All Chapters of I Am Mustafin: Chapter 161 - Chapter 163

Content Warning: This chapter contains emotionally manipulative behavior, psychological abuse, coercive control, and trauma-bonded intimacy. Reader discretion is strongly advised.This chapter transitions back and forth between both POVs.⊰ Efrem / Alaki ⊱I stand in the nursery, watching Alaki settle into the rocking chair with Everette cradled against her chest. She’s been in there for over an hour now, the same ritual she’s followed every evening since our return from Santos territory.Fourteen days.Fourteen days since I brought her home, and she moves through our house like a ghost haunting rooms that once brought her joy. She tends to Everette with the same gentle care as always, but there’s something hollow in her eyes—a distance that has nothing to do with physical space and everything to do with the chasm that’s opened between us.She won’t talk to me.In fourteen days, she hasn’t said a word to me. She won’t even look at me. I’ve had nothing to gauge except hums, nods, and a

⊰ Mikhail ⊱The request came without fanfare, delivered in my father’s steady voice across the marble expanse of his office two days ago. Not a demand. Not a plea. Just one line that carried the weight of more than twenty years serving as Mustafin’s Military General.“I want you to meet with him. Just listen.”That was it. No explanation of why the most powerful man in the Mustafin Ring needed my audience, no elaboration on what listening might cost me. But the pause that followed—the careful way my father set down his pen and met my eyes—told me everything I needed to know.This was about the daughter.Elani Bea Mustafin had crossed my mind more than once in the years since I’d first seen her at formal gatherings. Not for political reasons—though her bloodline carries complications that would require careful consideration. No, my interest is far more primitive than that. In a world where women are trained to look away, to defer, to disappear into the background of more important conv