Have they ever wondered that the monster they so hate, is the monster they created!!.

...ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ...

---

...Dimitri ...

---

Nine years old.

The kitchen smelled of burning bread and blood.

Dimitri Ivanov pressed himself into the corner, his small body trembling, his hands clamped over his ears. But nothing could block out the sounds. The wet, rhythmic thud of fist against flesh. His mother's choked whimpers. His father's guttural roars.

"You made him weak! You coddled him like a girl!"

Another blow. Another cry.

Dimitri wanted to run. Wanted to scream. Wanted to be brave like the heroes in his mother's bedtime stories—the ones who charged in and saved the day.

But he was just a boy.

And heroes didn't exist.

His mother's eyes found his across the room. Even through the swelling, through the blood streaming from her nose, she smiled. A broken, beautiful smile.

"Close your eyes, my love," she whispered. "Don't watch."

He couldn't obey.

He watched as his father grabbed her by the hair. Watched as he slammed her head against the kitchen counter. Once. Twice. Three times.

She stopped moving.

The silence that followed was worse than the noise.

His father turned to him, chest heaving, knuckles split and bloody. His eyes—those same dark blue eyes Dimitri had inherited—were wild with rage.

"You," his father spat, pointing a trembling finger. "You did this. Your weakness killed her."

Dimitri opened his mouth to deny it, to plead, to beg—

But no sound came.

He was already broken.

---

Three days later.

The camp.

They came for him at midnight—men in dark coats with hard faces and harder hands. They dragged him from his bed, his sister Maya screaming in the next room. He'd tried to reach her, tried to hold her hand one last time, but they'd torn him away.

"You're going to become a man," his father had said, watching from the doorway. "Or you're going to die trying. Either way, you're no longer my problem."

The truck ride lasted hours. Dimitri huddled in the corner, his wrists bound, his mind replaying his mother's final moments on an endless, torturous loop.

Live, my love. Live.

When they arrived, the camp was nothing but a nightmare made of mud and barbed wire. Other boys were there—some younger than him, some older. All of them hollow-eyed. All of them already dead inside.

"Welcome to your new home," the head instructor said, smiling with yellowed teeth. "Here, we break you or we make you. And there's no in-between."

They started with the water.

Dimitri was held under until his lungs burned and black spots danced across his vision. They pulled him up, gasping, then pushed him down again.

"Beg," they said. "Beg for mercy."

He didn't beg.

They moved to the needles. The electricity. The beatings that left him bruised and bleeding on the cold ground.

Every night, he'd curl into a ball and whisper his mother's name. Every morning, he'd wake up and find the will to survive.

Because that's what she'd asked of him.

Live.

---

Years passed.

The boy became a weapon.

Dimitri grew tall and hard and cold. His body became a canvas of scars—whip marks across his back, burns on his chest, a jagged line on his chin from a knife that had almost killed him at thirteen. He learned to kill before he learned to speak properly. He learned to endure before he learned to feel.

The instructors tried everything.

They starved him.

They broke his bones and made him run on them.

They held his face to the fire until his skin blistered and peeled.

But Dimitri never screamed.

He swallowed every cry, every whimper, every plea until there was nothing left inside him but ice.

And when he finally killed his instructor—snapped the man's neck between his thighs with a cold, clinical precision—he felt nothing.

"You're a monster," the dying man had choked out.

Dimitri had looked down at him, his blue eyes empty.

"No," he'd said softly. "I'm what you made me."

---

He returned home a stranger.

The Ivanov estate was the same. His father was the same—drunk, cruel, rotting from the inside out. But Maya was different.

She was twelve now. Thin. Bruised. Her eyes held the same terror Dimitri remembered from his own childhood.

"He hits me," she'd whispered when she saw him. "Just like he hit Mama."

Something cracked inside Dimitri's chest. Something he thought had died long ago.

He walked into his father's study. The old man was half-asleep, a bottle in his hand.

"Come to kill me?" his father slurred, laughing. "You're too weak. You've always been too—"

Dimitri didn't let him finish.

He picked up the letter opener from the desk—a cold, silver thing—and drove it through his father's eye with all the force of a lifetime's worth of pain.

