Chapter 35 The Reckoning Room #2
But eventually, I paused. He was still breathing—barely—but alive.
Barely. The room reeked of copper and fear.
I stood over him, chest heaving, every inch of me drenched in sweat and his blood.
And still, I saw her. Kira. The way her eyes darkened when she told me she wanted to be there next time. The way she made me promise.
This was the time.
She deserved this moment. This choice. If she wanted to be the one to end him—I’d let her. If she wanted to look him in the eye—well, whatever was left of them—and decide for herself, then that was hers to have. No more secrets. No more stolen moments of violence behind her back.
I looked down at Pakhan, his breath rattling, face ruined. “Don’t bleed out just yet.” I muttered, turning away. “We’ve got a guest joining the show.”
I left the study, walking the familiar halls of the estate. In Kira’s wing, everything was still and dim. I stepped into the bathroom first, scrubbing my hands clean, watching the blood swirl down the sink in crimson spirals.
Then I padded into her room and knelt beside the bed.
She was still asleep—tangled in the sheets, hair a soft halo around her face. My bloodstained shirt was too close to her skin. I reached out gently.
“Malaya,” I murmured, touching her shoulder.
She stirred, eyes fluttering open, disoriented. “Maksym?” she mumbled. “Why are you not in bed?” Then she blinked and saw the dried blood on my clothes. She sat up quickly, her body tensing.
“What happened? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said softly. “It’s over. But I need you to come with me. Please. Just dress quickly.”
Her brows furrowed. “Why? What’s going on?”
I met her eyes, steady. “Do you trust me?”
She hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”
“I’m not doing this without you. Not this time. You said you wanted in—now’s your moment.”
Still dazed, she pushed herself up from the bed, brows drawn in confusion. But she didn’t ask more. She moved fast—pulling on her clothes with stiff hands, tension thrumming beneath her skin.
We stepped into the hall, and her breath caught as we reached the stairs. Two of Pakhan’s men lay crumpled on the floor below—bodies still, blood seeping dark into the marble. She froze mid-step.
“Maksym,” she whispered, her voice tight. “What the fuck is going on?” Then she turned to look at me fully, her gaze scanning the smeared stains on my sleeves. “Tell me... whose blood is this?”
My jaw clenched. I didn’t explain. “Just… come with me. You have to see for yourself.”
We reached the door to the study. I stopped her with a hand to her arm, turning so we stood face to face. My eyes locked with hers.
“He’s not dead yet,” I said, eyes hard. “You wanted a say, Kira. You’ve got it.”
She stared at me, brow creased, lips parted in confusion.
Her eyes widened slightly. The silence between us cracked open.
“You’re talking about... my father.”
I gave a small nod.
She drew in a breath, unsteady. “Why?”
I didn’t answer.
“Are you ready to go in?” I asked instead, voice low.
She looked at me, heart in her throat, then gave a single nod.
—Kira—
The smell hit me the second the door opened. Rot. Sweat. Blood. It was thick in the air, sour and metallic, so dense I could almost feel it settling on my skin. I stumbled back a step, gagging, my hand flying to my mouth as I turned my head away.
But I looked.
He was tied to the table—if you could even call it that.
It looked more like a slab of ruin. His body was barely recognizable.
Skin flayed in strips. Cuts layered over bruises.
One arm hung at an unnatural angle, the hand a mangled wreck of shattered fingers and torn flesh.
His face—God, his face—was sunken, bloodied, unseeing.
The sockets where his eyes used to be were just hollow, gaping holes.
I couldn’t breathe.
Maksym stood behind me, one hand resting gently on my arm. His breath was close, steady and warm against my ear.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I shook my head, voice barely a whisper. “No.”
From the ruin on the table, a rasp broke through. My name. Fragile. Broken.
“Kira...”
I froze.
His voice—barely there, more like the ghost of a sound—scraped against me like broken glass. I wanted to run. To scream. But my body wouldn’t move.
“I’ve been planning this for some time now,” Maksym said, still behind me, his voice low and taut like a wire pulled tight. “I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t want to risk you... interfering.”
I turned my head just slightly. Felt his breath on my cheek. Still too stunned to speak.
“He trafficked my little sister. Mila. Sold her.”
I gasped, my hand flying up to cover my mouth.
