Just for a heartbeat.
He didn’t turn fully. He didn’t need to. The partial angle was enough for me to see his face in profile—the rigid line of his jaw, the tension carving shadows beneath his cheekbones.
When his eyes met mine, they were bloodshot, feral, stripped of reason or restraint. There was no humanity left in them in that moment. Only survival. Only vengeance.
“You deserve to be in the grave beside them, Elena,” he said.
Not shouted.
Not snarled.
Spoken with quiet certainty.
Then he turned away and disappeared down the hallway, his footsteps heavy, unhurried, echoing like the retreat of something lethal that had chosen—for now—not to strike.
The sound of him faded.
The silence afterward was worse.
I stayed where I was, sinking back to my knees.
The carpet bit into my skin, rough fibers embedding themselves painfully into my flesh, but I barely felt it.
My body felt alien—like it belonged to someone else entirely, a vessel carrying nothing but exhaustion, fear, and despair.
I tried to breathe.
The air wouldn’t come properly.
Tears spilled from my eyes in relentless streams, soaking the fabric of my dress, dripping onto the floor.
It felt as though something inside me had finally cracked wide open, and everything I’d been holding back for years—decades—was pouring out all at once. I wasn’t just crying for myself.
I was crying for him.
For the man who had been brutalized beyond repair and still kept walking.
For a little boy sleeping somewhere down the hall, trapped in a world where safety had vanished before he could understand what it meant.
And for me.
Because no matter how many times I’d told myself I was strong, no matter how many nights I’d survived alone, this—this was too much.
The pain wasn’t separate anymore.
It braided together—Ruslan’s rage, Yannis’s grief, my own long-buried terror—until it felt collective, shared, impossibly heavy. Three shattered lives colliding in the aftermath of violence none of us had chosen.
A sound ripped from my chest before I could stop it.
A scream.
Raw. Broken. Animal.
It tore at my throat until my lungs burned and my voice dissolved into nothing but air. It didn’t bring relief. It didn’t loosen the stone lodged in my chest. It only left me empty, shaking, weak.
My strength abandoned me completely.
I folded forward, my body giving up at last, and collapsed face-down onto the marble floor.