The man dropped like a stone.

Dimitri stood over him, breathing evenly, watching the blood pool across the mahogany desk. He felt... nothing.

No. That wasn't true.

He felt relief.

Maya appeared in the doorway, her face pale, her hands shaking. She stared at their father's body, then at Dimitri.

And then she ran into his arms.

"I knew you'd come back," she sobbed into his chest. "I knew you'd save me."

Dimitri held her close, his scarred hands gentle against her hair.

"I'll never let anyone hurt you," he promised. "Never again."

---

Now, thirteen years later, he keeps that promise with blood.

But even a man forged in fire can be burned.

And when Dimitri Ivanov looks into the eyes of a soft, furious engineer with caramel skin and a septum piercing—when he smells vanilla and cocoa and defiant rage—something in his frozen chest begins to thaw.

He doesn't know it yet.

He doesn't understand it yet.

All he knows is that when she glared at him and whispered "I hope you rot," his heart—the dead, scarred thing he thought he'd buried—stuttered.

And for the first time in twenty-six years, Dimitri Ivanov felt afraid.

Not of her.

Of what she might awaken in him.

Because monsters don't get happy endings.

And he'd been a monster for so long, he'd forgotten how to be anything else.

...----------------...

Here's Ella's POV—a glimpse into her world before the collision, her fears, her loneliness, and the quiet strength she hides beneath baggy sweaters and big glasses.

...----------------...

To every lonely woman who was scared by her father and lost the hope to love

...ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ...

...ELLA...

present day

---

The night was quiet.

Ella Kovak sat cross-legged on her worn-out couch, a paperback balanced on her knee and a mug of hot chocolate cooling on the side table. Her glasses had slipped down her nose for the hundredth time, and she pushed them back with an absentminded finger, her eyes never leaving the page.

"And he pulled her into the shadows," she read silently, "his breath hot against her ear. 'You're mine,' he whispered. 'You've always been mine.'"

She snorted.

Yeah, right.

In her experience, men didn't whisper possessive things in the dark. They yelled. They slammed doors. They walked out and never looked back.

Like her father.

She closed the book with a sigh, setting it aside. The cover stared up at her—a shirtless man with smoldering eyes and a woman swooning in his arms. Fiction. Pure, beautiful, impossible fiction.

Ella pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. Her gray tank top was thin, and the apartment's ancient heater wheezed in the corner like it was on its last legs. Baggy sweatpants pooled around her ankles. Comfort. Safety. Layers between her and the world.

Outside, the city hummed with life she wanted no part of.

Inside, it was just her. And the silence. And the ghosts.

Her phone buzzed on the coffee table. She glanced at the screen.

Mum 💛: Did you eat dinner, sweetheart?

Ella smiled—a small, tired thing. Her mother, Clara, had been texting her the same question every night for twenty-three years. And every night, Ella lied.

Ella: Yes, Mum. Had soup. Tasty.

She hadn't. She'd had half a ham and polony sandwich and a handful of chips. But her mother worried enough without knowing that her eldest daughter survived mostly on caffeine and spite.

Another buzz.

Mum 💛: Your sister called. She says you're not answering her texts.

Ella winced. Sally. Her baby sister, her only true friend in the world. Sally was twenty-two, a doctor with a heart too big for her chest, and she had an annoying habit of seeing right through Ella's bullshit.

Ella: I'll call her tomorrow. I'm tired. Love you.

Mum 💛: I love you too, my darling. Sleep well.

Ella stared at the screen for a long moment. Then she opened Sally's messages—a string of increasingly frantic texts that ranged from "How was work?" to "Ella I swear to God if you don't respond I'm driving over there" to "I made cookies. They're sad. Please eat one."

Ella laughed—a quiet, rusty sound.

Ella: I'm alive. Work was hell. Cookies tomorrow?

Sally 🩺: YOU'RE ALIVE. Oh thank God. And yes, cookies tomorrow. I'll bring the good ones. Also, Mum said you sounded sad. What's wrong?

Ella's thumb hovered over the keyboard.

What was wrong?

Everything. Nothing. The usual.

