Firm. Solid. Unyielding.
His arm wrapped around my shoulders, his other hand pressing between my shoulder blades, anchoring me in place.
“You cannot break in front of them, milaya,” he murmured against my hair. Low. Steady. Commanding. “They don’t get to see that.”
Milaya.
The word hit me like a shockwave.
My love.
The old endearment—one he used only when it mattered. My breath caught. He remembered. Maybe not everything. Maybe not clearly.
But this—this piece of us—was still there.
I leaned into him for one heartbeat. Just one. I didn’t cry. Didn’t shake.
I breathed.
Then I straightened and stepped away.
I walked the rows slowly this time, baton hanging loosely at my side. My posture was upright. My chin lifted. I met their gazes one by one.
Some stared back in open terror.
A few tried to harden themselves with defiance.
Most looked away.
“You are evil,” I said, my voice steady despite the tremor in my hands. It carried easily in the vast room. “You already know that. You’ve always known.”
I stopped midway down the aisle and turned slowly, letting them all see me.
“But you thought no one would ever make you pay,” I continued. “You tore women apart in this century. You used us. Sold us. Traded us like objects.” My grip tightened on the baton. “You told yourselves the world didn’t care. That no one would come.”
I met their eyes again, one by one.
“You were wrong.”
I stopped in the center of the room.
The silence pressed in—thick, suffocating—broken only by ragged breathing and the faint clink of chains shifting against concrete. Eighty-nine pairs of eyes were fixed on me now. Not on Dmitri. Not on the weapons. On me.
The girl who had lived.
“Now your day has come,” I said, my voice steady, carrying across the cavernous space. I didn’t raise it. I didn’t need to. “You will sit here and watch the fire approach—helpless, bound, unable to run.”
A tremor rippled through the rows. Some began to shake. Others squeezed their eyes shut as if blindness might save them.
“It will crawl across the floor,” I continued, slow and deliberate. “You will feel the heat before it touches you. You will smell it. You will understand, minute by minute, what it means to wait for pain with no escape.”
I took a step forward, then another, turning in a slow circle so they could all see my face.
“You burned lives for profit,” I said. “You burned innocence. Tonight, you burn for that.”
I paused, letting the words sink in.
“And when it finally takes you,” I finished quietly, “you will burn again in hell.”