Page 51 of Scarlet Thorns

What kind of twisted cosmic joke is this?

What the fuck have I been reduced to in just a matter of days?

I killed her father. I took the one person who made her feel safe in the world. And then she came to me— tome— seeking comfort for grief I created. She cried before me about losing the most important person in her life, while I sat there like the soullessmudakI am, pretending to offer solace.

The irony tastes like blood and betrayal.

The house around me feels like a mausoleum. Galina’s clothes still hang in our closet, her perfume still lingering on silk blouses I can’t bring myself to pack away. The nursery door remains closed— I haven’t opened it since that night, can’t bear to see the crib I assembled with dreams of teaching my son to be a good man. A man unlike his father.

All of it gone. My wife, my unborn child, my chance at redemption— erased while I was with Igor Shiradze’s daughter. A woman whose family I destroyed before I ever knew her.

Face it, dolboyob.

You destroy everything you touch.

You’re an accident waiting to happen.

The empty house mocks me with its silence. No Galina humming in the kitchen, no sounds of her moving through our bedroom at night, no soft conversations about baby names and paint colors and futures that will never exist.

Eto pizdets.

The guilt is devouring me from the inside out. This is all fucked beyond repair. And I— Christ, I’m the one who lit the match and watched it all burn.

My phone buzzes with another message from Stanley— the fifth one today, each more demanding than the last. He wants the money he thinks Igor stole, wants explanations for partnerships that died with a knife between the ribs. But Stanley’s threats feel like mosquito bites compared to the cancer eating through my chest.

I lost my wife.

My son.

I killed Igor Shiradze.

And his daughter— my masked angel, the only woman who ever made me feel alive— will never know that her grief has a name. That her father’s murderer held her while she cried, fucked her, offered comfort with hands still stained by blood.

The guilt should destroy me. Maybe it is already destroying me, one shot of vodka at a time.

My brothers have been calling since Galina’s death, demanding I leave this graveyard of a city and join them in Budapest. Melor’s dry voice echoes in my memory:You havenothing left in Boston, bratan. Join us in Hungary. We’ll start fresh, build something new.

He’s right. I have nothing here but ghosts and grave dirt and the kind of guilt that ferments into madness if you let it sit too long.

Ona nikogda ne uznayot.

She’ll never know what I’ve done.

The thought should comfort me, but it doesn’t. It sits in my chest like broken glass, cutting me from the inside every time I breathe. She’ll spend the rest of her life missing a father I stole from her, wondering why good men die and monsters keep breathing.

Because that’s what I am.

A soulless monster who destroys everything he touches.

I remember the weight of her grief, the broken way she said his name like speaking it might bring him back. The trust she placed in a stranger’s hands, desperate for connection.

Ya ubil yego.

I killed him.

Just like I killed my wife and son.

And Shiradze’s daughter, she’ll never know that I’m the reason she needed comfort in the first place.