Slowly, he lowers his hand.
The softness quickly vanishes. Whatever humanity flickered there is gone in an instant, replaced by the cold armor I’ve come to recognize. His jaw sets. His eyes harden, turning unreadable, impenetrable.
“You wanted the truth. Now you have it,” he says flatly.
He turns away from me, toward the door, as if this conversation is already over. As if the devastation he’s just delivered is a closed transaction.
“Wait.”
He pauses with his hand on the doorframe.
When he speaks again, his voice is quieter. “Your father didn’t just bring you here to keep you safe from that bombing, Alina.”
I shake my head, a small, frantic motion. I don’t want to hear this. I already know in some terrible, instinctual way that whatever comes next will destroy something that cannot be repaired.
Sasha turns back to face me. His gaze pins me in place, heavy and unyielding. “He offered you up before you even finished school.”
My eyes widen.
“You were always going to end up here,” he continues, unrelenting. “With me. Why do you think he paraded you through those galas? The dinners? The charity functions where men twice his age watched you like inventory?” His mouth twists. “He was shopping you. Waiting for the highest bidder to come knocking on his door to take you off his hands. Your mother wasn’t there to stop it. So, he did what he wanted with you.”
I can’t breathe.
My mind fractures under the weight of it, memories rushing in all at once. Of Papa’s hand tight on my elbow as he steered me across marble floors, the way he corrected my posture before introductions, the subtle pressure to smile, to be charming, tobepleasing. I had thought it was politics. Optics. Parental pride warped by ambition.
But this…
This is something else entirely.
“What…?” The word barely makes it past my lips.
Then why allow me to go to school? To make me more appealing? Why the illusion of choice? Why let me believe, if only in the smallest, most fragile way, that my future belonged to me?
“So you bought me…” I whisper, “before anyone else could?”
Sasha’s brows draw together, not in confusion, but in grim acknowledgement. “Yes.”
That single word guts me.
I scramble backward, panic taking over. My hands push uselessly at the desk as I retreat until there’s nowhere left to go. My back hits the corner behind it hard enough to knock the air from my lungs. I curl in on myself instinctively like distance alone might protect me.
He doesn’t follow. He just watches me from where he’s standing, eyes dark and unblinking.
“You’re sick,” I choke out.
He doesn’t deny it. Somehow, that feels worse than any denial ever could. Worse than rage. Worse than excuses. Worse than lies dressed up as mercy.
The door closes with a quiet, absolute finality when he leaves. The click of the latch echoes around me, reverberating throughthe study and my body. Silence rushes in to replace him. It presses down on me, thick and suffocating.
The papers still lie scattered across the desk where the folder slipped from my hands. My mother’s face stares up at me from every direction. Her image repeats again and again, fractured by the chaos, half-hidden under pages stamped with my father’s signature like a brand burned into flesh.
A sob tears out of me before I can stop it, and then my legs give out.
I collapse to the floor, my knees slamming into the carpet hard. The sound I make doesn’t even feel human. It’s raw and animalistic, ripping from somewhere deep in my chest where words no longer exist. I crawl forward blindly and grab the nearest photograph off the edge of the desk and clutch it to my chest like it might anchor me.
Her smile is bright, unaware of the evil that lives under the same roof as her, plotting her demise. She looks so alive in this picture, as if death is some abstract thing that only happens to other people. I press my thumb against the edge of the photo, tracing the curve of her cheek, the familiar warmth of her eyes.
He killed her.
