Page 54 of Beautiful Ruin

“Sofia, your uncle loved your mother. He would never harm her. Whatever your father told you isn’t true,” I say firmly, cupping her damp cheeks with my rough hands. My thumbs brush away fresh tears even as they continue to fall.

She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and pulls away from me to slide out of my bed. She’s shaking slightly, but there’s something beneath the trembling that looks almost determined in a wounded sense.

“I’ll be right back,” she says.

“Sofia.”

But she’s already moving.

She grabs my T-shirt from the floor and slips it over her naked body. The hem falls nearly to her thighs, the dark fabric swallowing her small frame. For a split second I’m too stunned to react and stop her from leaving, to warn her that someone might see her slipping out of my room.

She twists the handle and pulls the door open, disappearing into the hallway before shutting the door behind her.

I sit frozen in the middle of my bed, naked and still half-hard from the way we’d been pressed together minutes ago.

I let out a sigh and drop back onto the mattress, one arm flung over my eyes, the other fisted in the sheets as my pulse hammers inside my chest. The room is quiet, but my mind is anything but.

I drag my hand down my face, feeling the faint impression of the bruises from Ivan’s punishment still there. By now, they have mostly faded, but the memory of his fists still lingers like a branding.

After what feels like ten minutes have come and gone, the door to my room opens again without a knock of warning.

I sit up to catch Sofia slip back inside, her laptop clutched to her chest like a shield. Before I can open my mouth to ask her what the hell she’s doing, she flings it onto the bed beside me and crawls up after it.

I slap my palm over the laptop before she can open it. “Stop. Listen to me⁠—”

“No, Rowan.” She shoves at my shoulder, trying to move me to retrieve her laptop. “You’re going to look at what I found. Then you can judge for yourself.”

This woman will be the death of me.

I drag a hand down my face but release the laptop, only to hook an arm around her waist and pull her into my lap before she can squirm away. She lets out a small gasp but doesn’t fight me. Instead, she settles back against my chest, her body fitting flush with mine like it was made to be there, and opens the laptop.

Her fingers move quickly over the keyboard. Document after document appears, notes typed in frantic bursts that I force myself to read. It’s a transcript of her meeting with her father, documented almost like a stream of consciousness.

Her father speaks of meeting Irena for the first time back when they were teenagers, calling her “the love of his life” over and over. He describes her as bright and stubborn, much too gentle for the family she was born into, a girl with laughter in her mouth and steel in her spine. He says Ivan hated him from the beginning. That he saw him as unworthy and a threat to the future he intended to build around his family’s bloodline.

The conversation moves to an elopement and a pregnancy, the birth of Sofia that followed. He speaks about holding her as a newborn and Irena crying because she feared Ivan would take the baby away to keep her in Moscow, and of their promises made while the house slept to leave.

Then his exile. How he was forced out onto the unforgiving streets of the city with nothing but the clothes on his back. His supposedly begging Irena to leave with him and run away like they planned from the family that had controlled her all her life.

Every line is crafted to paint him as a victim. A man who lost everything, including his daughter who he one day hoped would learn the truth. The same one he never bothered coming back for after the tragic death of his wife. It doesn’t at all shock me, nor am I surprised this is the angle he decided to go in.

How else would he have gotten his only child on his side after years of no contact? Never mind the fact that if he believed the Kuznetsovs to be so dangerous, leaving his only child in the hands of such a monster would have been sacrificing her to the wolves. If he truly believed Irena had been trapped and controlled, why leave Sofia behind to be raised under that same family?

It doesn’t make any sense.

Sofia scrolls to a highlighted passage, her finger tapping against the screen. “He said as he was escaping with my mother, that’s when the ‘accident’ happened.”

I exhale slowly.

To an outsider, it’s a compelling story.

A young love crushed beneath family power. A secret marriage. A child born into danger. A woman finally willing to escape, only to die before reaching freedom. A father exiled. A daughter stolen. A brother turned tyrant.

It’s emotional and tragic in all the right ways.

But to me? Convenience is the loudest alarm bell of all.

I tilt my head down toward her, my chin brushing the top of her head. “Sofia… what reason would Ivan have to kill his own sister? She had already gotten married to your father and had you. What sense does that make?”