Prologue

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

...ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ...

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...Dimitri ...

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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

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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.

---

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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.

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