Page 48 of His Stolen Bride

I feel cold settle in my stomach.

“Who?” I ask.

“You already know,” he says.

My grip on Oisin tightens.

“You can keep running,” Mikhail continues, his voice controlled but urgent. “You’re good at it. You proved that. Or you can stay where I can end this.”

“And my son?” I whisper. “What happens to him?”

Mikhail doesn’t hesitate. “If you run, they keep following you until he’s old enough to matter, and then they kill him to hurt me. If you stay, I burn the man who started this. Alina, nothing will change the fact that he’s my son too. He’s a Morin.”

“You don’t get to decide that for me,” I say, but my voice begins shaking.

But even as I move, a part of me has already done the math.

I didn’t disappear for six years by accident, and I didn’t survive on luck. I stayed alive by staying unfinished, by never letting any place feel permanent enough to settle into, and by leaving the moment something started to feel familiar. I worked kitchens, laundries, offices, anywhere cash changed hands quietly and no one asked for histories. I kept my head down, I paid rent in advance, and I never gave my real name twice.

I learned early that running wasn’t enough. Twice, men found me anyway. The first time was in a market, the second in a boarding house outside a city I didn’t bother learning. Different faces, same eyes, same careful patience. Both times, I left before they could act, and both times, I understood that this wasn’t random violence looking for money. It was someone waiting for the right moment.

That knowledge kept me moving even when my body wanted rest, and it kept my son growing up on buses and in borrowed rooms, learning not to ask why we left places so suddenly. I taught him how to pack fast, how to stay quiet when I told him to, and how to trust my voice even when everything else felt wrong.

It wore us down.

There were days I woke up exhausted before I even stood up, days when I counted my cash and knew I’d have to move again soon, days when I looked at my son sleeping and wondered how long I could keep asking him to live like this. I told myself it was temporary, because telling myself anything else would’ve broken me.

And through all of it, I thought about Mikhail more than I wanted to admit.

Not because I wanted his world, or his protection, or the life I ran from, but because he was the one man who understood exactly what kind of danger we were in. He never softened it for me. He never lied about the cost. Some nights, I caught myself wondering if staying would’ve been safer, if running only taught our enemies patience.

I hated myself for those thoughts, and I pushed them away every time they surfaced.

But seeing him here, in this moment, with a gunshot still ringing in my ears and my son pressed against me, I know something I’ve been avoiding for years.

I didn’t just run from Mikhail. I ran from the part of myself that trusted him to end this. And now, standing this close to him again, I can feel how tired I am of carrying it alone.

Another shot rings out, closer still. A scream follows.

Mikhail steps into my space. “I’m deciding it because I won’t lose him.”

I look up at him. “You don’t get to lose what you never protected.”

He doesn’t argue. “Alina,” he says quietly. “There’s no version of this where you walk out that door alone and live.”

Silence stretches between us. Oisin’s fingers twist in my shirt.

“What if I say no?” I ask.

Mikhail’s mouth tightens. “Then I still move you. Because this isn’t a debate.”

I laugh once, sharp and bitter. “That’s hardly what we’re going for.”

He glances down at Oisin again. “He’s mine.”

“Yes,” I say. “He is. And that’s why you don’t touch him unless I say so.”

Another shot, this one close enough to rattle glass.