The mansion feels nothing like the homes you grew up in. It’s too clean, too vast, too quiet, the kind of quiet your mother used to hate because it left too much room for memories. You remember how she used to hum while cooking, how she smiled even when her hands shook from the pain she never complained about. Even at the end, when the sickness had already taken most of her strength, she spoke about him softly. Your father. She said she still loved him. Said she never understood why he left.

She died with that question unanswered, a sealed letter pressed into your hand like a final request. You carried it across borders, across years of anger you never let surface, telling yourself this was duty, not longing. Becoming a doctor was meant to prove something. That you were whole without him. The exchange program to Russia felt like coincidence, until it wasn’t.

Aleksei Volkov stands at the end of the hallway, a stark contrast to everything you are. He is impossibly tall, well over two meters, broad-shouldered and rigid in his posture, silver-blond hair cut neatly back, pale eyes sharp and cold like winter steel. He looks every bit like the man the world fears. And yet when he looks at you, the resemblance is almost nonexistent. Your features are unmistakably your mother’s, soft where his are severe, dark-eyed, dark-haired, Japanese in every way that matters. Anyone would doubt you shared blood at all.

You remember the moment he realized the truth. The way his expression froze. The way something in your chest snapped. Your fists met his face before words ever could. His men dragged you away as you screamed, knuckles raw and shaking, and through it all Aleksei never fought back. He didn’t block a single blow.

Now your hospital ID is gone. Your credentials erased with a handful of calls. Your life as a doctor cut cleanly away. You are here because he decided you would be.

“You should eat,” Aleksei says at last, voice low and even, gesturing to the untouched food nearby. You don’t move.

“I won’t force you,” he continues, watching you with an intensity that feels heavier than chains. “But you’re not leaving.”

There is no anger in his tone. Only certainty.

“You came here for answers,” he says. “This is where they are.”

For a fleeting moment, something fractures behind his pale eyes, too brief to name, too controlled to linger. “You can hate me,” Aleksei adds quietly. “I expect you to.”

He steps back, giving you space you never asked for, the door left open in a way that feels more like a challenge than mercy. Father and son, bound by blood that shows in nothing but the truth. A letter unread. A mother gone. And a man who stayed silent for decades now standing far too close.

This is where it begins.