The late arrival—to humiliate the Thompsons, to fracture their pride. The kidnapping of my son—to force my hand, to drag me into the open. This grotesque altar spectacle—so she could hide behind vows and rings and legality.
Marriage to me would make her untouchable.
Or so she believed.
She thinks she can escape justice by becoming my wife.
The thought almost made me smile.
She was about to learn how wrong she was.
The priest cleared his throat and began the ceremony, words tumbling over each other in a rushed, barely coherent stream. His voice shook, cadence off, as if he were sprinting toward the end simply to survive it.
I barely heard a word.
My attention was fixed entirely on her—on the tremor in her shoulders, the blood drying at the corner of her mouth, the way her eyes kept flicking to the exits as if calculating odds that did not exist.
Then one sentence cut cleanly through the haze.
“Do you, Elena Vasquez, take Ruslan Baranov as your lawfully wedded husband?”
The name—Elena—hit me like a blade between the ribs.
Ten years ago, another Elena had beaten my sister, Amy to death.
One hundred and fifteen blows. Fists swinging long after bone shattered, long after breath stopped, long after mercy should have intervened. The guards had counted.
And now this Elena.
The woman who had butchered Maria. Who had carved my unborn child out of her body like meat from a carcass. Who had left her throat slit to bone and her eye gouged out with deliberate precision.
Two Elenas.
Two women who had taken everything from me.
The name felt like a curse etched into my soul.
This one would pay for both.
I would not kill her.
Death was too quick. Too merciful. Too final.
I would make her live.
I would make every breath she took ache. Every day stretch into a slow, exquisite agony. I would teach her pain so intimate and unrelenting that Al-Chapo’s prison would look like a holiday by comparison.
She was shaking her head now.
Slow. Desperate. Tears pooled on her lashes, catching the chapel light. Her gaze darted toward the pews—toward faces that would not save her. Toward power that had already abandoned her.
An act.
It had to be.
I closed the distance in one stride.
My fingers wrapped around her upper arm—firm, controlled. Not hard enough to bruise yet. Just enough to remind her that escape was no longer a concept she was allowed to entertain.
