His voice was calm, frighteningly calm—steady in a way nothing in my world had ever been.
“Let me take you away from here. Away from him. Away from all of them.”
I tried to speak, but only a rasp escaped.
Fear crawled under my skin—was he one of my father’s men, sent to finish the job?
Or one of Dmitri’s soldiers, ordered to pull me back into chains the moment I could stand again?
I tried to move, to fight, to understand—but consciousness slipped away, dragging me back into suffocating darkness before I could choose.
The next time I opened my eyes, everything had changed.
The machines were gone.
The white lights were gone.
The smell of antiseptic replaced by sunlight and salt and the distant melody of waves.
I was no longer in New Jersey. No longer in Dmitri’s fortress of power or my father’s kingdom of nightmares.
I wasn’t even in the same world.
I was in Athens, Greece, in a room washed in warm sunlight, curtains fluttering like soft breaths against the sea breeze.
And beside me—wrapped in a hospital blanket far too big for his fragile body—was my son.
Vanya.
Alive. Premature. Tiny enough to fit inside my trembling arms.
His cries were weak, barely whispers—but they were real.
A miracle. My proof that I had survived. My proof that I had escaped.
For a fleeting, fragile moment—I was free.
For five years, I had lived tucked away in the northern wing of a sprawling estate—a palace of white marble and blooming jasmine perched high above the hills of Athens. It was a world untouched by the violence that had carved my past, a sanctuary built like a fortress, every archway and column whispering promises of safety.
My son, Vanya, now five, was my universe.
His dark curls—Dmitri’s curls—fell over bright, inquisitive eyes that mirrored the man whose love had nearly destroyed me. His laughter echoed through the halls like sunlight in human form, softening the loneliness that clung to me like a second skin.
No matter how gilded this exile was, it remained exile.
The estate belonged to Ruslan Baranov, the undisputed kingpin of Greece—a man whose power shaped the nation the way tides shaped the shore. No politician rose without his blessing; no law passed without brushing the edge of his influence. His legitimate empire—shipping fleets, olive orchards, real estate stretching from Santorini to Mykonos—was merely the curtain behind which his true dominion thrived.
Arms routes threaded through the Mediterranean.
Synthetic drug networks pulsed through the ports.
A stern portrait of Ruslan hung in the great hall: cold eyes, a jaw carved from stone, a presence even paint could not diminish. Men came to this estate to kneel to him under the guise of business. They brought gifts, loyalty, silence. The walls whispered reverence.
And yet—I had never seen him.
Not once in five years.
Not since that fleeting hospital moment, his face a blur through my fevered vision as I bled and clutched my premature son. His absence gnawed at me. Men like Ruslan did not give protection freely. No one sheltered a woman and her child for half a decade out of kindness alone. That truth hung over me every day like a blade waiting to drop.
