Really looked.
Hair matted with sweat and tears. Eyes bloodshot, ringed with dark circles so deep they looked like bruises. Lips cracked and bleeding. The scar on my neck fresh and red, still weeping blood. I looked like death warmed over. Like something the world had chewed up and spit out.
I looked like a victim.
And then I laughed.
Not broken. Not manic. Clear. Sharp. Dangerous.
"Okay," I said to my reflection. "Enough."
The shadows in the bathroom stirred. Watching. Waiting.
I met their attention in the mirror's reflection. Held it.
"That ends today," I said, voice steady for the first time in weeks. "I will not fall because of a fucking man. Whoever he is."
The shadows hesitated.
Then they moved.
Not toward me. Not threatening. They shifted, reorganized, settled into the corners like obedient dogs waiting for commands. The whispers stayed silent. The cold stopped creeping. The frost on the mirror began to melt, water running down in slow streams.
I felt it then—the shift. The change. They weren't controlling me anymore.
I was controlling them.
Or at least, we'd reached an understanding. A truce. They could hurt me, yes. But I could hurt them back now. I'd proven it. And they knew it.
I wiped the blood from my neck with the back of my hand. Looked at myself one more time. At the woman in the mirror who'd survived ghosts and abandonment and her own spiral into madness.
"No more," I whispered.
The woman in the mirror stared back.
Broken, yes.
But not defeated.
Not anymore.
27
DROGO
Six months.
That's how long I've been in New York. Half a year since I walked out of Alena's apartment promising I'd be back in a few days. Half a year of blood on my hands and lies on my tongue. Half a year of becoming someone I don't recognize in the mirror anymore.
The stars on my knees burn under fresh bandages—two eight-pointed Bratva stars, one on each kneecap. Earned two nights ago in Klaus's penthouse basement, guards holding my arms while the tattoo artist worked and Klaus watched from his wheelchair with that smug, dying smile.
"Klekni," he'd said in Russian. Kneel. "Dokazi chto ty gotov."Prove you're ready.
I'd answered in the same language. "Ya gotov, otets."I'm ready, father.
The words came easier now. Russian rolled off my tongue like I'd been speaking it my whole life instead of just six months. Immersion, they call it. Survival, I call it. You learn fast when your life depends on understanding every whispered conversation, every coded order, every threat hidden in pleasantries.
The irony of the knee stars wasn't lost on me. Bratva stars on the knees mean I bow to no one. But I'd gotten mine by kneeling for him. By bowing to every demand, every kill, every piece of myself he asked me to carve away.
