His jaw tightened slightly.
“I sent you to prison because I believed you were still in contact with your sister.”
His voice shifted — no longer possessive, but measured and almost explanatory.
“I intercepted communications. I found what appeared to be proof — messages that showed you feeding her intelligence. Helping her avoid my operations. Setting traps for my men.”
My pulse spiked.
He stared at me directly. “And in my world, betrayal like that earns execution. But I couldn’t bring myself to kill you.”
His voice lowered. “Not the way I would kill any other traitor.”
My stomach turned.
“So you chose prison,” I said bitterly.
“Yes.” He swallowed. “I will never forgive myself for what happened to you there.”
His tone lost its arrogance. “And I will spend the rest of my life trying to undo what my decision caused.”
My breathing remained uneven. “Undo?”
I shook my head. “You can’t undo trauma. You can’t resurrect a dead baby. You can’t erase the nights I begged God to let me die.”
His gaze flickered.
The mention of the child hit harder than anything else.
He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t deny. He absorbed.
“I never knew your uncle was one of the prison guards,” Ruslan continued quietly. “He later confessed how much he pressured you — repeatedly — to go into corners of the prison where the cameras couldn’t see.”
His jaw tightened.
“And when you rejected him... he weaponized the inmates. He ordered them to target you. To break you.”
My jaw tightened.
Images flashed through my mind — not because he described them explicitly — but because I had lived them.
Dragged through corridors.
Shoved into locked rooms.
Surrounded.
Cornered.
Bruised.
“He told me those women would do anything for him because he helped them move drugs outside the prison,” Ruslan went on quietly. “He admitted how they singled you out”
His jaw tightened.
“They’d drag you into the showers or the laundry room, inflict pain so severe it left you curled on the floor, gasping for air. Beatings that targeted your ribs, your back, places that bruised but didn’t show under clothes.
His jaw tightened. “They shoved filth at you... slapped you awake... and then it got worse.”