“She wasn’t the only one,” he went on, and now his voice cracked with something deeper—rage, maybe. Or grief. “Thousands of kids. Sold like property. That’s what built his empire. That’s what bought the house you grew up in.”
My thoughts spiraled, dragging me down with them.
I’d always known my father was cruel—controlling, manipulative, capable of monstrous things—but this.
.. this was something darker. This wasn’t just violence.
It was evil. Cold. Systematic. A rot that had lived beneath our marble floors and crystal chandeliers all along.
I saw it then—etched in every corner of my childhood.
The suffocating grip of control. The gilded cage I was raised in.
My mother, humiliated and brutalized until she was discarded into an asylum like refuse.
And me... offered up like a bargaining chip to a sadist. He hadn’t just ruined lives—he’d sold them.
“Kira...” he croaked again.
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. My chest felt hollowed out. My skin felt like ice.
Maksym’s hand tightened on my arm, grounding me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I couldn’t let him go. Not after what he did. Not after what he took. I had to make him pay—for her. For me.”
I still couldn’t speak. But I didn’t pull away.
“This isn’t about revenge anymore,” he murmured. “It’s about truth. About you knowing everything—and deciding what happens next.”
My pulse thundered. The weight of his words pressed into my chest like a stone. I could see my father’s body on the table. Barely alive. A grotesque ruin of the man who raised me. But the truth was, he’d been dead to me long before this.
I’d imagined this moment more times than I could count—sometimes through tears, sometimes through clenched teeth.
I used to lie awake at night, wishing him gone, fantasizing about justice and revenge.
And now, here it was. No dream. No fantasy.
Just flesh and blood and ruin, right in front of me.
All that remained was the question I had never truly answered: could I be the one to end it?
I pressed a hand to my stomach.
There, beneath my palm, was the reason. The only reason that mattered.
I’d been pregnant for five weeks, but I only found out last week.
I missed my period. Thought it was stress.
Valeria insisted. The test was positive before I even set it on the counter.
And I felt…peace. I had stopped the pill because it made me sick to my stomach—literally.
But I hadn’t told him. Not because I wanted to trap him.
Because the truth is, the way Maksym fills me—it’s sacred.
Like something more than physical. And I wasn’t lying when I said I wanted to carry him.
I wanted him everywhere. Inside me. Around me.
Tied to me in a way no one could sever. I know he fears he’d hurt a child the way he was hurt.
But he’s wrong. He’d guard that baby like a war god.
I’ve seen him love me when I didn’t deserve it.
I’ve seen him fight for me when I wanted to give up.
He doesn’t just deserve to be a father. He was made to be one.
I stepped forward. Slow. Deliberate. My father—no, the rotting husk who’d once chained me—lay bound and ruined, blind and pitiful. The air reeked of copper, decay, and the sour stink of fear-sweat, and it took every ounce of control not to retch again.
His head jerked at the sound of my footsteps, blind sockets searching for the source of the noise. He tried to speak. Tried to say my name. But I wasn’t his daughter anymore. He forfeited that right a long time ago.
“Look at you,” I said, a soft, cruel laugh slipping free. “How the mighty fall.”
“Guess I won’t be making that little date you so carefully arranged for me after all.” A quiet, amused exhale. “What a pity.”
I tilted my head, studying the wreckage of his face like it was already carrion. “You’ll die blind.”
“Forgotten,” I continued, almost gentle, almost kind. “No one will mourn you. Your grandchild will never know your name. Never carry your poison.”
I let the silence swell, thick and final. Then I added, soft as a lullaby, “You’ll rot here in the dark… and your legacy of filth dies with you.”
A sound escaped him then—wet, rattling, like his lungs were filled with blood. A desperate, broken wheeze clawing its way out of his throat. It didn’t sound human. It sounded like the last gasp of something that should’ve died long ago. I recoiled, disgusted.
Behind me, Maksym shifted. I heard his voice, low and stunned. “Grandchild?”
I turned, walked back to him. His face had gone pale, his jaw tense, nostrils flaring as if he couldn’t get enough air. His eyes glistened, not quite tears—but close. His whole body was pulled taut, like he was bracing for something too big to hold.
“We don’t need to kill him,” I said, gently. “He’s not worth it. He’ll bleed out. Let him. Let him choke on his own sins.”