Her father had called yesterday—Terence, the man who'd given her his last name and nothing else. He'd demanded she come to a family dinner at his estate. "With Irene and the girls," he'd said, as if Kelly and Grayson were her siblings rather than strangers who shared her blood.

She'd refused.

He'd yelled.

She'd hung up.

Now there were five missed calls from Kelly—her spoiled, cruel stepsister—and a text from Irene that read: "Your father is very disappointed. You know how he gets."

Ella knew exactly how he got.

Cold. Dismissive. Cruel when you least expected it.

She'd grown up with a mother who worked double shifts to keep food on the table, a sister who was too young to understand why Daddy was never home, and a father who only appeared when he wanted something. He'd married Irene—his mistress—when Ella was fifteen, and the divorce had been swift and brutal. Her mother had cried for months. Ella had spent those months learning to hate.

Now she was twenty-three, an engineer with a degree she'd earned through sheer stubbornness, and she still couldn't escape him.

Her father owned the construction company she worked for. Not because she'd asked—because he'd pulled strings behind her back, made sure she was "protected" in an industry full of men who didn't take women seriously.

Protected.

She laughed bitterly.

Caged was more like it.

She worked eighteen-hour days because she didn't have anything else. No boyfriend. No social life. Just blueprints and safety regulations and the quiet hum of her laptop at 2 AM.

Her apartment was small and cluttered—books stacked on every surface, bakeware she rarely used, a plant that was somehow still alive despite her best efforts to kill it. It wasn't much. But it was hers.

Hers.

No father. No stepmother. No spoiled stepsister barging in and calling her "the charity case."

Just Ella. And her books. And the sticky note on her mirror that read:

"You are not your father's daughter. You are your mother's warrior."

Sally had written that. Sally, who understood.

Ella touched the note, her fingertips brushing the faded ink.

"I'm trying," she whispered. "I'm really trying."

---

Later that night.

Sleep didn't come easily. It never did.

Ella tossed and turned, her heavy sleeper's body betraying her restless mind. The apartment creaked around her. The city hummed. And in the darkness, she saw her father's face. His cold eyes. His dismissive smile.

"You'll never be good enough," he'd told her once. "You're too soft. Too quiet. Too much like your mother."

She'd wanted to scream. To tell him that being like her mother was the greatest compliment she could imagine. But she'd stayed silent, as she always did. Silent and small and invisible.

Not anymore, she told herself. I'm not that girl anymore.

But sometimes, in the dark, she wasn't so sure.

---

————————————————————

Content warning: be warned before reading

This book contains adult content, including explicit sex scenes,adult language, and other content that maybe offensive to some readers

NOTE: Some content may be considered offensive to other people.

Other sensitive content includes depictions of violence,murder,child abuse and past torture.

This book is intended for adults ONLY!!. (18+!!!!!!!!)

Adults keep out of reach from underages.

Copyright © 2026 Emmaline

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to real events, real people, and real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the Author’s imagination and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, organizations, characters or places is entirely and purely coincidental.

...Ella...

...ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ...

The day of the storm

*Earlier that day*

Ella woke to the sun streaming through her thin curtains and her phone buzzing with a call from work. Site vandalized. Machinery destroyed. Documents stolen. The Volkovs, the foreman said. They were making moves.

Ella groaned, rubbing her eyes. She'd been at that site for three months—her biggest project yet. A new commercial complex on the east side. And now some rival faction was trying to sabotage it.

"I'll be there in an hour," she told her foreman. "Don't touch anything. I need to see the damage."

She dressed quickly—gray tank top, baggy sweatpants, her worn-out sneakers. She didn't bother with makeup. What was the point? She was going to spend the next eighteen hours crawling through dust and debris, and the only people who'd see her were construction workers who didn't care what she looked like.

Her glasses fogged as she stepped outside. The morning air was cold, thick with the promise of rain.

Great.

She grabbed a coffee from the corner shop—chocolate, extra sweet, the only thing that made mornings bearable—and drove to the site.

The site was a skeleton of steel and concrete, half-built and abandoned for the night. Vandalized machinery lay scattered across the ground. Stolen documents—blueprints, permits, everything—were gone.

Ella sighed, rubbing her temples.

