Affection was rationed. Kindness was conditional.
Love—if it existed at all—was buried beneath layers of vengeance he refused to release.
I had passed out after taking that bullet meant for him. Days—or perhaps weeks—slipped by in fragmented shadows.
When consciousness finally returned, it did so gently, almost kindly. Sunlight filtered through sheer curtains, warm against my skin. The air smelled of salt and olives instead of antiseptic and gunpowder.
I was no longer in that hospital.
I lay in a quiet room overlooking an endless stretch of blue—sea melting into sky. Greece. Somewhere remote. Somewhere deliberately chosen.
Beside me, swaddled in white, slept my son.
Vanya.
His tiny fingers curled instinctively around mine, his grip impossibly strong for something so small.
Dark hair crowned his head, already thick. Even then, I could see Dmitri in him—the sharp lines, the intensity waiting beneath the softness.
But Dmitri himself was gone.
The man responsible for pulling me from the chaos and bringing me to a safe, quiet place was Ruslan.
Ruslan Baranov.
A name that carried weight in the underworld, spoken with caution, never lightly.
When he entered a room, conversation died—not because he demanded it, but because his presence made it so.
Tall. Imposing. Eyes dark and unreadable, like obsidian polished smooth by centuries of violence. He looked at me once, assessing, then nodded.
“You’ll be safe here,” he said simply.
And he made it so.
Ruslan arranged everything—the secluded villa hidden among olive groves, the doctors who asked no questions, thesecurity that never slept. For five years, I lived under his protection, carefully erased from the world that had hunted me.
Vanya grew fast. Too fast.
By five, he was tall for his age, sharp-eyed and fearless, with Dmitri’s piercing blue gaze and an unsettling awareness that made adults uneasy.
He asked questions I didn’t always know how to answer.
“Where is my father?”
I learned how to deflect. How to lie gently.
Our life was quiet. Healing. Almost normal.
I baked bread in the mornings. Read him stories beneath starlit skies. Learned to exist without fear tightening my chest at every unexpected sound.
All was peaceful for me and my son, Vanya, in Ruslan’s estate—until a sudden message arrived.
Ruslan didn’t deliver it himself. He sent an emissary—precise, emotionless.
“Dmitri Volkov is remarrying,” the sealed note read. Ruslan had advised me to go.
I shouldn’t have gone.