Page 52 of Scarlet Thorns

The VanishMe app glows on my phone screen, our conversation thread empty now but weighted with everything I can never tell her. She reached out today, breaking every rule, risking exposure because she neededme. The masked stranger who represents safety in a world gone mad.

If she knew the truth, she’d kill me herself.

And I’d let her.

My fingers shake as I navigate to the account settings. The delete button waits, small and red, offering the only mercy I can give her— distance from the animal who’s been masquerading as her salvation.

Prosti menya,I whisper to the empty house, to the woman who’ll never hear it, to the ghosts that follow me everywhere now.

Forgive me.

I delete the account with one tap, severing the last connection between us. Now she’s truly safe from me, protected by ignorance and geography and the kind of distance that can’t be bridged by encrypted messages.

The phone clatters onto the coffee table beside the empty bottle, and I lean back into leather that still smells like Galina’s perfume. The silence presses against my eardrums like deep water, threatening to drown what’s left of my sanity.

Budapest.

A new city, new language, new opportunities to build something that doesn’t involve trafficking orphaned babies to rich families or murdering fathers. Melor and Radimir have been there for months, setting up legitimate businesses, creating lives that don’t require violence to maintain.

Maybe I can learn to be something other than this. Maybe distance and time can scab over wounds that feel fatal right now.

But I’ll never forget her. Never stop carrying the weight of what I took from her. She’ll exist forever in my memory as she was in Room Five— vulnerable and trusting, looking for comfort from the very man who caused her pain.

Eto moya kara.

This is my punishment.

To yearn for someone I can never have, to crave absolution from someone who’d destroy me if she knew the truth. To live with the knowledge that I found my salvation in the daughter of my victim.

The cosmic joke isn’t that I fell for Igor’s daughter. The cosmic joke is that she might have saved me, if I hadn’t killed her father first.

I pull up the family group chat on my phone, the screen blurring as exhaustion and vodka take their toll. My brothers’ names glow at the top— Melor, Radimir, the only family I have left in this world.

“Arriving in two days,”I type with fingers that feel disconnected from my body.“I need a couch to crash on before I buy a house there.”

The response comes immediately from Melor:“About fucking time, bratok. We’ll pick you up at the airport.”

Radimir follows with a string of laughing emojis and:“Welcome to the land of goulash and fresh starts.”

Fresh starts. Like I deserve that luxury. The concept feels foreign, laughable. How do you start fresh when blood stains your hands, when you’re drowning in the weight of your murdered wife and son, tormented by the ghost of a woman whose family you destroyed?

But maybe that’s the point. Maybe redemption isn’t about forgetting your sins—maybe it’s about carrying them so completely that they transform you into something different. Something better. Something worthy of the trust placed in you by people who don’t know they’re touching poison.

I close my eyes and let myself remember her one last time— the way she moved beneath me, the sounds she made when she came, the trust in her voice when she asked if she could see me again.

Net,milaya. You can’t see me again. Ever.

Because if you did, if you ever learned the truth, it would destroy us both. And you’ve suffered enough damage from my hands.

I’ll carry my guilt to Budapest, to whatever new life my brothers are building in the hills above the Danube. I’ll use it as armor against ever hurting anyone else the way I’ve hurt her.

But I’ll never forget what happened here.

I’ll never forgether. I’ll never stop wanting to be the man she deserved to find in that burgundy room— someone clean, someone worthy, someone who could offer comfort without contamination.

Do svidaniya, Boston.

Goodbye.