I took his hands and pressed them against my belly. He froze.
“This is for our future,” I whispered. “Let’s do it for him. Or her. I’m not sure yet.”
Maksym’s brows pulled together. “You told me you were on the pill.”
“It made me feel sick,” I admitted. “So I stopped. And I kept that from you. I’m sorry.”
He didn’t speak right away. Just exhaled hard, and pinched the bridge of his nose like he was still trying to process it.
His hand moved down to rub his jaw, slow and tense.
He looked over at the broken, wheezing man on the table—his enemy, my father, a ruined thing giving his last breaths—and then turned back to me.
“I can’t even process this shit in here,” he said, glancing back at the corpse. “We get to my place, we sit down, and we stop bullshitting each other. You feel me?”
His eyes dropped to my stomach again, then flicked up. “And I swear to God, Kira—if you weren’t pregnant, I’d bend you over right now and spank the shit out of you.”
Despite everything, a breath of laughter escaped me. Just a breath. But it felt like a crack of light through all the dark.
He took my hand.
We left the room without another glance at the thing we were leaving behind.
Halfway down the hallway, I slowed.
Maksym’s grip tightened instantly. “What?”
I didn’t answer right away. My eyes drifted past him, landing on one of his men pouring gasoline across the floor, the sharp smell already filling the air.
For a second, I just watched.
Then I slipped my hand from Maksym’s and walked over.
The man froze when I approached, clearly not sure what the hell to do with me. His eyes flicked past me—to Maksym.
“Can I have that for a second?” I asked, gesturing to the canister.
He hesitated.
Maksym gave a small, almost lazy nod.
The man handed it over.
“Thanks,” I said lightly, already turning away.
“Kira—” Maksym started, but I was already moving.
Back down the hallway. Back into the study.
My father was still there. Still breathing.
I didn’t hesitate.
I tipped the canister. The gasoline poured over him, soaking into torn skin, open wounds, his clothes, his face.
For a second—nothing.
Then he screamed—raw, animal—the last cry of a monster.
I flinched.
The sound cut through me, but it didn’t stop me.
I kept pouring.
His body jerked weakly, every exposed nerve screaming under the burn. His voice broke, twisted into something inhuman as the gasoline hit his eyes, his mouth, every place already ruined.
I finished. The silence returned, thick and suffocating, broken only by the ragged pull of his failing breaths.
Maksym stepped in behind me.
“I thought you wanted to leave him,” he said.
I looked at my father for one last second.
Then I turned away.
“Yeah,” I said, handing the canister back to the man as we stepped out. “But I also want to make sure the bastard actually dies.”
Maksym’s mouth twitched, just slightly.
“Fair,” he muttered.
I shrugged. “Can’t risk it.”
He studied me for a second, something dark and almost amused flickering in his eyes.
“Remind me never to piss you off.”
I smirked. “Too late.”
He huffed a quiet breath—almost a laugh—and took my hand again.
He led me upstairs in silence, the weight of everything still tightening his grip around my fingers. When we reached my bedroom, he turned to me.
“Pack only what you need,” he said, cupping my jaw for a moment. “I’ll get you everything else. I’ll buy you the world if I have to. Let’s not waste another second in this place.”
I nodded and moved to gather a few clothes, the sketchbook with my drawings, and my laptop—whatever I could carry that actually meant something. The rest could burn.
He turned and disappeared into his own room. When he returned, he was in a clean shirt and jeans, his hair wet where he’d scrubbed his face and hands.
Downstairs, the acrid smell of gasoline already filled the air.
Maksym’s men were moving fast—soaking curtains, dousing carpets. One of them nodded at us as we passed. No words. Just understanding.
We stepped outside into the cold, the early morning air sharp against my skin. Dawn was just beginning to break—pale light creeping over the horizon, soft and gray, like the world wasn’t fully awake yet.
He pulled me close, his jacket wrapping around me, shielding me from more than just the wind. Together, we stood in the driveway, the quiet of morning settling around us.
Flames flickered in the windows in front of us. And then, with a low whoosh, they roared to life.
My home, my cage—was burning.
And we watched it fall.
He faced me, firelight flickering in his eyes.
Ash drifted between us as he pulled me close and kissed me, fierce and final—like he was sealing our future in the ruins of our past.