“Can’t change the past,” I mutter.
I slam the door and lock it.
My back slides down the glass until I’m sitting on the floor, knees pulled in, hands covering my face as the sound finally breaks free.
I break down in a full-body sob. Rage and devastation are tangling so tight I can’t tell them apart.
Roxy’s arms wrap around me, but I barely register it.
My mother’s words echo in my head.
He’s dead.
He can’t hurt me.
And that brings me a quiet, terrible kind of peace.
I remember the gunshot. The scream. The not knowing. The years of wondering if he lived.
It’s haunted me.
And now, finally, that part of the nightmare is over.
My abuser is dead.
And the man who saved me made sure of it.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Drago
We’re on the jet back to the US, and Lev’s sound asleep, his breathing steady beside me, so I pull up the monitor feeds from Lily’s gallery and slip my headphones on.
Her sobs hit me instantly.
They don’t just reach my ears. They carve straight through my chest, the kind of sound that lodges itself in your bones and refuses to leave.
The pain she carries… I wish I could rip it out of her and shoulder it myself.
I lean forward, elbows on my knees, jaw clenched tight. I wish I could see her smile again. The real one. The one from before. The one that lit her up from the inside out.
What the hell happened to you, lastochka?
I rewind the footage, slowing it down, watching every second with surgical focus. Zooming in. My body goes rigid the moment I see her.
Maria.
A low growl slips out of me before I can stop it. This explains why Lily is so upset. Her mother might not have been the one to hurt her physically, but she brought the man into Lily’s life who did.
She is the most useless mother in the world.
She wasn’t always like that. Before she left Russia, she was a good mother to Lily. Then something in her cracked. Greed, maybe. Or resentment. She wanted the life Lev couldn’t give her at the time. The luxury. The attention. The illusion of power.
Boyfriend after boyfriend paraded through Lily’s life like disposable accessories— until the husband.
The one I left bleeding out on the floor.
My jaw tightens as the memory surfaces. I left my mark so there would be no confusion about who he’d crossed.
