Liliana
Six months had passed since my father's death, and I still woke up some nights expecting to see him standing in the shadows of our bedroom. The rational part of my mind knew he was gone, knew that Anastasia had put a bullet in his chest and ended his reign of terror once and for all.
But the daughter in me, the little girl who had once looked up to him despite everything, couldn't quite accept that he was really gone.
“You're thinking about him again,” Mikhail said from beside me, his voice rough with sleep.
I turned to look at him in the dim morning light entering through our curtains. Even after all this time, seeing him in our bed still took my breath away. His dark hair was messy from sleep, his chest was bare, and those intense eyes focused entirely on me.
The night he to
