The hospital room’s white glow didn’t just haunt my memories—it stalked them.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that sterile light bleeding across my vision, cold and merciless, the last thing I remembered before my world ruptured.
Five years ago, I had taken a bullet for Dmitri Volkov.
Not because I was brave.
Not because I wanted to die.
But because even then—despite his cruelty, his obsession, the fractures he left in my heart—I had loved him the way a drowning woman loves the last breath she has left. With desperation. With blindness. With devotion sharp enough to cut.
The gunshot had been sudden—a crack that split the air and my chest in the same breath.
Pain burst through me like fire, and my legs buckled. I remembered the metallic taste of blood, the smell of cordite, and then Dmitri’s arms catching me before I hit the ground.
“Milaya... stay with me. Stay alive. Don’t you dare leave me.”
His voice had never sounded like that before—ragged, terrified, stripped of all his arrogance.
It trembled, and the world blurred around the edges.
But no amount of desperation could stop the darkness that crawled into my lungs as my blood soaked his shirt.
I fought to breathe. Fought to stay conscious.
Fought because I was carrying more than pain—I had just delivered my son, Vanya, too early, too small, but already the anchor keeping me tethered to life.
My son. My reason.
My tether to a world that had never been kind to me.
The darkness whispered its temptations—release from fear, from violence, from being torn in half between Dmitri’s obsession and my father’s cruelty. A soft, painless end.
But I had held Vanya only minutes before the bullet tore through me.
I had felt his tiny body shiver against my chest, had heard the fragile cry he pushed into the world.
I couldn’t die.
Not when he had just begun to live.
Not when he needed a mother’s touch, a mother’s protection.
Not when I still had to raise him—far away from men who only knew how to destroy.
So I fought. For him. For us.
For the chance to see my son grow beyond the violence that created him.
In the fog of half-consciousness, as machines beeped and nurses rushed around me, a figure appeared at the edge of my vision.
Not Dmitri. Not a doctor.
A stranger.
Tall. Shadowed. His silhouette cut sharply by the dim hospital lights.
“I can give you escape.”
