Chapter 24 Ivy
IVY
It’s been weeks since I arrived back in the States.
Everything is… muted. Dimmed, like someone turned the volume down on my life and forgot to switch it back up. I keep waiting for the old rhythm to return, for the familiar comfort of routine to slip over me like a second skin, but no matter how many days pass, it never does.
I walk the same streets I’ve always walked. Pass the same coffee shop on the corner with its burnt espresso and the chalkboard sign that never changes. I sit at my desk and shuffle through job applications, trying to go through the motions like some marionette whose strings have been cut.
Nothing feels real.
It’s like the second I stepped onto that jet out of Russia, someone plucked me from my own life and dropped me into a hollow replica. Everything looks the same, but beneath the surface, it’s wrong. Off-kilter. Like I’ve somehow slipped into an alternate universe where I’m still Ivy, but not really.
Not the Ivy I once was less than three months ago.
Is that what trauma does to you?
The memories don’t help. They won’t stop replaying in my head, uninvited and merciless.
Maksim’s voice, low and steady, cutting through chaos of my dreams. The way Yulia’s little arms wrapped around my neck in that last hug before I left, fierce enough to almost knock me back, desperate enough to make my heart splinter for leaving her behind.
The echo of gunfire in my ears, sharp and endless, as bullets rain down over me like droplets of water falling from the sky.
And worse—so much fucking worse—is the way my body betrays me still. The way it aches for Maksim.
The memory of his touch lingers under my skin, warm in the quiet hours of the night when I’m alone and most vulnerable. My brain desperately tries to scream sense into me that he’s dangerous and ruthless, but my body doesn’t care.
My body remembers how it felt to be claimed by him.
Owned by him.
I hate that I miss him.
God, I hate it.
It makes no sense to miss a man like him. Not after what I saw. Not after what I was forced to be a part of.
Maksim Antonov isn’t some dark, brooding stranger you meet out at a bar and take back to your place for a wild night of inhibited fun. He isn’t a mistake you stumble into, someone you can chalk up to bad judgment and too much booze.
He’s a Pakhan. A Bratva boss to a ruthless organization. A man who can make entire groups disappear in a day if it suits him. A man whose name alone carries enough weight to crush someone like me.
And still, when I close my eyes, it isn’t Moscow I see.
It’s him.
It’s better this way, being separated. I repeat that to myself like a mantra, even when the words taste like ash on my tongue.
I know in my heart despite the loud, persistent voice in the back of my head telling me otherwise that escaping with my life is worth this heartache. Whatever ache lingers in my chest is a small price compared to what could’ve happened if I’d stayed.
His decision to send me home should be seen as a miracle.
I should fall to my knees in gratitude that he let me go at all, that he didn’t fold me into that violent world of his and make me a part of it.
Being set free is a gift I never thought I’d get.
A gift I need to cherish, hold tightly to, and never question.
And yet…
The thought of never seeing him again feels like losing a piece of myself.
Like someone carved out something vital from inside me and left behind a hollow hole.
I catch myself turning at the sound of a low voice in the crowd, expecting it to be his.
I wake in the night reaching for a warmth that isn’t there.
Sometimes, it’s torture.
But the idea of going back there? Of willingly stepping into that storm again? That terrifies me more than anything.
I’ve seen the kind of world he lives in firsthand. I’ve been held in it, threatened, and nearly broken by it. That world doesn’t forgive weakness. It doesn’t allow softness of any kind.
I don’t belong in it, no matter how much my heart stumbles at the memory of him, no matter how much my body betrays me with its longing. I am not made for the blood and violence and power games that is a Russian Bratva.
Alia notices how pale I look one morning while we’re sitting down for coffee in my new apartment. The steam from my untouched cappuccino curls between us, but she isn’t distracted by the cozy warmth or the noise around us. Her sharp eyes are fixed entirely on me.
They sweep over my face, my shoulders, my frame in my loose sweater, and I know what she sees.
