nyet! ” The scream tears from my chest. “Don’t take him! He’s mine!”
But the masked figure is already moving, cradling my son against his chest as he glides toward the door with that horrible, weightless motion. I struggle against invisible chains that force me to witness every second of this fresh hell.
“You don’t deserve to keep what you love,” the figure says. “You never learn, Sidorov.”
Then he’s gone, vanishing into darkness with my son’s cries echoing in the night. But this time, the echo changes— becomes the sound of Ilona sobbing, becomes Dr. Varga’s clinical voice explaining how bodies fail and children die.
I wake up wheezing, cold sweat turning expensive sheets clammy against my skin. My ribs feel cracked from the inside, each heartbeat a reminder that I’m still alive while others aren’t.
Clambering out of bed, I stumble toward the bathroom and yank open the medicine cabinet. Dr. Szabó’s sedatives rattle in their prescription bottle— little white pills that promise peace but deliver only temporary numbness.
I swallow two, then another pair for good measure. But chemicals can’t shake the mind-numbing grief.
I’ve lost two children now.
And Ilona— the woman who means more to me than she should, more than is safe— fights for her life in a sterile hospital room while infection threatens to take her too.
Leaning my back against the wall, I slide down until I’m sitting on the cold tiles. This is what it’s come to. The unshakeable sense that it’s my fault.
You destroy everything you touch.
Maybe it’s penance for a lifetime of brutality. Maybe it’s the Universe’s idea of a joke. But what should I expect? A man like me? Every attempt at family, every grab for something pure and lasting, turns to shit.
Maybe that’s what I deserve. Maybe some men are too stained by violence to deserve second chances, too broken by their choices to build anything that lasts.
But as I sit here, wallowing in guilt and sinking into the haze of sedatives, one thing stands out.
Why them?
Why the fuck should Ilona and our child have to pay the price for what I am?