He raised his eyebrows, smirk fading. Looked away.
Smart.
I took a seat by the window. Alena's face crossed my mind again. Christ. I raised my hand. "Scotch."
The glass was in front of me before I could breathe.
The plane taxied smoothly, lifted off smoother still. London fell away below us—the lights of the city shrinking to pinpricks, then nothing. Just darkness and distance and the hum of engines carrying me toward a man I'd spent my entire life trying to forget.
And then the memories came.
Unstoppable. Unwanted. The kind that lived in the back of my skull like shrapnel I could never quite dig out.
The leather seat smelled like her flat. My mother's flat. Old and worn and full of ghosts.
The hum of the engines sounded like the machines that kept me alive when I was born.
The darkness outside the window looked like the void I'd been cut from.
I was never told the full story until I was older. I had to piece it together from orphanage files I wasn't supposed to see, whispered conversations between social workers who thought I wasn't listening, the cold facts typed out in a coroner's report I stole when I was sixteen and desperate to understand why I was the way I was.
My mother took the pills when she was eight months pregnant with me.
Not to kill herself alone.
To kill us both.
She'd found out who my father was—some rising Bratva enforcer with connections and blood on his hands, a man who'd used her and vanished the moment she told him she was carrying his child. He laughed, apparently. Told her a bastard would only complicate things. Threatened her if she kept it. Said he'd make her disappear if she ever came looking for money or support or anything resembling responsibility.
So, she chose death.
For both of us.
She swallowed enough pills to stop a heart twice her size, lay down on her bed in that small London flat, and waited for it to be over—waiting for the end she thought would spare me from his poison. She didn't want me born into his world. Didn't want me raised by monsters. Didn't want me to carry his blood, his legacy, his curse.
Was this the mother's love I heard so much about? Did she try to protect me? Maybe.
But I lived.
They cut me out after she was already gone. Heart stopped, body cold, skin turning gray. I came into the world covered in her blood, breathing only because machines forced air into my underdeveloped lungs. Born from a corpse. Born from a woman who chose death over letting me exist.
The note they found in her hand—folded tight, ink smudged from her fingers, the words burned into me like a brand—said it clearly enough for the adults to understand even if they tried to hide it from me:
You killed me by existing in my womb. You did this.
She never meant for me to read it even though it was clear—painfully so—she meant me. It was probably meant forhim. For Klaus. For the man who'd destroyed her life and then laughed about it. But someone—some well-meaning social worker or careless administrator—left it in my file. Someone thought I should know the truth.
So I grew up believing it.
Believing I was the reason she was dead.
Believing I carried death inside me from the very start, that my first act in this world was murder, that everything I touched would eventually turn to ash because that's what I was made of. Because it was true. I killed her. I drew my first blood before I was even born.
It's funny. I always wondered why I am so drawn to violence.
The plane leveled out. The seatbelt sign blinked off. Silence except for the steady drone of engines carrying me across an ocean toward the man who made my mother choose death over bringing me into his world.
I leaned my head back against the leather seat, closed my eyes.
