Chapter 37 Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Lesson of Scars

Chapter 37 Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Lesson of Scars
I wake to the smell of smoke and antiseptic, the two scents that have always followed me. My body feels foreign, like it belongs to someone else. My shoulder burns, my ribs ache, and my throat tastes like iron. The room is dark except for a single lamp, its light spilling across a cracked tile floor and the outline of a woman sitting in the corner.
Alina.
For a heartbeat, memory fractures through the pain—her laugh years ago, warm and reckless, back when loyalty still looked like love. I remember the first night she stitched a bullet wound in my side, her hands steady, her eyes daring me to flinch. The woman sitting before me now is a ghost of that one. She looks half-dead herself, eyes red-rimmed, hands still stained with ash. “Welcome back,” she says quietly. “You almost didn’t make it.”
“How long?” My voice is a rasp, each word scraping against the pain.
“Two days. Maybe three. Hard to tell. You were bleeding too fast to keep track.”
I try to sit up. She’s on me in a second, a hand at my chest pushing me back. “Don’t,” she says. “You’ll rip the stitches. The doctor wasn’t gentle.”
“I don’t need gentle.”
“No,” she says, a shadow of something like amusement crossing her face. “You never did.”
I stare at the ceiling, the cracks spidering outward like veins. The last thing I remember is fire—the roar of it swallowing my father’s house, the heat biting into my skin, the sound of the blast tearing the world apart. For a moment, I thought maybe I’d died with him.
But no. Death doesn’t feel like this.
“He’s gone?” I ask.
Alina nods once. “What’s left of him is ash. You made sure of that.”
I should feel relief, but all I feel is hollow. “And the city?”
“Half the bratva thinks you’re dead. The other half thinks you staged it. Either way, they’re waiting for you to crawl out of the grave.”
I laugh once, the sound catching in my chest. “Let them wait.”
A silence stretches between us before I ask the only question that matters. “Lena. Where is she?”
The sound of her name cuts sharper than any wound. “She’s safe?”
Alina hesitates just long enough to make the air between us shift. “She’s gone,” she says finally, tone too even. Her gaze doesn’t meet mine. “Vanished before I got back.”
My pulse spikes despite the pain, and for a moment the world tilts. The room narrows, the sound of her voice echoing inside my skull like static. “Gone where?” The words scrape out of me before I can stop them. A cold rush floods my veins, sharp and dizzying.
She’s gone. The idea of her walking away shouldn’t matter, not after everything I’ve done, but it does. It shouldn’t feel like betrayal when it feels more like suffocation. The thought of her somewhere out there, breathing without me, burns worse than the wound in my shoulder.
“I don’t know,” she says too quickly. “Maybe she finally did what you wouldn’t—walk away.”
Her words are smooth, but not clean. There’s something rehearsed in the way she says them. I hear it. I always hear it.
The thought twists through me, cold and clean. For a long time, I don’t speak. My mind loops through the possibilities like a wound reopening—Lena on a train, Lena in another man’s protection, Lena waiting for me to forget her. None of it feels right.
She’s never been a coward, only desperate enough to trust the wrong hands. And that wrong hand was Alina’s. I see it now—her calm smile, the way she angled herself between us, always measuring, always waiting. The air hums with the ghosts of everything I didn’t say, everything I can’t undo, until the only thing left in me is the decision itself: I have to find her, no matter what it costs.
“She won’t get far,” I whisper, studying her face. The calm there is practiced—too practiced. Alina’s control has always been her armor, but now it looks like guilt wearing a prettier mask.
She lifts her chin, the faintest smile ghosting her lips. “Maybe that’s the point.”
I close my eyes, but the image of her won’t leave me—Lena, rain-soaked and defiant, slipping away while I burned. I’d told her to stay, but I’d known even then she wouldn’t. Still, something in me refuses to believe she ran on her own.
When I open my eyes again, Alina is still watching me. Waiting. Testing how much I’ve guessed.
“Find her,” I say.
“Roman—”
“Find her,” I repeat, voice sharp enough to cut through the quiet. “If she’s running, she’s still in danger. My father’s loyalists will scatter, and they’ll look for something to break.”
Her lashes flicker once, a tremor she tries to hide. “And if she doesn’t want to be found?”
“I don’t believe that,” I say. My hand tightens against the blanket, veins standing out under my skin. “You’d be amazed what people think they want until they see what’s left without me.”
She watches me for a long time, lips parting like she’s about to speak—but she doesn’t. Instead, she turns toward the door.
“Get some rest,” she says. “You’ll need it.”
Something about the way she says it makes my pulse slow, not from calm but from the old, familiar ache of recognition. It’s the same voice she used when she lied before—low, deliberate, and wrapped in warmth sharp enough to cut. The kind of tone meant to disarm, to soothe while it sinks the knife. I remember that sound from another lifetime, in another room—the one where she touched my face and told me I could trust her, right before she sold my secrets to the men who wanted me dead.
The memory crawls up my spine as she moves toward the door. Even now, she has the same poise—the careful, unhurried steps of someone who believes she still holds all the cards. The door clicks shut behind her, a clean, final sound that echoes too long in the room.
The silence that follows isn’t calm; it’s accusation. Proof in its purest form.
She told Lena to run. Not to save her. Not out of pity or loyalty. She did it for herself—to erase the one thing she can’t be, to punish me for choosing someone else. I see it now, every hesitation, every calculated breath. She wanted me to wake up empty.
