But I looked.
He was tied to the table—if you could even call it that. It looked more like a slab of ruin. His body was barely recognizable. Skin flayed in strips. Cuts layered over bruises. One arm hung at an unnatural angle, the hand a mangled wreck of shattered fingersand torn flesh. His face—God, his face—was sunken, bloodied, unseeing. The sockets where his eyes used to be were just hollow, gaping holes.
I couldn’t breathe.
Maksym stood behind me, one hand resting gently on my arm. His breath was close, steady and warm against my ear.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I shook my head, voice barely a whisper. “No.”
From the ruin on the table, a rasp broke through. My name. Fragile. Broken.
“Kira...”
I froze.
His voice—barely there, more like the ghost of a sound—scraped against me like broken glass. I wanted to run. To scream. But my body wouldn’t move.
“I’ve been planning this for some time now,” Maksym said, still behind me, his voice low and taut like a wire pulled tight. “I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t want to risk you... interfering.”
I turned my head just slightly. Felt his breath on my cheek. Still too stunned to speak.
“He trafficked my little sister. Mila. Sold her.”
I gasped, my hand flying up to cover my mouth.
“She wasn’t the only one,” he went on, and now his voice cracked with something deeper—rage, maybe. Or grief. “Thousands of kids. Sold like property. That’s what built his empire. That’s what bought the house you grew up in.”
My thoughts spiraled, dragging me down with them. I’d always known my father was cruel—controlling, manipulative, capable of monstrous things—but this... this was something darker. This wasn’t just violence. It was evil. Cold. Systematic. A rot that had lived beneath our marble floors and crystal chandeliers all along.
I saw it then—etched in every corner of my childhood. The suffocating grip of control. The gilded cage I was raised in. My mother, humiliated and brutalized until she was discarded into an asylum like refuse. And me... offered up like a bargaining chip to a sadist. He hadn’t just ruined lives—he’d sold them.
“Kira...” he croaked again.
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. My chest felt hollowed out. My skin felt like ice.
Maksym’s hand tightened on my arm, grounding me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I couldn’t let him go. Not after what he did. Not after what he took. I had to make him pay—for her. For me.”
I still couldn’t speak. But I didn’t pull away.
“This isn’t about revenge anymore,” he murmured. “It’s about truth. About you knowing everything—and deciding what happens next.”
My pulse thundered. The weight of his words pressed into my chest like a stone. I could see my father’s body on the table. Barely alive. A grotesque ruin of the man who raised me. But the truth was, he’d been dead to me long before this.
I’d imagined this moment more times than I could count—sometimes through tears, sometimes through clenched teeth. I used to lie awake at night, wishing him gone, fantasizing about justice and revenge. And now, here it was. No dream. No fantasy. Just flesh and blood and ruin, right in front of me. All that remained was the question I had never truly answered: could I be the one to end it?
I pressed a hand to my stomach.
There, beneath my palm, was the reason. The only reason that mattered.
I’d been pregnant for five weeks, but I only found out last week. I missed my period. Thought it was stress. Valeria insisted. The test was positive before I even set it on the counter.And I felt…peace. I had stopped the pill because it made me sick to my stomach—literally. But I hadn’t told him. Not because I wanted to trap him.Because the truth is, the way Maksym fills me—it’s sacred. Like something more than physical. And I wasn’t lying when I said I wanted to carry him. I wanted him everywhere. Inside me. Around me. Tied to me in a way no one could sever.I know he fears he’d hurt a child the way he was hurt. But he’s wrong. He’d guard that baby like a war god.I’ve seen him love me when I didn’t deserve it. I’ve seen him fight for me when I wanted to give up. He doesn’t just deserve to be a father. He was made to be one.
I stepped forward. Slow. Deliberate. My father—no, the rotting husk who’d once chained me—lay bound and ruined, blind and pitiful. The air reeked of copper, decay, and the sour stink of fear-sweat, and it took every ounce of control not to retch again.
His head jerked at the sound of my footsteps, blind sockets searching for the source of the noise. He tried to speak. Tried to say my name. But I wasn’t his daughter anymore. He forfeited that right a long time ago.