"Eighteen hours," she muttered. "This is going to take eighteen hours."

She didn't know that, by nightfall, she'd be staring into the coldest blue eyes she'd ever seen.

She didn't know that she'd be accused of being a spy, trapped in a trailer by a man who looked like a god and talked like the devil.

She didn't know that everything she thought she knew—about herself, about her father, about the world—was about to shatter.

But she felt it.

A whisper at the back of her mind. A shiver down her spine. A premonition that something was coming—something dark and dangerous and inevitable.

She shook it off.

Focus, she told herself. One hour at a time.

And she walked into the trailer.

---

End of Ella's POV

...****************...

...Dimitri ...

...ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ...

---

The warehouse smelled of rust, rain, and fear.

Dimitri Ivanov stood motionless in the center of the concrete floor, his black silk hair slicked back from a face that could have been carved by a vengeful god—if gods believed in mercy. At six-foot-four, he towered over the kneeling men before him, his shadow swallowing them whole. His dark blue eyes, fringed with lashes too long for a man of his reputation, swept across their trembling forms with the dispassion of a surgeon examining cadavers.

The scar on his chin caught the dim light—a pale slash that bisected his jaw like a warning. Beneath his tailored black shirt, he knew the map of his chest and back told a darker story. Whip marks. Cigarette burns. A constellation of suffering etched into muscle and bone.

He was nine years old when his father beat his mother to death on the kitchen floor.

Dimitri had watched from the corner, too small to stop it, too frozen to scream. His mother's blood had pooled around the table legs, warm and sticky, and when she'd reached for him with a trembling hand, his father had stepped on her wrist and twisted.

"Weak," his father had spat. "You made her weak. And I will not raise a weak son."

Three days later, Dimitri was dragged from his bed and thrown into the back of a truck. The camp was deep in the mountains—a brutal place where broken boys were forged into weapons. They starved him. Beat him. Held his head underwater until his lungs burned and the world went white. They put needles under his nails. They broke his ribs one by one and made him run on them.

They tried to break him.

They failed.

Because every time the darkness closed in, Dimitri saw his mother's face. Heard her last whisper: "Live, my love. Live."

So he lived.

And he became something the camp masters feared.

At fourteen, he killed his first instructor—snapped the man's neck with his bare thighs—and walked out of those mountains like a ghost made flesh. He returned to the Ivanov estate a stranger. A blade. A reckoning.

He found his father in the study, bottle in hand, screaming at a twelve-year-old Maya. His little sister—the only soft thing left in his ruined world—was cowering in the corner, her cheek red from a slap.

Dimitri didn't speak.

He walked to the desk, picked up the letter opener, and drove it through his father's eye.

The man dropped without a sound.

Maya had screamed. Then, when Dimitri turned to her with blood-spattered hands, she'd run into his arms and sobbed into his chest. He'd held her—held her like she was the only thing keeping him tethered to this earth.

"I'll never let anyone hurt you," he'd whispered. "Never again."

That was thirteen years ago.

Now, at thirty-five, Dimitri Ivanov ruled the Bratva with an iron fist and a heart of frozen ash. He had the scars to prove his survival, and the ruthlessness to ensure no one ever forgot it.

---

"The shipment," Dimitri said, his voice a low rumble that echoed off the corrugated walls. "You lost it."

The man on the left—Viktor, a lieutenant who'd served his father—babbled something about a raid, about ambushes, about forces beyond his control.

Dimitri didn't listen.

He stepped forward, his leather boots echoing with each deliberate stride. The scent of sandalwood and citrus clung to him—the same fragrance his mother had worn, the one he'd preserved in her old bottles. The only piece of her he had left.

"Tell me," Dimitri murmured, crouching in front of Viktor. "Do you remember the camp?"

Viktor shook his head frantically, tears streaming.

"I do," Dimitri continued, his tone conversational. "Every moment. Every scream. They thought they could break a nine-year-old boy by drowning him. By burning him." He tilted his head. "They were wrong."

Viktor sobbed.

Dimitri stood, pulling a knife from his belt—a blade worn smooth from years of use.

"The shipment," he repeated. "Where did it go?"

