Chapter 20
IVY
My parents don’t leave me alone for the next few days, and neither does Lettie.
They hover, circle, pick at the fraying threads of my silence with questions I can’t answer and worried eyes that only seem to grow more haunted the longer I fail to give them what they’re so desperately seeking, wearing me down with every conversation I can’t finish.
At first, they try to be gentle about it.
“Sweetheart, we just want to understand…”
“We need to know what happened, Ivy.”
“Was it him? Was it Maksim? Or someone else?”
Their voices change depending on the moment, sometimes trembling with concern, sometimes laced with barely concealed fury, and sometimes just… pleading. But they’re always there, always echoing in my head even when the house falls quiet.
For days, it’s the same.
I want to open my mouth and tell them everything—about the mental torture, about the blackmail, about Leo’s tiny cries in the night when his nightmares take him back to the horrible place.
About the way Mikhail’s voice still slithers into my dreams and the terror of seeing him press that gun to my son’s head and being completely powerless to stop it.
I want to so badly tell them everything… but nothing ever comes out.
It’s like there’s a wall inside me, thick and invisible and immovable, pressing down on my chest every time I try.
My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth, my throat burns, my hands tremble.
I don’t even know how to begin separating the pain from the truth.
I don’t know how to untangle one horror from the next without shattering into pieces in front of them.
So, I stay silent.
I can’t afford to break.
Not when Leo still wakes up in the middle of the night calling for me, when he curls against my chest like he’s afraid I’ll disappear again if he’s not holding onto me, when I’m the only thing keeping him grounded to this reality after everything he’s seen.
To my surprise, Maksim comes to visit us every day.
I never expected it after shutting him out, but sure enough, every afternoon like clockwork, the familiar black car pulls up to the curb in front of my parents’ house, and every afternoon, the chaos begins.
The first time, my father slams the door in his face before he can get a single word out. No hesitation, no warning. Just an explosive crack of wood against wood and a fury I haven’t seen in my father in years.
The second time, it’s my mother who intercepts him on the porch, her arms crossed and her mouth drawn tight with rage.
She doesn’t yell at him. No, that would be too easy.
Her words are laced with venom, soft and sharp enough to bleed him dry without ever raising her voice.
She tells him to stay away from my daughter, and you’ve done enough.
The third time, it’s Lettie.
And Lettie yells.
She screams so loudly at him that the neighbors poke their heads out from behind curtains and open windows, curious about the scene unraveling on our usually quiet street.
She doesn’t hold back, either. She calls him every name in the book, tells him he’s a coward, a manipulator, a criminal.
That he has no business being anywhere near Leo or me.
That if he thinks he can just show up and be forgiven, he’s more deluded than she thought.
Every day, he leaves. Not with any theatrics but with his jaw locked tight, a muscle ticking in his cheek that’s visible from even the second floor. He doesn’t shout back or defend himself. He just turns and walks back down the steps, back toward the car waiting for him.
But before he gets in, every single time, he looks up toward my window, to the sheer curtain I’m always hiding behind to watch him when he comes. He doesn’t wave at me, he just stares, searching for a sign or a shadow. For me.
And every time, I step back a little farther into the room so he can’t see the shape of me standing there. But I always watch him go.
I know what he wants. It’s not hard to guess.
He wants me to talk to him. To stand beside him now that the threats have been handled.
Now that Mikhail is dead and the dust has started to settle, he wants me and Leo to follow him back to his empire in Russia as if it were some kind of family home instead of a fortress I’ve come to associate with deals and domination.
I don’t even know how to think about tomorrow, let alone plan for some whole future. My mind is a minefield of what-ifs and ghosts and sleepless nights where Leo curls so tightly into my chest, I can barely breathe.
But I miss him.
God help me, I miss him so much it aches.
Except our memories together are tangled up with too many others now. With too many dark corridors in my mind that whisper threats, reminding me of the many nights I spent wondering if Leo and I would live to see the morning.
I can’t untangle them.
So I keep the curtains drawn. I keep my mouth shut. I keep my heart caged behind the wall I’ve put around it to make it stop aching.
And I hope one day, he stops returning and reopening the wound that refuses to scab.
Eventually, he stops acting polite.
