Page 126 of Scarlet Thorns

Rest.

As if sleep is possible when your world has just collapsed into rubble.

I don’t remember leaving the hospital. Don’t remember the drive home or walking through my front door. The next thing I’m aware of is the familiar fire of vodka down my throat— premium Russian poison that promises numbness but delivers only deeper pain.

Half the bottle disappears before my body finally surrenders to exhaustion. I collapse onto the living room sofa still wearing yesterday’s clothes, my expensive suit wrinkled and stained with the sweat of panic.

The nightmare comes immediately.

I’m back in that Boston house, the one I shared with Galina before everything went to hell. But this time the details are sharper, more vivid— horror in high definition.

Galina lies on our cream sofa, positioned with that terrible serenity that only comes with death. A hand over her belly, the other dangles toward our Persian rug. Beautiful. Peaceful. Gone.

But the movement beneath her dress is stronger now, more desperate. My son— fighting for life inside his murdered mother with the kind of determination that tells me he’s a fighter.

“Hold on,malysh,” I whisper, reaching for her belly. “Papa’s here. Papa’s going to save you.”

The masked figure materializes from shadow like my personal demon, black leather covering features I’ve never seen but somehow know by heart. His hands move quickly as he produces that gleaming blade, the one that’s carved my sanity into ribbons night after night.

But this time when he cuts, when he reaches inside and pulls out my child, the baby isn’t the tiny, faceless infant from months of identical nightmares.

This time he has features. A perfect little face with Dénes’s dark eyes and determined jaw— Péter’s son from the construction site, the boy who builds skyscrapers from blocks and dreams of creating things that last forever.

“Nyet!” The scream tears from my chest. “Don’t take him! He’s mine!”

But the masked figure is already moving, cradling my son against his chest as he glides toward the door with that horrible, weightless motion. I struggle against invisible chains that force me to witness every second of this fresh hell.

“You don’t deserve to keep what you love,” the figure says. “You never learn, Sidorov.”

Then he’s gone, vanishing into darkness with my son’s cries echoing in the night. But this time, the echo changes— becomes the sound of Ilona sobbing, becomes Dr. Varga’s clinical voice explaining how bodies fail and children die.

I wake up wheezing, cold sweat turning expensive sheets clammy against my skin. My ribs feel cracked from the inside, each heartbeat a reminder that I’m still alive while others aren’t.

Clambering out of bed, I stumble toward the bathroom and yank open the medicine cabinet. Dr. Szabó’s sedatives rattle in their prescription bottle— little white pills that promise peace but deliver only temporary numbness.

I swallow two, then another pair for good measure. But chemicals can’t shake the mind-numbing grief.

I’ve lost two children now.

And Ilona— the woman who means more to me than she should, more than is safe— fights for her life in a sterile hospital room while infection threatens to take her too.

Leaning my back against the wall, I slide down until I’m sitting on the cold tiles. This is what it’s come to. The unshakeable sense that it’s my fault.

You destroy everything you touch.

Maybe it’s penance for a lifetime of brutality. Maybe it’s the Universe’s idea of a joke. But what should I expect? A man like me? Every attempt at family, every grab for something pure and lasting, turns to shit.

Maybe that’s what I deserve. Maybe some men are too stained by violence to deserve second chances, too broken by their choices to build anything that lasts.

But as I sit here, wallowing in guilt and sinking into the haze of sedatives, one thing stands out.

Why them?

Why the fuck should Ilona and our child have to pay the price for what I am?

Chapter Fifty

Osip