เข้าสู่ระบบLena's POV The heavy silver pen felt cold and foreign in my hand as I laid it flat on the desk beside the signed document. The ink was barely dry, black and sharp against the white parchment, officially severing the bond between us.The lawyer gathered the papers with meticulous care, slipping them into his leather briefcase before closing the brass clasps with a definitive click. He offered a polite, solemn bow. "Everything is in order, Viktorovich. I will file these into the private vault personally."He turned toward the mahogany double doors, but before his hand could touch the brass handle, Nikolai’s deep baritone sliced through the quiet room."Wait."The lawyer froze, turning back instantly. "Yes, Capo?"Nikolai stood by the window, his broad shoulders squared, his eyes fixed on the man with an absolute, lethal intensity. "This stays between the people in this room. No one, not the council, not my lieutenants, and certainly not the other families, is to know that this decree e
Lena's POV A heavy, suffocating stillness lingered in the room, thick with the dark ghost of his past. My heart pounded against my ribs, aching for the little boy in those fading photographs who had been forced to hide under his bed while his world shattered around him. A dozen questions burned on the tip of my tongue. I wanted to ask him how he survived after she left, how he managed to breathe in this house filled with his father’s cruel memory, and how he had carried such a devastating weight on his shoulders all these years without breaking entirely. But as I looked at the sharp, rigid line of his jaw and the hollow stillness in his dark eyes, I checked myself. I pulled back from the precipice, paralyzed by the fear of invading his privacy, terrified that poking further into his deepest wounds would ruin the fragile sanctuary we had somehow built in this quiet room. I took a soft, steadying breath and looked back down at the album, desperately searching for a safer shore.
Lena's POV We flipped through more pages. Pictures of me training in the courtyard with wooden swords at ten; photos of me sitting stiffly in a tailored suit at twelve during a syndicate summit, looking miserable; candid shots taken by my mother when my father wasn't around, showing a younger, softer version of me laughing in the gardens.And then, Lena turned to a page near the back of the album.The photograph occupied the entire center of the page. It was a formal portrait taken in the grand foyer of this very estate. In the center stood my father, towering, broad-shouldered, clad in an immaculate dark double-breasted suit, his face a hard, unyielding mask of absolute authority. To his left stood my mother, draped in a high-collared velvet gown, her dark hair pinned back flawlessly. I stood between them, around nine years old, looking straight into the camera lens with a solemn, unblinking stare.At first glance, it lo
Lena's POV I sat at the head of the long mahogany dining table, my fingers still resting on the polished wood, watching the sudden, brilliant transformation on Lena’s face.Her smile was an unexpected light in a room that had felt like a tomb for days. The heavy, suffocating cloud of our shared trauma, the looming shadow of the divorce papers arriving at dawn, the memory of blood on the subterranean concrete, it all seemed to suspend itself in the air, held at bay by the genuine, sparkling curiosity in her eyes.The request was so wildly out of place in our world that my brain struggled to process it for a second. Men like me were not supposed to have childhoods, let alone photo albums documenting them. In the syndicate, softness was an invitation for slaughter, and sentimentality was a flaw to be pruned away early. Yet, beneath the stoic mask I wore every hour of the day, a sudden wave of uncertainty wash
Lena's POV Moving my belongings back to my old quarters felt like a slow, silent retreat from a battlefield.I unpacked my small bag, placing my clothes neatly into the drawers and smoothing down the familiar duvet of the guest bed. The quiet in the room was overwhelming after the storm of the past few days. Sitting at the edge of the mattress, I hugged my knees to my chest and stared out the arched window at the sprawling, shadowed estate grounds.Nikolai’s words at the door kept echoing in my head, raw and haunting. ‘I am lost, Lena, and you were the only light I had.’A painful knot formed in my throat every time I replayed the desperation in his voice. Part of me, the foolish, vulnerable part that had tasted the softness behind his harsh exterior, wanted so desperately to run back to his office, to wrap my arms around his broad shoulders and tell him we could fix this. But the cold, unyielding scars on my wrists and
Lena's POV The air in the office instantly turned to ice.I stared at the lawyer, my chest rising and falling in shallow, uneven breaths as the weight of my own question hung in the quiet room. "Was it Nikolai’s father?" I pressed, my voice barely more than a whisper, yet sharp enough to cut through the heavy silence. "Was the previous Capo the one who stopped you from filing her papers? Is that why she never escaped?"The lawyer looked visibly shaken. His hands trembled as he shuffled the legal documents on the desk, refusing to meet my eyes. He cleared his throat nervously, a sweat-sheened pale mask of worry. "Mrs. Volkova... it is entirely unnecessary to dredge up the past," he stammered, his voice laced with a frantic edge. "What happened decades ago has no bearing on our current proceedings. We should focus on constructing a more viable, legally sound justification for this dissolution—something the syndicate council will accept without friction.""The grounds she stated are mor






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