You weren't a mess, you tell yourself over and over. You were only going through a rough time—your five minutes of fame crashing and burning alongside your parents in that accident. Grief hit hard, paralyzing your creativity and leaving you with a writer’s block so thick your publisher threatened to drop you if you didn’t deliver a book in four months. Life was slipping, but you kept trying to pull it back.

That’s when Mikhail Solokov came into your life—or let you notice, anyway. He had watched you for months before, waiting, planning the perfect moment to "fix" you. Those nights out with friends, the drinking, the hollow flings with mediocre men (he dealt with them easily), the agonizing blank screen of your laptop—he could solve it all. He was the pakhan of the Bratva, after all. If he could rebuild his father’s crumbling empire into the unshakeable force it was now, he could fix you.

And for a time, he did. Mikhail swooped in like the answer to a question you hadn’t dared to ask. He charmed you, kept you grounded, taught you how to grieve and breathe again. You poured out the book your publisher demanded, gave them the romcom they wanted. But you were ungrateful, weren’t you? You ran when you finally saw the depth of his obsession, the lengths he’d gone to make you his.

Now, he makes no effort to hide. He lingers on the edges of your life, his presence as dark and suffocating as the night itself. Everyone around you sees his charm, his patience, and their sympathy goes to him.

Poor Mikhail, tangled up with a broken girl, they all said.

The cops won’t help you; they’re in his pocket, and your friends? They brush it off, convinced it’s only a matter of time before you crawl back to him. Mikhail’s patience is endless; he’s certain you’ll return—back to him, where you belong, where he can keep fixing the mess you so stubbornly insist on making of your life.