My Malyshka

--- PROLOGUE The Weight of Scars --- They say monsters are born, not made. They're wrong. Monsters are carved—slowly, painfully, one scream at a time. They are shaped in the dark, in the blood-soaked corners of childhood, in the spaces where love should have been but wasn't. Dimitri Ivanov was not born a monster. He was made one. At nine years old, he watched his mother die on a kitchen floor, her blood seeping between the tiles like a promise he couldn't keep. He was too small. Too weak. Too young to do anything but see—and seeing was the worst punishment of all. Then they took him. They took him to a place where boys became weapons and mercy was a forgotten language. They broke his bones. They burned his skin. They held him underwater until the light faded and the darkness whispered his name. And in that darkness, something shifted. The boy died. What crawled out was something else. Something cold. Something that wore his face and used his voice but had forgotten how to smile. He killed his father with a letter opener and felt nothing—except the weight of his sister's arms around his neck, trembling, grateful, alive. She was the only thread keeping him tethered to humanity. The only reason he still remembered what it felt like to be soft. He built an empire on blood and loyalty. He swore he would never be weak again. --- And then she walked into his world. A girl with caramel skin and a septum piercing, clutching a wrench like a shield. She was small—so impossibly small—with big brown eyes behind fogged glasses and a scent of vanilla that clung to his lungs like a curse. She looked at him—really looked—and he saw no fear in her defiance. She wasn't supposed to be there. She wasn't supposed to matter. She was the daughter of a man who had watched Dimitri's mother die and done nothing. She was the enemy's child, a pawn, a tool to be used. But when her wrist trembled in his grip and her voice cracked with fury instead of tears, something inside him—something he thought had died in that camp—stirred. And Dimitri Ivanov realized: Monsters don't fall in love. They consume. And he would consume every piece of her—her heart, her soul, her hatred—until there was nothing left but the hollow echo of his own obsession. Because that was the cruelest truth of all: She was never going to escape him. And he was never going to let her go. --- This is a story about broken things finding each other. This is a story about forgiveness—and the price of withholding it. This is a story about the girl who made a monster feel human again. And the monster who would burn the world to keep her. --- Are you ready? --- Turn the page. —————————— Read content warnings before proceeding 18+