Viktor cracked. Names spilled out. Locations. Dates. A rival faction called the Volkovs, operating out of a construction site on the east side of the city.

Dimitri listened, nodded, then pressed the blade to Viktor's throat.

"You're a dead man walking," he said softly. "But I'm not the one who kills you tonight." He withdrew the knife, tapping it against Viktor's cheek. "Run. Tell the Volkovs I'm coming. I want them to have time to pray."

Viktor scrambled away, stumbling out into the rain.

Dimitri watched him go, then turned to his second-in-command. "Burn this place. I don't want a trace."

"Yes, Pakhan."

He pulled out his phone, already dialing. Maya answered on the first ring.

"Big brother?" Her voice was warm, sweet—the only softness in his brutal world.

"I'm coming home," he said, his tone shifting, gentling. "Did you eat?"

"I'm waiting for you. I made borscht."

His chest tightened—the only place he allowed himself to feel anything. "I'll be there in thirty."

---

The construction site was a skeleton of steel and concrete, half-built and abandoned at night.

Dimitri arrived with six of his men, all armed, all silent. The rain had turned to a mist, clinging to his black coat. He moved through the site with the efficiency of a man who had killed too many times to count.

But the Volkovs were rats—they'd scattered.

All except one.

He found her in the main office trailer, hunched over blueprints spread across a folding table, muttering to herself. Curly black hair fell around her face like a storm cloud. Caramel skin. A septum piercing that glinted under the fluorescent light. She wore a gray tank top and baggy sweatpants, and she was tiny—barely five feet, if that.

She was also holding a wrench like a weapon.

"You're not supposed to be here," she said, her voice trembling but defiant. Brown eyes—big, dark, magnified by glasses—fixed on him. "This site is off-limits. I'm the lead engineer, and—"

Dimitri's men fanned out behind him.

The smell hit him first—vanilla and cocoa, cloying and soft. Everything about her was soft. Curves. Eyes. That ridiculous nose ring. She looked like a pastry chef who'd wandered into a war zone.

"Who sent you?" he demanded, his voice ice.

She blinked. "What?"

"The Volkovs. Who sent you to spy?"

Her expression twisted—confusion first, then anger. "I don't know what you're talking about. I work for Terence Holdings. This is my site. My project. And you and your..." she gestured at his men, "...theater troupe need to leave before I call security."

Dimitri laughed—a cold, hollow sound.

She flinched. Good.

He stepped into the trailer, crowding her space. She smelled of vanilla and defiance, and he wanted to crush both.

"Tell me where the Volkovs are hiding," he said, looming over her. "Or I will make your life a very short misery."

"I don't know any Volkovs!" She jabbed the wrench at his chest—he didn't flinch. "I was called in because someone vandalized this site! Machinery destroyed, documents stolen—I've been working for eighteen hours to salvage what I can!"

His jaw tightened.

It could be true. The Volkovs were sloppy. They'd torched a competitor's site before.

But he didn't trust coincidence.

And he didn't trust her.

"This site," he said slowly, "is linked to the Ivanov Syndicate. Which means you—"

"Are an engineer!" she snapped, shoving at him—ineffective as a kitten. "Not a gangster! I don't know who you are, but if you don't leave right now, I'm calling the police. And my father. And—"

"Your father?" Dimitri's eyes narrowed. "Who's your father?"

Her mouth snapped shut. Guilt flickered across her face.

"Tell me," he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Or I'll start breaking things. And I don't mean the machinery."

She swallowed hard. Her glasses had fogged slightly—from fear, or the heat of the trailer. He could see the pulse fluttering in her throat.

"Terence," she finally said, quiet. "Terence Kovak."

Dimitri went still.

Kovak.

The man who had helped his father. The man who had watched as nine-year-old Dimitri was dragged to that truck. The man who had smiled and said, "He'll come back a soldier or not at all."

The man who had laughed at Dimitri's mother's funeral.

"Good riddance," Kovak had muttered, loud enough for Dimitri to hear through his tears.

Dimitri had never forgotten.

And now—this girl. This soft, furious, ridiculous creature—was his daughter.

"Terence Kovak," Dimitri repeated, tasting the name like poison.