It’s late at night when it happens.
The house is quiet. My parents have long since gone to bed. Lettie texted hours ago that she was out with friends, and I haven’t heard the front door open since.
For a moment, I delude myself into believing I might actually get a minute of peace.
Leo is curled into me, one arm flung across my stomach, his little body rising and falling in slow, uneven rhythms. It’s the first real sleep he’s had in days.
His fingers twitch every now and then like his dreams are still chasing him, but the iron-tight grip he’s kept on me for days has finally loosened enough for me to breathe.
I glance down at him when my stomach growls, brushing his messy curls from his forehead before leaning down to press a soft kiss above his brow.
“My baby,” I whisper. “My broken, brave baby.”
He doesn’t stir.
Carefully, I slide out of bed, moving silently around the room. I pull and tuck the blanket tighter around him and pad barefoot downstairs, the wooden floorboards creaking softly beneath my steps.
I’m halfway to the kitchen when I almost scream.
Motionless in the dark, I spot a tall, broad-shouldered figure lurking in the living room. He doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything, but he’s there. The hallway shadows eat up the softer edges of him until all that’s left is something almost feral.
When he rises, I stumble back, nearly colliding with the wall leading into the kitchen. I suck in a breath, heart in my throat.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I whisper-shout, panic making my voice higher than I mean for it to be. My hands find his chest instinctively when I push myself away from the wall, shoving him toward the door.
He doesn’t budge, not even an inch. His jaw tics once. “You can’t avoid me forever, Ivy.”
There’s no softness in his voice tonight, no pleading in his eyes. He remains cold and unyielding.
“You can’t be here. If my parents wake up, they’re going to call the cops,” I hiss.
“I don’t care. They’ve made it clear I’m not welcome. That’s fine. But I’m not here for them.” His tone doesn’t rise from a quiet murmur, but it cuts like a blade, nonetheless.
I back up again, but he follows, shrinking the already narrow area into something that feels completely suffocating. His gaze is locked on me, unreadable in the dark, but I feel the weight of it on me, dissecting every inch of my body.
“Maksim—”
His voice tightens. “You are treating me like I’m the enemy.”
I flinch, eyes snapping to his, whispering fiercely, “I don’t know what you want from me. You can’t come here demanding things after what happened. We… I…”
“I want my family back.”
The simplicity of it shatters something inside me.
My eyes sting as I look at him. His face is still mostly shadowed, but I can see the grief etched into the lines around his mouth. The tight strain in his shoulders, the subtle way he sways forward like he’s aching to touch me and trying so hard not to.
“I gave you space,” he says softly. “I let your family curse me out on your porch day after day. I stood there and took it because I knew you needed time to think and reacclimate.”
The lump in my throat returns so suddenly, I almost choke on it trying to swallow around it.
He exhales through his nose. “I’m not asking you to come back with me tonight… I’m just asking you to talk to me.”
My chest rises and falls in sharp, uneven bursts. “You don’t know what Leo and I went through when we were with… when we…”
His name won’t come out. Not even now with Maksim standing here—the one person in the world who could understand what that hell was like. Someone who knew Mikhail inside and out, who understood the cruelty that man could inflict without even lifting his own finger to do so.
And yet still the words twist in my mouth, refusing to be spoken. Instead, they turn to ash on my tongue.
He reaches for me then, brushing along the edge of my jaw. The touch is featherlight, his fingertips a whisper of warmth along my skin. So gently, I almost don’t believe it’s real.
“Then make me understand,” he murmurs. “Please… I wake up every night wondering how badly I failed you both… if there was something I could do that would’ve never led us down this path. I regret ever involving you in any of this.”
The silence between us stretches.
His brows knit together, his hand hesitating before pulling away, leaving me cold and empty. “I’m not your enemy, Ivy. You have every reason to be angry with me. But I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere.”
The tears come unexpectedly. A hot rush that wells in my eyes and burns down my cheeks before I can stop them.
“I betrayed you.” The words slip free, broken and breathless. Saying them out loud is like tearing open my own skin. It hurts worse than anything else I’ve ever said or admitted to in my whole life.
He just pulls in a long, slow breath. “I know. I forgive you.”