Chapter 17
Mila
—Maksym—
Isat there in the car for a minute after she was gone. Then another. My hands stayed on the wheel, engine running, but I wasn’t going anywhere.
She had already disappeared around the corner, but she was still everywhere in my head.
I could still feel her pressed against me—the weight of her body, the way she leaned in like she belonged there. Her breath on my throat. Her lips brushing my jaw like she was whispering some dangerous fucking spell straight into my blood.
My chest burned. And my cock was still hard.
I swore under my breath and leaned my head back against the seat. This was ridiculous. She was gone, and my body was acting like she was still sitting on my lap.
I tried to think about work. About the shit I actually needed to do today.
“Fuck,” I muttered.
Cold shower. That was the only thing that had a chance of fixing this before I did something stupid.
I shoved the car into gear and pulled out onto the road.
I parked on the street and killed the engine, jaw tight, whole body thrumming with a frustration I couldn’t shake. Not even ten seconds inside and I was already yanking my hoodie over my head, kicking off my shoes, stripping down to nothing as I stalked to the bathroom.
The cold shower hit me like a brick wall. I stood under it with my palms flat against the tile, eyes shut, breath ragged. But even with the icy water dragging goosebumps over my skin, all I could think about was her.
I pressed my forehead to the wall.
Kira.
Malaya.
My poor girl.
I dried off and walked back into the living room, towel wrapped around my hips, water still dripping down my chest. My mind was still back in that car.
Getting pulled into someone else’s family shit was never part of the plan.
Least of all my boss’s mess. I’d seen enough of that crap over the years—broken wives, scared kids, men who drank too much and pretended they were still kings of their little rotten kingdoms. That’s the world I worked in. No fairy tales there.
So normally I would’ve stayed out of it. Kept my head down. Done the job and moved on. I used to not give a damn about any of it. Not my drama. Not my problem. I’m nobody’s fucking savior.
That’s exactly why I’d never have kids of my own. Fuck that. I’d ruin one just by breathing near it. A man like me doesn’t get to play father.
But Kira. I gave her my word. Which meant I was going to find out where the hell her mother had been taken. Whether I liked it or not, I was already neck-deep in this family mess.
And the truth was… for that girl, I’d do just about anything.
Still in my thoughts, I wandered to the kitchen, made myself a coffee, and headed for the balcony to light a cigarette. But something stopped me mid-step—the cabinet across the room. Its door was slightly ajar.
That was odd. I always closed it.
I stepped closer and pulled it open, the hinges creaking. Inside, the folder waited. And then it hit me—fuck. I was about to dig into the files from that cop I killed a few months ago—right before Kira knocked on my door and made me lose my mind and… fuck her.
I pulled it out now.
It was heavier than I remembered. Thick. A folder swollen with papers that hinted at something buried deeper. I dropped onto the couch, towel still wrapped around my waist, and flipped it open across my lap.
Photocopies. Scans. Handwritten notes. Police memos. News articles that never made front pages.
And then came the list.
Hundreds of names.
I kept turning pages.
Boys. Girls. Some as young as two. Cities I recognized. Villages I’d never heard of. Case numbers. Sloppy handwriting. Warnings scrawled in the margins.
And then I saw it.
Kovalenko Mila Igorevna.
Female. Age 3. Abducted 2003. Kharkiv.
My lungs seized. Air wouldn’t come. For a second I thought I was dying—then I realized I wished I was.
Wait—
What the fuck is this?
I flipped through the papers like a man possessed. Every report, every article, every scribbled note screamed the truth I didn’t want to believe.
No, no, no—
This was about human trafficking.
And Mila’s name was in the middle of it.
She didn’t vanish.
She was stolen.
I couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t move.
I stared at the page, waiting for it to correct itself. Waiting for something to shift, to fix, to undo.
It didn’t.
It just sat there.
Telling me exactly what had been done to her.
All this time, I never knew what happened to her.
One day she was there, and then she wasn’t.
I searched. We all searched. But there was nothing—no leads, no sightings, not even a body to mourn.
For years I thought maybe she ran away, maybe someone killed her in a moment of madness and buried the evidence deep.
My mind invented every possibility except the truth.
Never once did I consider that someone could look at a three-year-old child and see a price tag.
That she might have been trafficked—sold, passed around like contraband, her name stripped down to a number on some ledger.
I’d convinced myself she was already gone because the alternative was unthinkable.
Suddenly I was on my feet, stumbling into the bathroom. I fell to my knees in front of the toilet and threw up hard. Violently. My stomach heaved again and again until there was nothing left but bile and acid and the kind of pain that lived in your bones.
My hands shook. My vision blurred. And for a moment I didn’t even feel anger—just grief.
Deep, howling grief that threatened to rip me open from the inside out.
My brain conjured her image—tiny, innocent, helpless.
Just a little girl. My little sister. Sold.
Used. Hurt. Over and over until she probably didn’t survive it.
And that thought alone made me sick all over again.
I gripped the edge of the toilet and emptied whatever was left.
I’d killed the cop who compiled this. I’d taken out the judge who pursued the case.
I’d shut down the only people who were trying to stop the horror.
And why? Because I thought I was doing my job?
No. The truth was uglier than that. I never asked the right questions because I didn’t want the answers.
All I ever cared about was the money. The kill order.
The next payday. The rush of being needed.
I didn’t think. Didn’t look twice. I was so fucking sure I was above it all.
That I was the sharpest weapon in the room. But I was blind. Willingly blind.
I stood up sharply, the towel falling to the floor.
Rage ignited in my chest like a struck match, sudden and all-consuming.
I stormed into the living room, eyes scanning for the first thing to obliterate.
The standing lamp met my wrath—snatched by the neck and flung and hurled across the room without a second thought.
