Page 65 of Bratva and Betrayal: Kirill

The video ends with the devastating reality that I’m not that woman on the screen anymore. She looked comfortable in her own skin, like she knew exactly who she was.

There was no fear in her. No wavering. Only certainty.

Only love.

Someone took that woman away from me. From the man standing over me. From the child who called me Mommy.

Anger fires under my skin, but I keep it together.

Kirill watches me with a raw sadness, reliving those moments. What he lost is visible in the shadows behind his eyes. He had our daughter all these years. He didn’t have me.

“The last time I saw you,” he begins, his voice laced with control. “You were going to see your father. He’d been calling you. He found out you had the baby.” His jaw tightens, the muscle ticking beneath his skin. “I never saw you again after that.”

That simple statement breaks my heart, the edges blurring together with Lourdes’s words all those years ago. Stairs, a fall, a skull fracture that split my life in two.

I press my fingers to my temple, the echo of that pain ghosting through my brain.

My thoughts of a past that is now a lie feel thick and murky until my mind wraps around the here and now.

“Does Violet know?” I ask, my voice more urgent now. “That I’m her mother?”

Kirill exhales slowly, nodding. “Yes. But I smoothed it over. I’d been telling her you’re here, but that you’re sick.”

I hold back tears at the idea of a little girl, my little girl, going all these years without a mother. Like I went without mine. I know that pain. I close my eyes briefly, letting all this settle inside me.

Lourdes’s voice echoes again: You made these choices. You loved him. You kept it a secret from us.

“Was I a virgin when we…” The question slips out before I can stop it, awkward and raw.

An entire part of my life exists in a hazy shadow. My body lived in a way that I don’t remember.

Kirill stills, but his eyes soften at the edges. “Yes,” he says finally. “You were.”

I blink, realizing that means he’s the only man I’ve been with.

“But you weren’t.” I voice the obvious.

“No.” His gaze holds mine, steady and unflinching. “I knew you were the one for me the minute I laid eyes on you. Before you, sex was just release, Sandrine. You made it about pleasure. But I’ve not touched another woman since you left.”

That confession breaks something open inside me. Tears spill out in my cheeks before I can stop them, hot and immediate.

“You remember us,” I whisper. “But I don’t.”

He exhales and crosses the room to sit on the edge of the bed beside me. The mattress dips toward him under his weight.

“It’s not your fault,” he says, his tone gentler now, stripped of all the hate he’d thrown at me yesterday. “You had an accident.”

“But you’re still mad at me,” I say, because I can feel an edge woven through everything he says.

“I’m mad because I begged you not to leave that night.” His voice cracks, and he looks away, pinching the bridge of his nose. But then he exhales, turning his head back toward me. “But there was no way to know this would happen.”

I study him, the tension in his shoulders, the way his hands flex slightly against his knees, like he’s holding back a darker side of himself.

“What now?” I ask.

The past is clearer, but the future seems much further away.

He stands and adjusts his charcoal suit jacket. The shift to controlling mafia boss is immediate, and any softness he just felt disappears.