Maybe she thinks distance will dull what’s left of me. Maybe she thinks I’ll let go because she made it look like mercy.
Either way, she’s wrong.
She thinks she’s in control. She isn’t.
Lena doesn’t need saving from me. She never did.
She belongs to me. Even if I have to burn down every piece of what’s left to prove it.
✧ ✧ ✧
I lie there for a while after she leaves, the sound of her heels fading into nothing. My mind keeps tracing the shape of her words, their edges too smooth, too polished. I’ve spent my entire life reading people—liars, killers, men who think they can hide behind power—and Alina just made the same mistake they did. She forgot I taught her how to lie.
The longer I think about it, the more the haze lifts, replaced by something darker, sharper. Betrayal doesn’t surprise me anymore—it’s practically inherited—but from her, it cuts deeper. She was supposed to be the constant. The one who’d never choose herself over the family, over me. And yet, she just did.
I drag myself upright, ignoring the pull of stitches, the flash of pain that follows. Every nerve screams, but the pain feels clean, earned. It reminds me I’m still alive—and that she’s still out there.
The table beside the bed holds my gun, clip half-empty, and a glass of water I don’t touch. Next to it, there’s something else—Alina’s phone. She’s careful, but I notice something wrong—a pattern that doesn’t fit. A missing data chip from the drawer, a code on the screen she should have deleted, the faint smell of cigarette smoke that isn’t mine. It’s an anomaly, small but deliberate, the kind of mistake she never makes unless she wants to be found out. I pick it up, swipe through the screen.
A small detail catches my eye—an encrypted folder left unlocked, the faint outline of a missing keycard on the desk, the trace of her perfume mixed with cigarette smoke. It’s not proof, but it’s enough. She’s careless in the way people are when they think they’ve already won. I search deeper until I find it—a half-deleted message draft, a name half-scratched out. It’s subtle, deliberate, and exactly the kind of clue she’d leave for me to find..
Sent: Two days ago.
She’s gone. Like you asked.
No reply. No name. Just a number I don’t recognize—but I will. I always do.
I let the phone drop onto the blanket and stare at the ceiling. My pulse slows, steadies. That message confirms everything I already knew. She didn’t just tell Lena to run. She made it happen. Arranged it. Probably thought it would buy her forgiveness or power—or maybe she just wanted to see if I’d chase.
I will.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed. The movement rips the healing flesh along my shoulder, blood seeping through the bandages, but I don’t care. I press a hand against the wound to keep it closed and stand. The cold floor sends a shock through me. I need that. I need the pain, the reminder that there’s still work to do.
Alina’s gone by now, but she won’t be hard to find. She always circles back to control, like a vulture to its meal.
Lena, though… she’s unpredictable. She runs on fear and fire and the kind of hope that doesn’t die easy. Somewhere out there, she’s trying to start over. She’ll learn soon enough there’s no world left that doesn’t end with my name.
I reach for my jacket, the weight of it familiar, grounding. Every step toward the door feels like waking from a dream I never wanted. Outside, the night air bites against my skin, sharp and wet. The safehouse lights hum behind me, but I don’t look back.
Alina thinks she won. That she took away the one thing that kept me human.
She doesn’t understand.
All she’s done is give me a reason to start the war again.
I taught Lena to survive, and she survived me by believing in the wrong person. The guilt slides beneath my ribs, heavy and sharp, burning hotter than rage. I see her in my mind—the way she looked at me when she still wanted to believe I could save her. And I see Alina standing beside her, calm, convincing, promising her freedom when she was only leading her into exile.
It wasn’t Lena who walked away. It was me who built the road she used to run.
My jaw tightens until it hurts. There’s no mercy left in me, not for either of them. I’ll find Alina first. Then I’ll find Lena.
And this time, no one will come between us.
I step out into the hallway, the air colder than I remember. Every shadow in this place feels wrong now, tainted by her. Alina. I can almost feel her presence lingering—the faint trail of perfume, the cigarette smoke she never fully quit. Every breath of it feels like mockery.
Outside, the wind cuts across the cracked asphalt of the yard, carrying the scent of river water and rust. Somewhere beyond that, Lena is breathing air that doesn’t belong to me. She’s not hiding yet; she still believes the distance Alina promised will save her. That belief is temporary. Hope always is.
I reach the garage and find the car she left behind. Her glovebox is empty except for a lighter and a folded photograph. It’s old—me and Alina at a bar years ago, before the blood and the empire. She looks alive in it, laughing into my shoulder. I tear it down the middle and let the pieces fall to the floor. The sound feels final.
Every mile I drive through the dark feels like a countdown. The headlights cut through mist, the road narrowing ahead, the forest closing in. My shoulder throbs with every turn of the wheel, a pulse that syncs with the anger building behind my ribs.
Alina thinks she knows me—that I’ll look for Lena and forget her. But I’ll find them both. I’ll make her watch while I take back everything she thought she could steal. She wanted to remind me what it means to lose? I’ll show her what it means to be forgotten.
I press harder on the accelerator, the engine’s growl filling the car. Somewhere, the first hint of dawn breaks across the horizon. The light feels undeserved.
It doesn’t matter. Dawn is for people who sleep. I don’t anymore.
By the time the sun rises, I’ll have Alina’s trail. And once I do, there won’t be anywhere left for her—or for Lena—to hide.