The rain had been coming down all damn day.

By the time he was walking in the direction of home, the petals were bent from the onslaught of raindrops, and it looked like a mess more than a bouquet.

Wildflowers were not pretty in the usual sense, but you liked them once because they were our thing. When he brought them to your old apartment, in the earlier years before we married, he had picked them and handed them to you with dirt still clinging to the roots, because he didn’t know better. Because he was stupidly in love with you, even then. His beautiful sunshine in his darkened world.

He stood slowly, a rough breath pushing past his lips. His ribs ached when he inhaled, some bruised, one cracked for sure. The bastard in Novokuznetsk had swung a pipe while he’d been focused on the knife coming at his throat. He hadn’t even had time to clean the dried mess out of his hair—mud, blood, soot.

Who the fuck knew anymore? All irrelevant when he had something more pressing; besides, the rain was rinsing it out well enough.

He looked down at the flowers in his shaking hand, and it wasn't from pain or the cold.

He flexed his jaw, tried to steady his grip on the flowers, and continued toward the house.

The log cabin came into view through the trees. Nestled deep in the woods with enough perimeter to keep watch, enough men stationed to make sure he could sleep at night without a gun under his pillow.

You hadn’t said a fucking word when he’d come in this morning.

Not when he crossed the threshold bleeding and exhausted, not when he’d passed behind you in the hallway, hand brushing your back—the way he always used to—thumb pausing on the soft ridge of your spine.

But you had stepped away from his touch... from him.

No screaming. No anger. Just that silent resignation.

The kind that filled a room and left no space for anything else. Not even a breath, and fuck if he could breathe right now because of it.

He could take your fury. Could take it when you shoved at his chest or swore at him, fists pounding against his chest.

That meant you still gave a damn. That he still had something to make up for, something to repair.

But this silence from you?

It scared the shit out of him, and he wasn't the type to get spooked.

He pushed the front door open with his shoulder.

He paused on the threshold, water dripping from his sleeves onto the hardwood. His knuckles were scraped, blood dried under his fingernails. The flowers looked pathetic now. Slumped in his grip, and seeming to be too small an apology. The flowers weren’t enough.

But they were all he had. No gift would make up for the fact that he had messed everything up.

He cleared his throat, willing his throat to work and his mouth to produce the right thing to say.

“Solntse (sunshine),” he called, the word thick in his chest.

He promised he’d call on our anniversary and hadn’t...worse, he had been so distracted with fulfilling Pakhan Volkov's orders, he had forgotten the date and remembered when it was too late to make it up.

“Are you home?” He called out to you, hoping for at least a mumbled yes.

The goddamn quiet that clawed down his back with a vengeance.

You were here. He knew it; the signs were there... You just wouldn't talk to him.

He walked deeper into the house, boots tracking wet prints across the floor. His muscles ached from days without real sleep, his bones stiff from the fight-or-flight response and the frost of travel. But none of that mattered. Not compared to this.

“Come on…” he said, softer now, voice barely above a breath as he searched for you. “Solntse (sunshine)...”

He swallowed, shoulder brushing the frame of the kitchen door as he moved through it, glancing toward the hall, toward the stairs, toward anywhere you might be hiding to avoid him.

“Please don’t be angry…” He looked down at the flowers again, fingers curling tighter around them, and one of the petals dropped to the floor.

“Let me fix it.” He pleaded.

Pursuing you—even when you wanted nothing to do with him.