I am a wife paying the price for a crime I did not commit.
A substitute for my sister’s sins.
My husband is my judge, my jailer, and my sentence.
He will never forgive me—not because I am guilty, but because I am available. Because I am here. Because my sister is not.
Until he finds her, I am the stand-in.
The reminder.
The punishment.
He looks at me with disgust, with hatred that has nowhere else to land. Every day, every silence, every cruelty is shaped by the same truth: I am not the one he wants, but I am the one he has.
I am not his wife in any real sense.
I am leverage.
And maybe one day—if fate is merciful, if his search ever ends—he will find my sister and release me.
But until then, this is my life.
What a terrible fate it is, to be alive only because someone else is missing.
I danced like someone trying to outrun herself, like if I moved hard enough, fast enough, I could sweat the pain out through my skin.
A woman married to a monster.
A woman whose father had murdered her mother, faked his own death, and let his daughter rot for ten years while he lived rich and untouched.
A woman whose survival depended on a traumatized boy who clung to her because his world had already ended once.
A woman owned by a man who looked through her as if she were nothing—and yet somehow held her entire existence in his hands.
The bottle tilted back again. The burn was brutal and welcome.
Most nights, when I returned to the mansion, Ruslan would be in the living room—laptop open, jaw clenched, the cold blue glow of the screen carving harsh shadows across his face. I’d murmur a quiet, useless “I’m home.”
He never answered.
Not once.
He wouldn’t even lift his eyes.
I’d climb the staircase alone, each step echoing too loudly in the vastness of the house, slip beneath the cold, immaculate sheets of our enormous bed, and lie there staring at the ceiling until exhaustion dragged me under.
Sometimes he came to bed hours later.
Sometimes he didn’t come at all.
Either way, the space between us felt like an ocean—wide, dark, and impossible to cross.
He hated me.
He’d made that brutally, unmistakably clear.
He owned me.
