The room we had just entered—the one that should have felt safe—suddenly shrank around us, the walls pressing in with the weight of his presence.
He wasn’t wearing a suit now, but a charcoal Henley that clung to shoulders I used to kiss in the dark when the world was soft and we weren’t enemies.
The rising sun caught the silver threaded through his hair, the brutal new lines carved along his mouth.
He looked like a man sculpted from grief and sharpened by violence—someone who had learned how to bleed without ever making a sound.
“How dare you,” I said. My voice wasn’t steady; it trembled with rage and fear.
“Do you think you’re a god? That you can kidnap a mother and child who came here as tourists and lock us in your palace like we’re trophies to admire? Like our lives mean nothing?!”
Dmitri’s gaze flicked to Vanya and something raw, aching, and unbearably human cracked across his face.
But then the mask slammed down, cold and unforgiving.
“I didn’t kidnap anyone,” he said quietly. “Your son climbed my altar of his own free will. I’m simply... keeping you both safe while we sort this out.”
“Safe?”
Vanya’s head snapped up like a whip.
He stepped forward—past me—until he stood planted in front of Dmitri Volkov like a miniature knight defending a queen.
Tiny.
Fierce.
Unmovable.
“Mom didn’t send me,” he declared, voice trembling with passion and fury. “I went because I wanted to. And you’re proud and heartless and cruel, Mr Dmitri!”
The words didn’t hit Dmitri like bullets.
They hit him like prophecy.
I saw his throat work once—hard.
Goosebumps rose along his forearms.
His fingers twitched like he wanted to reach out, then clamped into fists instead.
Because there, standing defiant and blazing with righteous anger, was a mirror—a storm-eyed, stubborn-jawed, impossible mirror.
Dmitri was staring at a smaller, purer version of himself.
And it shook him.
Visibly.
He swallowed, and the sound echoed in the cavernous foyer.
“I’ll be marrying your mother,” he said finally, voice roughened to sand and gravel. “And you’ll be my son. We can be a family. A real one.”
Vanya barked out a laugh—sharp, wounded, disbelieving.
A laugh a five-year-old should never know how to make.
A family?” he spat, each word dripping with contempt. “You kidnapped my mother and me... and you think we can become a real family?