"Yes." She lifted her chin. "So you see, if you touch me—"

"I won't touch you," he said, and his smile was the worst thing she'd seen all night. "I'll do something far worse."

He turned to his men. "Seal the trailer. No one enters. No one leaves."

"What? No!" She lunged for the door—he caught her wrist. His grip was iron. She was so small beneath his palm, fragile as a bird.

He pulled her close, tilting her chin up. Her scent—vanilla—filled his nostrils.

"Listen to me, little engineer," he murmured. "You're going to stay here until your father comes to collect you. And when he does..." His thumb traced her jaw, featherlight, threatening. "I'm going to destroy everything he loves. Starting with you."

Her breath caught.

Tears welled in those big brown eyes—but she didn't cry. She glared at him with such pure, incandescent hatred that something in his chest shifted. Unsettled.

"I hope you rot!!" she whispered.

Dimitri smiled.

"Already did, sweetheart. A long time ago."

He released her wrist and strode toward the door. Paused.

"Try to run," he said softly, not looking back, "and I'll make sure your father finds you in pieces."

He left her there.

But as he walked through the rain, the scent of vanilla lingered in his lungs. And for the first time in years, Dimitri Ivanov felt something other than cold.

It felt like obsession.

And it terrified him.

---

End of Chapter One

...****************...

...Ella ...

...ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ...

The trailer door slammed shut, and Ella Kovak was alone.

Her wrist throbbed where he'd gripped it—a ring of fire that would bruise by morning. She stared at the closed door, her heart hammering against her ribs so hard she could hear it in her ears. Thump. Thump. Thump. Like a trapped bird battering against a cage.

She'd never been so afraid in her life.

Not when her father had screamed at her mother. Not when Kelly had locked her in the garden shed as a teenager. Not even when she'd been caught in a structural collapse her second year on the job.

This was different.

This was him.

Those eyes—dark blue, framed by impossibly long lashes, cold as a frozen lake. That face—chiseled, perfect, marred only by the scar on his chin. That voice—low and rough, like gravel wrapped in silk.

And the way he'd looked at her.

Like she was a bug beneath his shoe. Like she was nothing. Less than nothing.

Ella backed away from the door, her legs trembling. The wrench was still in her hand. She clutched it like a lifeline, her knuckles white.

Think. Think. You're an engineer. You solve problems.

She scanned the trailer. One door—the one he'd walked through. Two windows—too small to fit through, and bolted shut. A desk. A filing cabinet. A folding table covered in blueprints.

And a phone.

Yes.

She lunged for it, her fingers fumbling across the receiver. She dialed 9-1-1 with shaking hands.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

"Hello? I need—"

The line went dead.

She stared at the phone. Then she followed the cord with her eyes—snapped cleanly, deliberately. He'd cut it. Or one of his men had, while she wasn't watching.

Ella dropped the phone, her breath hitching.

She tried her cell next. Fumbled through her bag, her fingers numb. Pulled out her phone—

No signal.

Of course. They'd jammed it. She'd read about that in crime novels, never thought it would happen to her.

What do I do? What do I do?

She paced the trailer, her mind racing. Eighteen hours of work, and now this. She'd been so focused on the damaged machinery, the stolen documents, the mountain of paperwork waiting for her. She hadn't even noticed the men approaching. Hadn't seen them until it was too late.

And then he had stepped through the door, and everything had stopped.

He's not going to hurt you, she told herself. He said he wasn't going to touch you.

But the way he'd said it—"I'll do something far worse"—sent ice crawling down her spine.

She thought of her mother. Sweet, kind Clara, who had no idea her daughter was trapped in a construction trailer by a man who looked like an angel and talked like a demon.

She thought of Sally. Her baby sister, who would panic and drive straight here, straight into danger.

She thought of her father.

Terence.

The name tasted bitter in her mouth.

He'd done something. Something to make this man—this Dimitri Ivanov—hate him. She could see it in the way his eyes had darkened when she'd spoken her father's name. The way his jaw had tightened. The way his voice had dropped to that cold, lethal whisper.

"Terence Kovak."

Like the name was a curse. Like he'd been waiting his whole life to say it.

Ella sank onto the edge of the desk, her legs giving out. The wrench clattered to the floor. She didn't pick it up.

