“And it worked, didn’t it?”
My eyes locked onto his. “You isolated him from me. You controlled visitation. You dictated access.”
I leaned in slightly. “And now he needs me?”
I let the silence linger for emphasis. “After four—plus one—years of complete radio silence?”
“I thought independence would be good for him,” Ruslan said.
His tone shifted — defensive but composed.
“I thought—”
“You thought keeping him away would give you free rein to punish me however you wanted.”
The words came sharper now. “Maybe even make me disappear permanently.”
I tilted my head. “No?”
His jaw tightened again.
His hands — which had remained relaxed at his sides — curled slightly before he forced them to unclench.
For the first time since this conversation began, something real crossed his face.
Pain.
It lasted less than a second.
But it was there.
“I was wrong,” he said quietly. “About almost everything.”
My smirk earlier had been intentional — a shield.
But beneath it, memories had surfaced without permission.
The first forty-eight hours after our marriage still lived vividly in my mind.
Ruslan didn’t mark our union with tenderness. He marked it with vengeance.
Our marriage had been his way of avenging his late wife and his sister—using me as collateral in a war I never started.
He had ordered his men to dig a grave.
The soil had been turned carefully.
Fresh earth mixed with crushed roses from the garden.
He had stood at the edge of that pit with his arms folded, watching in silence, his expression calm and unreadable as he explained in that slow, measured tone how easily he could bury me alive—how it would be the first punishment I would endure for my sister’s supposed sins.
But in the end, it hadn’t been me inside that grave.
The therapist who had betrayed my trust—the one who had sold my confidential disclosures to Harlan—had been the one buried there instead.
Without that twist of fate, it wouldn’t have been him in that grave—it would have been me, buried alive by now.
After that display, Ruslan showed me nothing but hatred and cold abandonment within his own house.
