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The penthouse was close to Ro’s mansion but not near enough for him to hear my screams.

My father didn’t break any bones, or hit my face, or chest or legs. He asked me to remove my T shirt, kneel before him facing my back.

My back was the canvas and he was the artist.

The art, however, was grotesque.

He’d whip me six times every week he visited, one for each year I had escaped. I was conditioned that way. Mama taught me how to run, never to fight back.

Years passed, but every strike left me wondering, had he caught Mama too?

Was he doing the same to her?

When my father left, I asked Roman to help me find my mother the next morning. He didn’t know about my father’s frequent visits and found it odd but helped me nonetheless.

I was scraping public records, running facial recognition through custom scripts, cross referencing IP logs, hacking together some old security camera feeds.

I even wrote a small app to flag patterns in bank transactions.

A week later, the trail finally broke: her last known location, thirteen years ago, in Moscow, Russia.

What was Mama doing in Russia? I thought she’d escaped?

If she was in Russia…

Why didn’t she come back for me?

It was foolish to go back to the very place I’d spent years trying to escape. But I had to know.

Why didn’t she come back for me?

I thought I’d made peace with the fact that she didn’t want me anymore.

Apparently not. She left me.

Did she have a new family?

A son who doesn’t scowl whenever she denies him pelmeni?

But beneath the rage was guilt. It overrode every shred of rationality, and I decided to go back to Russia.

Roman protested but when he realised nothing would change my mind, he decided to come with me.

We were just about to leave my penthouse when Vasily showed up again, making Roman stop dead in his tracks.

He had no idea about the random visits—or that for the past two years, my father had been making my life a living hell behind closed doors.

The silence was deafening until it wasn’t.

Roman only looked at me once, none of my injuries were visible and it was beyond me how he put two and two together.

His gaze darkened and I only saw mayhem unleash like lightening on my father.

I had never seen Roman move like that. He had Vasily by the throat, lifting him almost a foot off the ground.

For the first time ever, my father, my abuser, was begging for mercy.

“I’m going to kill you!” Roman roared, hurling him with all his strength. Vasily’s body slammed against the wall, then crumpled to the floor like dead meat.