Moscow, 3:47 AM
Rain didn't fall on Moscow that night; it attacked. It hammered Viktor Mikhailov's penthouse windows like a million furious fists, turning the city's glittering arrogance below into a watercolour nightmare of smeared gold and neon. The kind of storm that felt personal.
Viktor stood sentinel at the glass, a crystal tumbler of vodka – untouched, growing warm – clutched in his hand. Sleep was a traitor that had long since deserted him, leaving only the familiar, hollow company of ghosts he refused to name. The penthouse, vast and coldly luxurious, echoed with the silence he cultivated like a weapon.
Then, the intercom buzzed. A harsh, electronic intrusion.
"Gospodin Mikhailov." The doorman's voice crackled, strained even through the speaker. "There's… a delivery. For you."
Viktor's thumb hovered over the sleek chrome panel's 'ignore' button. Deliveries didn't happen at this hour. Not legitimate ones.
A thunderclap detonated directly overhead, shaking the glass beneath his palm. The lights flickered.
And beneath the dying crackle of static… another sound.
A thin, desperate wail.
Ice flooded Viktor's veins. He stabbed the intercom button. "What is it?" His voice was a low rasp, barely audible over the storm.
"It… it cries, Gospodin Mikhailov," the doorman stammered, genuine panic threading his voice. "A child. In a carrier. Left in the service entrance. Soaked through."
---
The Elevator Ride (Seventeen Floors of Dread)
The descent felt eternal. Viktor stood rigid in the private elevator, the mirrored walls reflecting a face carved from marble – pale, hard, eyes like chips of winter sky. Only the faint, almost imperceptible tightening of his jaw betrayed anything. The wail, muffled now by steel and concrete, echoed in his skull.
The doors slid open onto chaos subdued by terror. The night manager, Lev, stood rigid as a lamppost near the service entrance, a useless umbrella dripping onto the polished marble floor. His face was the colour of ash. His eyes, wide and terrified, flickered between Viktor and the object at his feet.
It wasn't a package. It was a Louis Vuitton baby carrier, ludicrously opulent and utterly drenched. Rainwater pooled around it. Inside, swaddled in a Burberry blanket now the colour of mud, was a tiny, furious human being. Its face was screwed up, scarlet with effort, voicing its outrage at the world.
No note. No explanation. Just a single sheet of paper, laminated against the wet, paperclipped to the sodden blanket's edge. Viktor didn't need to read the clinical jargon. The bold print screamed: 99.98% Paternity Probability.
He took a step closer, the sound of his Italian leather shoes unnaturally loud on the wet marble. His gaze, cold and analytical, swept over the infant. And then he saw it. High on the delicate, heaving left shoulder, visible where the blanket gaped.
A birthmark. Distinctive, jagged. The unmistakable shape of the Crimean peninsula.
Just like his own.
A cold fist clenched around Viktor's heart.
---
The Phone Call (The World Shifts)
Lev scurried away like a startled cockroach the moment Viktor dismissed him with a flick of his fingers. Viktor scooped up the carrier, its weight insignificant yet terrifying. He didn't remember the elevator ride back up. One moment he was in the dripping service foyer, the next he was standing in his own vast, sterile living room, the carrier placed carefully on a low, obsonic Italian coffee table that cost more than Lev's annual salary.
The baby's cries had subsided into shuddering hiccups, exhausted by its own fury. It – she – stared up at the unfamiliar ceiling with wide, bewildered eyes the colour of storm clouds. Viktor stared down. He felt nothing. Just a vast, echoing void.
Then, the rage ignited. Cold, pure, and lethal. He pulled out his phone, a sleek, black instrument of efficiency, and dialed a number etched into his memory like a scar.
It rang twice.
"Ji-Hyun." His voice was low, flat, devoid of any inflection that could be mistaken for human. "Explain. Now."
A beat of silence. Then laughter – bright, brittle, laced with vodka and venom. "Viktor! Darling! Did you get my little… surprise?"
"You have three seconds." The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.
"Congrats, papasha!" she crowed, the Slavic endearment twisted into an insult. "She's all yours. Try not to break her like your precious batya broke you, hm?"
The line went dead.
Silence crashed back, heavier than before. Then, the baby drew a shuddering breath and unleashed a scream of pure, primal terror that seemed to vibrate in Viktor's bones.
---
The Choice (The Crack in the Glacier)
Yuri arrived in four minutes flat, as always. He burst through the penthouse door, hand already inside his jacket, eyes scanning for the threat. He found Viktor standing in the centre of the living room, illuminated only by the city lights bleeding through the storm-lashed windows.
Yuri froze.
Viktor Mikhailov – the man whose stare could silence boardrooms, whose reputation for icy, ruthless control was legendary – stood cradling the screaming infant against his chest. Not awkwardly. Not with disgust. But with a terrifying, fragile intensity, as if the tiny creature were spun glass. And Yuri saw it, clear as day in the dim light: Viktor's hands, the hands that signed billion-dollar deals and could end lives with a gesture, were shaking.
Yuri braced himself. For the explosion. For the cold command to dispose of the problem. For the call to Dmitri Volkov's lawyers. For Viktor to simply place the wailing bundle on the floor and walk away.
He did not expect Viktor Mikhailov to sink slowly to his knees on the cold marble floor. He did not expect the billionaire heir to press his lips gently against the damp, dark curls plastered to the baby's tiny skull. He did not expect the whisper, raw and fractured, spoken not in English, but in the guttural truth of Russian:
"Ty menya ne znaesh'." You don't know me. A statement of fact, heavy with the burden of his own history.
"No ya tebya ne otdam." But I won't give you away. A vow, torn from somewhere deep and hidden, resonating with defiance.
---
Outside, the storm raged on, indifferent. But here, in the cavernous, dimly lit silence of the penthouse, kneeling on unforgiving stone with a stranger's child – his child – trembling against his heartbeat, Viktor Mikhailov did something utterly alien, something that scraped his soul raw.
He begged.
Rocking her gently, his voice a shattered whisper lost beneath her cries, he murmured the only words of comfort his fractured world could offer, the plea falling from his lips in the language of his blood, of his own stolen childhood:
"Ne plach… Pozhaluysta…" Don't cry… Please…