It shattered against the wall in a flash of glass and ceramic.
The table went next. I kicked it until wood splintered and something stabbed into my foot. I didn’t care. I was already bleeding.
I stormed into the kitchen, ripped open the fridge, and grabbed the vodka. I drank half the bottle before I could think, burning my throat, my gut, anything that still worked. I smashed it against the wall, glass raining over the floor like frost.
I grabbed the biggest knife from the block. I didn’t want to cut. I wanted to destroy. I tore back into the living room and stabbed the punching bag. Once. Twice. Again and again until my shoulder screamed and my wrist went numb. Then I dropped the knife and pounded the thing with my fists.
A scream tore out of me—raw, guttural, primal—rising from somewhere I didn’t know I had. I didn’t care if the neighbors heard. Let them listen. Let them wonder what kind of beast lived next door.
I dropped to my knees, gasping, sweating, shaking. The taste of metal in my mouth. My eyes burning. The room wrecked.
Mila.
My baby sister.
I pulled on a fresh pair of boxers and track pants, then reached for a white tank top and zipped up my jacket.
My feet slid into boots without thought, muscle memory carrying me to the door.
I wasn’t thinking in any conscious way—I was moving on instinct.
Like a loaded gun that had already been cocked and fired, the path forward was inevitable.
I holstered my gun before I grabbed my keys and got out of the door.
I got behind the wheel and headed toward Pakhan’s estate, the engine humming like a war drum beneath my rage. The city blurred around me—buildings, lights, everything bleeding together in the periphery while my thoughts sharpened to a single, lethal point.
There was no one else left to blame.
And I wasn’t going there to talk.
The car barely stopped before I slammed the door and stepped out. My boots hit the gravel like gunshots. I didn’t bother to hide it—didn’t bother to fix my face or my posture. I didn’t care who saw me. I walked like I had death in my hands and no intention of slowing down.
The mansion loomed ahead, golden light spilling from the windows, mocking me with its warmth. My hand was already at my side, fingers wrapped around cold steel. The gun came out as naturally as a breath.
I was still a good three hundred feet from the entrance when a shadow shifted ahead of me—someone stepping directly into my path, forcing me to halt mid-stride.
I didn’t even look. I just pressed the barrel of my gun to their forehead.
And then I saw the face.
Sashko.
“Move,” I growled. My voice didn’t sound like mine.
He didn’t move.
“You shoot me,” he said, keeping his eyes locked on mine, “and I swear, Reaper, my toddler will grow up thinking you’re a bigger asshole than I already do.”
“I don’t give a fuck about your toddler,” I said. “Don’t you know who I am? I don’t care about people.”
Sashko raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? Must be exhausting, being that full of shit.”
I shoved the gun harder against his forehead, but he didn’t flinch. That’s the thing with Sashko—he always knew when to push and when to stand still. Right now, he was gambling that I wouldn’t pull the trigger.
He might’ve been wrong.
“You’re not going in there like this,” he said. “Not unless you want your brains on the pavement two seconds after. He’ll see you coming from a mile away.”
“Good. Let him.”
“Maksym—”
“Get out of my way.”
“No. I’m not letting you do this.”
I exhaled through my nose, sharp and trembling. The hand holding the gun was steady. The rest of me wasn’t.
“Sashko, I swear to God—”
“Then shoot me,” he cut in. “But you’re not getting past me with that look in your eyes. I’ve seen that look. It gets you killed.”
We stood like that for a beat too long. My heart was trying to punch its way out of my chest.
When Sashko’s fingers touched the gun, the pressure in my chest detonated.
Something deep inside me cracked wide open.
A tidal wave of grief and fury surged up from a place I didn’t even know still existed, and I couldn’t brace against it.
My vision blurred. My throat closed. My whole body trembled as I dropped to my knees like a puppet with its strings cut.
The heels of my palms pressed into my eyes, clawing at my face in a desperate attempt to hold it all in, trying to push the pain back in—but it was too late.
It was pouring out, decades of silence and fury and heartbreak breaking through all at once.
I saw her. Mila. A little girl stolen from the world.
From me. In that moment, I wasn’t Maksym the Reaper.
I was just a broken brother who had failed the only person that ever mattered. And it destroyed me.
Sashko crouched down next to me, voice low but urgent. “Come on, man. Not here. We gotta go before someone sees you like that.”
He grabbed my arm, pulling me up to my feet. “You’re not thinking straight. Let me drive you home.”
I stood, blinking against the sting in my eyes, jaw clenched hard as I forced the tears back. My whole body ached from the weight of it.
“I don’t need a therapist.”
“Good. I’d be a shit one. I’d just tell you to drink.”
He clapped a hand on my shoulder like we were about to go bowling instead of fleeing a murder.
“We’ll go back to yours. You don’t have to say a single word. But I’m driving. I don’t feel like dying before I’ve had one fucking drink.”
I didn’t answer. I turned on my heel, stalked back toward my car, and unlocked it.
Sashko climbed into the driver’s seat, and I didn’t offer a word of protest. My hands stayed in my lap, fists clenched, jaw locked as the engine started.
We rolled into the night, the silence between us thick, but not unwelcome.
Just two men, one broken, the other trying to keep him from shattering completely.
We pulled up to my building and parked in the shadows. I didn’t wait for Sashko—I got out, slammed the door, and stalked toward the entrance.
He caught up without saying anything. The stairwell stank of cigarettes and paint thinner. We climbed to the second floor, boots echoing against metal and tile, and I unlocked the door with knuckles still smeared in dried blood.
Then he stepped inside, halted just past the threshold, and let out a low whistle.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, eyes sweeping across the destruction. “You redecorating or exorcising demons?”
I stepped over the broken glass and didn’t look back. “Don’t ask questions. Just bring the vodka from the fridge.”