By the time she corners me in my kitchen when I get up to grab her another snack, I don’t even bother pretending I didn’t expect it. She blocks the door with her body like she’s afraid I’ll bolt if she leaves me an exit.
“You’re wasting away, Ivy,” she says firmly, pressing her still steaming mug of chamomile into my hands like it’s medicine, like it might cure everything inside me that’s broken.
“I can tell you’re barely eating. And don’t even try to tell me it’s nothing.
Your cheekbones could cut glass right now.
It’s scaring the hell out of me. What did Russia do to you? ”
I flinch. “Nothing.”
“We need to bring you to the doctors.”
I force a laugh. “I’m fine, Alia. You’re overreacting. There’s nothing wrong, I promise. I’m still recovering from the time difference, that’s all.”
“Ivy…” Her voice trembles at the edges, no matter how steady she tries to sound. She’s scared for me. That should mean something to me, but all it really does is pile guilt onto the heap already crushing my chest.
“Nothing happened.” It’s the excuse I’ve been feeding her since the day I landed back here, and she still doesn’t buy it. I see it in her eyes, the way they flicker with doubt. But she’s too kind to press harder, at least for now.
She’ll never know the whole truth.
She’ll never know about the days I spent locked down in that interrogation room with men circling me like vultures. She’ll never know how close I came to begging them to do it just to end the waiting. She’ll never know about Maksim. About how he burned the impression of his touch into my body.
She won’t know that I was foolish enough to let myself fall into orbit around a man like him and that it’s now slowly destroying me.
And she’s never going to know because I’ll be taking that shit to my grave.
My guilt chokes me. I smile at her, wanting to appease her despite the overwhelming urge to lock myself behind my bedroom door and never, ever come out again. “How about this? I’ll make an appointment to get checked out. Okay?”
She searches my face, uncertain, but eventually nods. Relief softens her shoulders. “Okay. I’ll drive.”
By the time we get there, I’m already eager to get this over with. The urgent care lobby reeks of disinfectant and lemon polish, like someone dumped an entire bottle of cleaner into a bucket and mopped the entire place sterile.
Everything about the place feels too clean, too bright.
The plastic chairs, the flickering fluorescent lights overhead, even the bland pastel posters warning about flu season. They all press in on me, making me feel smaller like I’m an intruder in a world where people come here with real problems. Not anxiety-induced episodes.
Alia sticks by me while a nurse checks me in. I’m slapped with a blood pressure cuff, a thermometer ghosted over my forehead. Her fingers fly over the tablet with my chart, her expression neutral. It should comfort me but for some reason, it doesn’t.
It only makes me feel more fraudulent like I’ve wasted her time by being here.
“You’ll need to pee into a cup,” she tells me, handing one with a lid over.
When I come back, I’m deposited into a small exam room with walls the color of wet sand. There’s a faint hum from the overhead vent, the rustle of paper on the exam table beneath me, the antiseptic tang still clinging to the air.
Alia plays on her phone from the chair next to me.
I bounce my knee, over and over, the rhythm uneven, stuttering, a poor substitute for actually breathing properly. I try to tell myself there’s nothing actually wrong with me—that this is just exhaustion and hunger, the aftershocks of too many sleepless nights, too many skipped meals.
But my brain doesn’t listen. It never does.
It turns over possibility after possibility, each one darker than the last. An ulcer, eating away at me from the inside.
A tumor growing silently in my brain, waiting for the right moment to snap the cord of my life.
Or hell, maybe there’s an aneurysm lurking, ready to burst without warning, one wrong move away from snuffing me out entirely.
I picture the news story. Imagine my body crumpled on the floor of my kitchen, Alia finding me too late, never knowing the truth of why I wasted away.
The shame prickles my skin, hot and cold all at once.
It’s not sickness, not really. It’s guilt. It’s grief. It’s shame.
When the door finally creaks open, I look up too fast, making myself a little dizzy. The doctor steps in, a man in his fifties with salt-and-pepper hair and kind eyes that somehow make me feel both seen and exposed.
