The only thing is this—Ruslan and the taste of blood, whiskey, and home where there should be none. He always does this to me. He takes the noise out of my world with a single touch and leaves me raw in the quiet that follows.
When he finally breaks the kiss, we’re both breathing hard. His thumb strokes my cheekbone once, gentle in a way nobody who knows him would ever believe.
He’s watching me with that same unbearable softness he’d never survive showing anyone else. It settles over the room, over the bruises and the blood and broken edges of my temper.
The meeting downstairs belongs to our fathers, to legacy, to humiliation, control, and all the things we inherited.
This belongs to us—stolen, temporary, and dangerous enough that wanting it already feels like treason.
This should have ended at Vintermoor two years ago.
The thought comes again, uninvited, and I tamp it down.
“What did he say to you?” he murmurs.
I break eye contact and stare at the opposite wall. “Nothing I haven’t heard before.”
His jaw tightens. “Salvatore.”
I could lie. I should lie. That’s what men like us are taught from birth—that pain is private, and weakness is bait. But this is Ruslan, and he already knows my soul too deeply. He knows how quickly I go quiet when my father changes his tone. He knows the bruises that never show on my skin.
“He was disgusted by my outburst and called me weak for losing my temper,” I say, and hate how flat my voice sounds.
Ruslan goes very still in front of me. That silence is dangerous in him—more dangerous than shouting. I place my hand on his chest and shake my head.
“Don’t,” I say.
His eyes meet mine, cold with a fury that isn’t aimed at me. “One day, you will stop shrinking for him.”
I let out a bitter laugh. “That’s easy for you to say. Your father lets you bare your teeth in rooms like that and calls it strength.”
Ruslan’s expression immediately changes from soft to guarded. “My father expects blood in private if I embarrass him in public. Don’t romanticize what you don’t know,malysh.”
There’s no self-pity in his words, only cold fact. That makes his words land harder.
I study him for a second—this violent, impossible man holding me in the wreckage of my hotel suit like I’m something worth calming.
Ruslan lifts my hand to his mouth, presses his lips to my knuckles, and looks at me with a softness no one else in the world would believe lives in him.
“I missed you,lyubimiy.”
I close my eyes for a second because there’s no point pretending I don’t fold for it. Beloved. Favorite. Mine in every way that matters and none that can ever survive daylight.
I am weak in exactly the way my father despises. I am twenty-three, furious, and so tired of being carved into shape for other men’s expectations.
So, I slide my arms around his neck, rest my forehead against his, and whisper the truth back into the wreckage he’s made of me.
“I missed you too,cuore mio.”
Ruslan - 25 Years Old
Sugar – Sleep Token
Ifixmycufflinksinthe backseat of the car, and watch my own reflection in the window until my face becomes someone else’s.
That’s the trick of survival in a family like mine. It isn’t just learning how to lie well, though I do that, too. It isn’t learning how to kill cleanly, either, though I’ve been trained for that since I was old enough to hold a knife without shaking.
The real trick is learning how to choose which version of yourself gets to live in which room.