She was so tired.

So impossibly, bone-deep tired.

She'd been working for eighteen hours before he'd shown up. Eighteen hours of crawling through dust, cataloging damage, trying to salvage what she could. And now—now she was trapped. Alone. At the mercy of a man who looked at her like she was a stain on his perfect world.

Don't cry, she told herself. Don't you dare cry.

But the tears came anyway—silent, hot, sliding down her cheeks and dripping onto her tank top. She pressed her palms to her eyes, trying to push them back.

Stupid. Stupid. You're not a victim. You're not weak. You survived your father. You survived Kelly. You survived everything life threw at you.

You can survive this.

But could she?

He'd said he was going to destroy her. Not kill her—destroy. And somehow, that was worse. Because destruction wasn't quick. It wasn't clean. It was slow and methodical and cruel.

Ella wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and stood.

No.

I won't let him.

I'm Ella Kovak. I'm an engineer. I solve problems.

And I will find a way out of this.

...Dimitri ...

...ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ...

Outside, the rain had stopped.

Dimitri stood beside his car, a cigarette burning between his fingers. The mist clung to his coat, to his hair, to the scars hidden beneath his clothes.

Alexei approached, his footsteps silent on the wet concrete.

"Pakhan. The men are in position. The Volkovs have been spotted at their secondary hideout."

Dimitri nodded, taking a long drag. The smoke curled around his face, mixing with the sandalwood and citrus that clung to his collar.

"And the girl?" Alexei asked. "What do we do with her?"

Dimitri was silent for a moment.

The girl.

He could still feel her wrist beneath his fingers—small, fragile, the pulse fluttering like a trapped bird. He could still see those eyes—big and brown and full of fire, even as they filled with tears. He could still smell her—vanilla and cocoa, sweet and soft and utterly out of place in his world.

He should kill her.

Not today. Not now. But eventually. She was Terence Kovak's daughter, which made her his enemy. And enemies didn't survive in his world.

But something stopped him.

Something about the way she'd glared at him. The way she'd whispered, "I hope you rot," like she meant it. Like she wasn't afraid to say it to his face.

Most people trembled. Begged. Cried.

She'd done none of those things.

She'd stared at him with hatred burning in those stupidly big eyes, and she'd told him to rot.

Dimitri almost smiled.

Almost.

"She stays," he said, his voice flat. "For now. I want to know what she knows. And I want her father to squirm."

Alexei nodded. "The trailer is sealed. She won't get out."

"Good." Dimitri crushed his cigarette beneath his heel. "Let her sit. Let her wonder. Fear is a better weapon than pain."

He slid into the back of the car, the leather creaking beneath his weight. As the engine purred to life, he glanced back at the trailer—a small, lonely structure in the middle of the abandoned site.

Somewhere inside, she was pacing. Crying. Plotting her escape.

He should have felt nothing.

He'd spent years learning to feel nothing.

But as the car pulled away, Dimitri Ivanov felt something stir in the frozen wasteland of his chest.

Annoyance, he told himself. Just annoyance.

But it wasn't.

It was hunger.

And he hadn't been hungry in a very long time.

---

...Ella...

...ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ...

Inside the trailer, Ella finally stopped pacing.

She sat on the floor, her back against the cold metal wall, her knees pulled to her chest. The tears had dried, leaving salt tracks on her cheeks. Her glasses were smudged. She didn't bother to clean them.

He's gone, she thought. For now.

But he'd be back.

She knew it with the same certainty she knew that the sun would rise tomorrow. He'd be back, and when he came, he wouldn't be gentle. He wouldn't be kind.

He'd be the monster she'd glimpsed behind those beautiful blue eyes.

Ella closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the wall.

"Mom," she whispered into the darkness. "Sally. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

She didn't know if she'd ever see them again.

But she made a promise—to herself, to her mother, to the sister who was the only real friend she'd ever had.

I will survive this.

I will get out.

And I will make Dimitri Ivanov regret the day he crossed paths with me, Ella Kovak.

...----------------...

She didn't know that he already did.

Or that their story was only beginning.

...----------------...

End of Chapter Two

...****************...