Finally, she steps inside, swinging the door shut behind her.
I stand there in the deepening dusk, staring at the house that holds everything I thought I’d lost. A wall of ordinary wood and paint separates me from them. From her. From him.
It would be too reckless of me to walk up those steps and knock on the door without a plan. Presenting myself after seven long years would get the door slammed in my face faster than she could even process what she was seeing.
If I’m going to do this, it has to be calculated. The same way I dismantled Anton’s loyalists, one by one.
I didn’t survive a coup by being reckless.
The question is timing.
She thinks I’m dead, that much I know. She’s already buried me in her mind, raised our son on the ashes of what we had back then, and built this quiet life to protect him, removed from the horror of what my Bratva brought into her life.
But things are not the same as they were back then.
The Bratva is stable again. My enemies are bones rotting in the dirt. The empire is rebuilt on foundations I bled to lay.
I could give her safety now. I could givehimsafety now.
I could give our son a name that means something. Alegacy. Protection no ordinary man could promise.
But would she believe that? Would she even let me close enough to try?
I picture her face when she opens the door and sees me standing there. Shock, and disbelief. Maybe even fear that I’m some ghost coming back to haunt her from beyond the grave. I wonder if there would be anger in her eyes too—that I survived without telling her, leaving her to carry the weight of raising our son alone.
My jaw tightens, the thought burning like acid in my throat.
Timing.
It will decide everything.
27
IVY
Ican’t shake it.
Even after we leave the park and get home, that prickling awareness clings to me like a second skin. I go through the motions on autopilot, slipping Leo’s jacket from his small shoulders, hanging it by the door, setting a pot to boil on the stove.
He chatters on about the swings and how he “almost touched the sky”, his hands flying everywhere as he describes it. Lettie laughs and I smile, nodding in all the right places.
I help him with his spelling homework, coax him through writing out a few sentences before my parents return home for dinner, but the whole time, that feeling stalks the edges of my mind.
The worst part is this isn’t the first time I’ve been feeling like this.
It’s been happening for weeks now. Long enough that I can’t chalk it up to a passing mood anymore. Ever since Leo turned six, the unease has been living under my skin.
I don’t know why, but that milestone felt heavier than the others. It was as if a hidden switch flipped inside me.
Paranoia? Maybe. I’ve asked myself that more than once.
But it doesn’t stop me from checking over my shoulder when I’m loading groceries into the trunk. It doesn’t stop me from slowing down on our evening walks, pretending to tie my shoe while my eyes sweep the street behind us. It doesn’t stop me from feeling my heart kick hard against my ribs when the back of my neck prickles, only to find the sidewalk empty when I turn.
It’salwaysnothing.
Just me, looking like an idiot, double-checking my surroundings for the tenth time.
I don’t know how to stop it.
