His voice tightens. “You are treating me like I’m the enemy.”
I flinch, eyes snapping to his, whispering fiercely, “I don’t know what you want from me. You can’t come here demanding things after what happened. We… I…”
“I want my family back.”
The simplicity of it shatters something inside me.
My eyes sting as I look at him. His face is still mostly shadowed, but I can see the grief etched into the lines around his mouth. The tight strain in his shoulders, the subtle way he sways forward like he’s aching to touch me and trying so hard not to.
“I gave you space,” he says softly. “I let your family curse me out on your porch day after day. I stood there and took it because I knew you needed time to think and reacclimate.”
The lump in my throat returns so suddenly, I almost choke on it trying to swallow around it.
He exhales through his nose. “I’m not asking you to come back with me tonight… I’m just asking you to talk to me.”
My chest rises and falls in sharp, uneven bursts. “You don’t know what Leo and I went through when we were with… when we…”
His name won’t come out. Not even now with Maksim standing here—the one person in the world who could understand what that hell was like. Someone who knew Mikhail inside and out, who understood the cruelty that man could inflict without even lifting his own finger to do so.
And yet still the words twist in my mouth, refusing to be spoken. Instead, they turn to ash on my tongue.
He reaches for me then, brushing along the edge of my jaw. The touch is featherlight, his fingertips a whisper of warmth along my skin. So gently, I almost don’t believe it’s real.
“Then make me understand,” he murmurs. “Please… I wake up every night wondering how badly I failed you both… if there was something I could do that would’ve never led us down this path. I regret ever involving you in any of this.”
The silence between us stretches.
His brows knit together, his hand hesitating before pulling away, leaving me cold and empty. “I’m not your enemy, Ivy. You have every reason to be angry with me. But I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere.”
The tears come unexpectedly. A hot rush that wells in my eyes and burns down my cheeks before I can stop them.
“I betrayed you.” The words slip free, broken and breathless. Saying them out loud is like tearing open my own skin. It hurts worse than anything else I’ve ever said or admitted to in my whole life.
He just pulls in a long, slow breath. “I know. I forgive you.”
A small, choked sound leaves me.
“How can you say that? How can you stand there and say that like it’s nothing? After everything I did? After everything that happened? You should hate me,” I demand.
“I don’t.”
“You should,” I insist, my voice cracking. “I nearly got you killed. You could’ve died. Leo could’ve?—”
“But I didn’t. You both made it out. That’s what matters. That’s the only thing that matters to me.”
I shake my head slowly. “Maksim… I can’t go back to Russia with you.”
He flinches.
It’s subtle, so subtle most people wouldn’t notice, the faintest recoil in his expression. But I know him. I know the way his jaw tenses, the way his eyes lose their sharp edge of confidence when he’s caught off guard.
It’s the first time I’ve seen him look unsteady. And for a moment, I see beneath it all. Not thePakhan, not the man the world fears. I see the father of my child, the man I once trusted enough to give my body to. The man whose supposed death had broken me in ways I never thought possible.
But none of that changes the truth.
We can’t fix this.
We never could.