Chapter 18 – Lukyan
“I’m not sitting. Lukyan, please start talking.”
The silence stretching between us is absolute, heavy with the weight of the ruin I’ve created. Looking at Sofia—seeing the raw, bleeding heartbreak in her eyes slowly hardening into a cold, impenetrable wall—I understand completely that there is no way out of this.
There’s no clever deflection I can use, no tactical lie that will save me, and no way to delay the inevitable. We’ve reached the exact point of no return. Withholding the truth from her right now will only deepen the damage, severing ties I’m suddenly terrified of losing.
I take a deep, grounding breath and look at her. I don’t move closer, respecting the invisible boundary she’s drawn between us.
Then, I tell her everything.
“Your father, Andrei Morozov, wasn’t just a scholar who got caught up in something dark,” I begin, my voice flat, stripping away any room for misinterpretation.
“He was the architect of a highly sophisticated, multi-billion-dollar financial network. When he was killed, a vast empire of our accounts was left completely frozen. Nobody could touch them. Nobody even knew where to look. We’re talking billions of dollars left in a void somewhere. ”
Sofia doesn’t flinch, but her fingers grip the fabric of her skirt tightly.
“I spent years hunting for the access protocols,” I continue, presenting the facts with the same brutal, analytical clarity I apply to every operations report on my desk, even though all I want is to cross the room and hold her. But she’s looking at me like she’s never seen me before.
“We only knew him as Creed, and nothing about his name or his family. I swear. And then I got approached by Karl Jonathan. He wanted me to marry you before he gave me any information on this code, and I was desperate, so I agreed.”
“Wow.” She laughs breathlessly, slowly shaking her head.
I feel my heart crack, but I keep going, eager to get it all out so there are no more secrets. “After the marriage, Karl disappeared. I’ve been looking for him to uphold his own end of the deal.”
“How’s Karl related to this? I don’t know who that man is,” Sofia said. “Does he know my father?”
“I don’t know,” I sigh. “He disappeared. But I know he knows something, and that’s why he put you in my path.”
“So how did you figure out my relationship to my father? How did you know the man you’re looking for is Andrei?”
“Sofia…”
“Tell me!”
I run a hand through my hair. “The other day, when I saw the patterns in which you arranged your books, I just kind of figured it out. I made Ben do extensive research on you just to be sure. The results came in, and I found out your father was Creed. Andrei had left the encryption master key in your possession, woven into something you wouldn’t think twice about handling. ”
The words cut through the room like a blade, but I don’t stop. I don’t attempt to soften the reality. I don’t try to shift the blame to Creed, or to the syndicate, or to the brutal world I was born into. I lay my sins bare at her feet.
“Everything you heard through that door is true,” I say, meeting her gaze head-on, forcing myself to endure the agony of watching her face pale. “I didn’t marry you to keep you safe. At least, not initially. I married you because I wanted more information. But that’s no longer the case, Sofia. I—”
Sofia holds up a hand to shut me up. The gesture is small, but it carries enough weight to slice right through my words.
“When did you find out exactly?” she asks, her voice dangerously quiet.
“Sofia, we don’t have to do this right now,” I try to say, reaching toward her, desperately trying to de-escalate the fire consuming the room.
She shakes her head to stop me again, her expression hardening into something entirely unyielding. “Tell me, Lukyan. When did you find out exactly that I was Creed’s daughter? Was it before the magical date you organized? I bet it was.”
The air leaves my lungs. I look at her, wishing more than anything I could lie, wishing I could rewrite the past. But there is no hiding anymore. I hang my head, the weight of my own deception crushing down on my neck.
“Yes,” I say quietly.
Sofia lets out a sharp laugh, but it’s completely hollow, dripping with a pure, agonizing bitterness that cuts me to the quick.
“No wonder,” she says, her voice trembling as the tears she’s fighting finally begin to glaze over her eyes.
“I knew that date was too good to be true. You just wanted to soften me up so you could prepare me to give you everything I know. And the sex afterward… that was just a bonus for you, wasn’t it? ”
The words go straight to my heart and completely shatter it.
The pain is instant and blinding, a physical ache that wraps around my ribs and squeezes until I can barely breathe.
In this exact, horrific moment, as I watch her tear down everything we built, the truth hits me with the force of a bullet: I am in love with her.
Truly, desperately in love with her. And I’m heartbroken.
The realization doesn’t bring warmth; it brings an absolute, suffocating despair because I know this ruin is entirely my fault.
“Sofia, no,” I plead, taking a step forward, completely abandoning the cold, calculated mafia boss she thinks I am.
“I admit I planned the date to soften you. I admit that was the initial goal. But before the date was even over, I was more interested in just getting to know you. I swear to you, Sofia.”
She scoffs, crossing her arms tightly over her chest as if to shield herself from my words. “Yeah, right.”
“And the sex was the best gift, Sofia. I swear it,” I rush out, my voice thick, cracking under the weight of a desperation I have never felt in my entire life. “I would never take advantage of you like that. It wasn’t a game. Not that part. Never that part.”
She just shakes her head at me, her eyes full of a profound disappointment that makes me feel smaller than the dirt beneath her shoes.
She just stares at me and says absolutely nothing else. There is no screaming, no throwing things, no explosive rage. Her reaction is entirely internal, a quiet, devastating collapse happening right behind her eyes.
That restraint makes the moment a hundred times more impactful, a suffocating silence filling the space between us. I can see her processing each piece of information, her understanding deepening with every word, rewriting every memory of the past few weeks until it turns to ash.
The trust she had so carefully, tentatively begun to build collapses completely under the weight of the truth. What had felt so real, so safe, is now entirely overshadowed by the dark knowledge that it all began as nothing more than a masterclass in manipulation.
“Lukyan, I can’t trust you anymore,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper, yet it cuts through me like a razor. “I’m sorry. This is too much. It’s just way too much.”
She turns to leave, her shoulders trembling.
Panic spikes through my veins. “Sofia, wait—”
I quickly cross the room to her, my boots slamming against the hardwood. But as I raise a hand to touch her arm, to pull her back to me, she flinches violently away from my reach.
The sight of her recoiling from me hits me like a physical blow. I freeze, instantly pulling my arm back, my hand dropping uselessly to my side.
She shakes her head, stepping backward toward the door. “Don’t touch me. Just stay away from me from now on, Lukyan. I want nothing to do with you.” She looks at me one last time, her eyes shining with unshed tears, and lets out a bitter, broken breath. “I hope you’re happy.”
“Sofia, please, listen to me,” I say, the words rushing out of me, raw and completely unscripted. “I know how this looks. I know what I was when I brought you here. I was a man looking at an asset, calculating a risk. But I swear to you on my life that man died weeks ago.”
I take a half-step forward, my hands open, pleading with her to see past my past.
“I didn’t plan for you,” I choke out, the admission tearing at my throat.
“I didn’t plan for the way you look at the world, or the way you laugh, or how it felt to hold you in the dark.
Somewhere between that date and the moment I thought I lost you in that warehouse, the mission stopped mattering.
The code stopped mattering. You became the only thing that made sense to me.
I don’t care about your father’s money, Sofia.
I don’t care about the secrets. If you want me to burn those books, I’ll do it right now.
Just don’t look at me like I’m a stranger. Please.”
But the words carry absolutely no weight in this moment. They sound hollow, like the frantic excuses of a liar caught in his own trap.
From Sofia’s perspective, the foundation of everything between us is fundamentally compromised. There’s no fixing a house built on lies, and as she turns her back on me and walks out of the study, she takes the last remnants of my heart with her.