I welcomed it. Let it scour me. Let it flay me down to whatever truth remained beneath the monster I’d become.
In the old Greek way—our ancestors’ way—I mourned.
I tore at my hair, fingers clawing, yanking out dark clumps until blood slicked my scalp and strands clung to my hands like offerings to forgotten gods.
Then I raked my nails down my chest, shredding fabric and skin alike, carving bloody furrows over my heart as if I could excavate the guilt lodged there with brute force.
Memories came crashing down on me.
I remembered dragging her to the darkest side of California. Making her stand among the graves I had dug—four of them—closing her in like a sentence already passed.
I remembered how I poured her mother’s ashes into the dirt as if they were nothing, as if her grief meant nothing, and how she screamed until her voice broke. How she collapsed, shaking, begging, coming apart right in front of me.
I remembered the sky opening up. The rain falling hard, merciless, soaking her through in minutes.
How the cold crept into her bones, how her body trembled uncontrollably, how the wind lashed at her clothes like punishment layered on punishment. I watched it all. I allowed it. I caused it.
I hurt her. Deliberately. Thoroughly.
And somehow, that still wasn’t the worst of it.
The worst was what came after.
After I stripped her of what little strength she had left, I took everything else too—her freedom, her safety, our baby, her voice—when I sent her to prison. I didn’t just break her once. I kept breaking her, even when she was no longer in front of me to defend herself.
I smashed my fist into the gravel again and again, reopening fractures, grinding bone against stone until the pain sang louder than the rain, until my hand was numb and useless.
Then I pressed my forehead into the mud.
I let it coat my face, my mouth, my eyes.
I tasted dirt and iron and salt.
Shame.
Hours passed.
The rain never softened. It beat me into the ground, washing blood into the earth, reducing my tailored suit to sodden rags, plastering hair across my skull until I looked less like Ruslan Baranov—the man men feared—and more like a drowned corpse dragged from a riverbank.
When the storm finally exhausted itself, the sky bruised purple and silent, I rose.
Slowly.
Unrecognizable.
A hollowed-out man wearing the remains of someone else’s skin.
I staggered to the car, wrenched the door open, and collapsed into the driver’s seat. My hands shook as they closed around the wheel, slick with blood and rain.
The engine turned over with a low growl.
“I’ll find my wife,” I whispered to the empty cabin, my voice stripped raw by rain and ruin. “I’ll find her... and I’ll beg on my knees until she either forgives me... or kills me herself.”
The confession felt less like a vow and more like a sentence passed.
I drove like a man unhinged—tires shrieking against asphalt, the speedometer needle climbing recklessly into the red.
Streetlights blurred into streaks of gold and white, the world narrowing to a tunnel of motion and obsession.
