My mother’s ashes in the hands of the man who believed I had murdered his pregnant wife. The juxtaposition crushed me. Relief, grief, terror, and disbelief collided in a storm inside my chest.
Ruslan tilted his head, watching me like a sculptor studying his clay before molding it. “You see what I have given you,” he said softly, almost conversational. “You see what I could take away.” His storm-gray eyes never wavered, never softened.
There was no mercy there—only the promise of consequences measured with precision.
I tried to speak—to explain, to scream that I ran because I was terrified, that I was innocent, that I had never harmed anyone... least of all his wife.
My throat tightened instantly, cruelly, a cage around my words. Blood welled in my mouth again, a metallic, sharp reminder that I could not release the truth in voice, only in desperate, silent terror.
Ruslan stood slowly, lifting the urn higher so I could see it in its entirety, shadows dancing across its smooth surface. “You don’t get to leave your past behind,” he said flatly. “What you did followed you here. You ran from it, but it caught up. And now you’re going to face it.”
I shook my head, heart hammering.
I could feel the grave dirt under my nails, the cold creeping through my borrowed lounge pants.
My knees threatened to buckle. I wanted to collapse. I wanted to cry. I wanted to curl into a ball and vanish. But theman who had orchestrated this circle of graves and held the ashes of my mother was waiting. And I could not vanish. Not yet.
The circle seemed to close in. Each grave, each empty pit, a mirror of my terror. The urn, the moon, his eyes—all pressed into me with suffocating inevitability.
I clenched my fists, blood drying on my knuckles, and forced myself to breathe.
One slow, deliberate inhale.
One shaky exhale.
Ruslan spoke again, almost gently, but with the weight of a hammer. “Do you understand the stakes now, Elena? Every action, every choice... every lie, every truth—it all leads here. To this moment. To your reckoning.”
My reckoning? My chest tightened, breath catching in my throat. I shook my head, almost violently. No... this isn’t mine.
“I—I didn’t—” My words faltered, stuck somewhere between throat and teeth. I pressed a hand to my chest, as if trying to physically hold the truth in place.
As I stared at him, frustration and helplessness clawing at my chest, a memory I had buried deep clawed its way back into my mind—a memory I had tried, over and over, to erase, yet it had never let go.
I was eighteen.
Three years after the funeral, my aunt and her husband arrived.
Their condolences were practiced, hollow.
Their eyes roamed the house like predators, scanning, weighing, measuring my grief as if it were an account to be settled.
They spoke of family, of duty, of how dangerous it was to leave a girl alone with her sorrow. “Stay with us,” they said, their words soft, almost comforting, but the intent behind them was a cage. A trap dressed as charity.
I moved in with them believing I needed someone—anyone—to share my grief with. I was young, raw with loss, desperate not to be alone inside my pain. I thought family meant safety. I thought I could trust them.
But that very first night, in a house I believed would protect me, I woke to something I would never forget.
Something that did not belong in my room.
Did not belong in my life.
Did not belong on my body.
Hands slammed me into the mattress—heavy, relentless, crushing the air from my lungs. Panic detonated inside me as my eyes adjusted, and then I saw his face.
My aunt’s husband.
The man who had hugged me at the funeral. Who had called me family.