He carries a tablet in his hands, glasses perched low on his nose. Taking a seat on the rolling stool, he pulls up my chart on the screen, flipping through the test results with pursed lips. Then he glances up at me with a faint smile that feels… oddly gentle.
“Well, Miss Bennett, I think I can explain the reason for your general lethargy and poor appetite,” he says, voice warm but professional, the practiced cadence of someone used to breaking news softly.
My pulse kicks into overdrive. My palms are slick where I’ve been pressing them together, gripping so hard my knuckles have gone pale. I try to smile. “Okay. Hit me.”
He looks at me for a moment longer, as though gauging my readiness, then clears his throat. “You’re pregnant.”
For a second, my brain simply refuses to register the words. They hang in the air, absurd, surreal. Pregnant. They don’t belong to me. They belong to some other woman in some other room, not me sitting here feeling the chill of the office seep into my bones.
Alia gasps beside me, her hand flying to her mouth.
“Pregnant?” I repeat. I let out a startled laugh, too loud in the quiet room, because clearly, he’s gotten my chart mixed up with someone else’s. “I—what? No. That’s… there’s no way.”
The doctor only adjusts his glasses, calm in the face of my disbelief. “Yes, Miss Bennett. The test is conclusive. You’re in the early weeks. That explains the fatigue, the changes in appetite.”
Oh, my God.
The doctor’s mouth keeps moving, shaping around words like prenatal vitamins, nutrition, follow-up appointments, but I can’t hold on to them. They blur into a low, buzzing drone like someone’s pressed a seashell to my ears and all I can hear is the rush of my own blood.
Maksim.
Oh my God. He has to know. I have to tell him.
The rest of the appointment is a blur.
I nod when the doctor hands me papers, I thank him when he says something I don’t catch.
I let Alia herd me out, her voice filling every silence with gasps and exclamations. She’s still reeling, rattling off how insane this is, how unexpected, how I need to figure out what I want to do.
She keeps saying the word options, like it’s supposed to ground me, but it just makes the ground tilt further under my feet.
I can’t give her anything. My responses are no more than small, flat sounds, a grunt here, a hum there, while my mind roars with one thought. I have to tell him.
By the time we pull up outside my building, I’ve scraped together just enough strength to speak.
“Don’t bother coming up,” I murmur, already reaching for the door handle. “I just… need some space.”
Alia hesitates, worry written all over her face. But eventually, she nods, squeezing my arm once before I slip out and shut the door behind me.
My legs are unsteady on the climb upstairs as if I’m learning to walk for the first time again.
The second I push my door shut, I’m already digging into my bag, nearly dropping my phone as I pull it free.
My fingers are trembling so badly I can barely scroll, searching, searching until I land on the name I swore I’d delete weeks ago but couldn’t.
Sergei.
The only thread I still have left connecting me to Maksim.
My thumb hovers over the contact, hesitating for a single heartbeat before pressing down. He answers on the third ring.
“Sergei Sorokin.” His voice is exactly as I remember.
My own comes out a rasp, shaking and unfamiliar in my throat. “Sergei? Um, it’s Ivy… Ivy Bennett. I need to talk to Maksim Antonov. I was hoping you had his number so I could give him a call. It’s urgent.”
There’s a pause.
It stretches. Long enough that my knees threaten to buckle. Long enough that dread claws at me, whispering that he’s just deciding whether he’ll pass me along, weighing whether I deserve to reach Maksim at all or not after what happened.
But when Sergei speaks, the weight of his words is a guillotine.
“Maksim Antonov is dead, Miss Bennett.”
The air leaves my lungs all at once like I’ve been punched in the sternum. “W–What?”
“He’s gone.” The words are final, clipped.
But before I can beg for an explanation, before I can ask how, before I can tell him about the baby swelling quietly inside me, the line clicks dead.
The silence on the other end is absolute.
I stare at the phone in my hand, the screen gone dark, my reflection staring back at me with wide, horrified eyes. My chest feels tight, my heart an echo chamber of disbelief and pure, unadulterated pain.
Dead.
Maksim Antonov is dead and I’m carrying the last remaining piece of him.