Chapter 298: Until The Cracks Began Showing…

[YAROSLAV]

Yaroslav had been watching.

From a distance.

Carefully.

But the conclusion he’d been coming to lately didn’t match what he had been thinking of over the past three years.

He knew what his father was like. And merciful was not something that Sergei Moskowsky, the father that he knew and had grown up with, extended to anyone who wasn’t Yaroslav.

Hell, Yaroslav had a scar for his reattached ear and bullet wounds on his body just because he’d disappointed his father.

He knew damn well what the man was like.

When he was happy.

When he was pissed.

He knew it all.

But then a floor in Moskowsky Holdings had been blown up. An omega had been named as the traitor in a very incriminating video, yet Sergei Moskowsky hadn’t started a manhunt.

In fact, Sergei Moskowsky had gone to visit the therapist in prison.

Yaroslav had later learned that the therapist was released into his father’s care.

And that...

That right there was absolute bullshit.

Sergei Moskowsky never got swayed. Not even for his son, who he loved more than he lived his own life.

So, what the fuck was happening?

Why were the Romanovs still free and not used as collateral to get to their omega son?

Why did no one know where Katya Romanov was?

Why were the psycho alpha friends of Romanov not already causing chaos because of their disappeared friend?

The last time Katya had disappeared, Svetlana had snapped Yaroslav’s neck twice in front of the whole city. She had threatened him with everything possible, and Yaroslav woke up wasted as hell three days later.

But it had been five days, and nothing was happening.

No statements. Not even a search for the senator, who Yaroslav knew had blown up the research and development floor.

What was going on?

And even better... why was his father not actively hunting Katya Romanov?

Those were questions that didn’t make any sense at all. And the fact that it had been five days without any public hunts or even private hunts got Yaroslav questioning everything.

His father was not a kind man.

His father was the most dangerous man in Frolo, a reputation that he didn’t earn by sitting on such a delicious hunt for traitors.

Hell, even the city was readying itself for the worst.

Yet his father was nowhere to be seen.

"Do you think it makes sense?" Yaroslav asked Milan, who was still hanging upside down from the basement roof. It was her default position ever since Yaroslav had kidnapped her on her way to remand six months ago.

The beta never gave her any relief, not even something as simple as telling the woman how their daughter was doing. If anything, he treated Milan like any other Moskowsky prisoner.

The difference being that Milan was a prisoner under the floorboards.

Not exactly in the best of conditions.

"Fuck you... You broke me for months, and suddenly you have daddy issues?" Milan scoffed, clearly not liking what Yaroslav was trying to do with her.

This man had already snipped off her fingers and fed them to the dogs. He’d shaved her hair completely and left her so bald and looking unhinged like that was the default state that Milan was supposed to be in.

The worst part was the fact that Yaroslav had shaved her because women who wanted to be unhinged looked nothing like the composed, proper shit she was presenting. So, he made her into what she wanted to be the most.

And fuck if it wasn’t pissing her off even to this day, despite the endless wounds on her that had somewhat refused to heal thanks to Yaroslav’s extreme torture methods.

"Come to think of it, Father hasn’t been the same since that anniversary my soul walked in on us on the couch," Yaroslav said as he looked at Milan, who was too tired to even say more to him. So, she just stared, pissed, and bored at the same time.

"Fine. I’ll untie you, but you must not run because, well, it’s pointless to run from me. I will find you wherever you hide, and that will just make it harder for you. Do you understand?" Yaroslav said to Milan as if they weren’t a prisoner and a captor.

But what the fuck was Milan supposed to say to that?

She knew better than to argue with a man who had been torturing her under the floorboards while playing depressed husband out there.

This man was insane, just like his father. It was a truth she had learned already.

"Understood," Milan forced out.

Yaroslav set aside the blade in his hands and untied Milan. Not caring that the woman’s body fell harshly onto the polythene on the ground that was filled with some of her wisdom teeth and whatever was left of her snipped skin from the torture.

The man needed to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital, but Milan wasn’t going to be the one to suggest that to him.

Not right now.

Not when her fate depended on whatever the fuck mood Yaroslav was in after everything.

"Here, sit," Yaroslav said, grabbing a plastic chair and handing it to Milan, whose hands were still bound in silver chains.

Just because he wanted to talk to her didn’t mean the chains would come off.

"What do you want to talk about?" Milan huffed as she grabbed a beer from the crate and handed it to Yaroslav to open it for her.

He had cut off most of her fingers, so she was useless there.

"Do you think Father has been acting weird since the anniversary?" Yaroslav asked in earnest, like he really needed someone to talk to that wasn’t his father.

Of course, he could simply go and ask Sergei the truth. His father had never lied to him. Sergei had always, always been honest with his son because he believed lies were a waste of time.

Yaro knew his father was a terrible liar who was only driven by one thing.

Protecting and loving Yaroslav.

To go to his father and ask him why he was acting weird was impossible to get the truth, given his father’s absurd honesty, but for some reason, Yaroslav wasn’t sure he would like the answers this time.

He didn’t want to break his own heart, which was crazy because he could swear his father had become happier and lighter.

The very thing he’d always wanted for his father.

So why the fuck was he bothered?

"Of course, he’s acting weird. He forced me to make you sign your divorce papers, remember?" Milan groaned, the truth serum in her system doing its work a little too efficiently.

She probably didn’t even know that it was in her system, given the way she had been tortured.

Or maybe she knew and just couldn’t give a fuck right now.

After all, she knew she was as good as dead.

The bus to hell wasn’t yet full, and taking Yaro with her wasn’t as bad, right?

"What do you mean?"

"Remember the administrative papers you signed months after the anniversary? The ones I gave you after that unhinged psycho woman snapped your neck?

"Well, they were divorce papers, and your daddy dearest said he’d strangle me in my sleep if I didn’t give them to you and make you sign," Milan said simply as she downed the beer.

"What?" Yaroslav asked, confused for a moment.

He remembered those administrative papers, but he could swear on everything that he saw the papers titled Administrative Leave. That was all he remembered because it was the first day in three days that he was half sober.

Fuck.

"Lying to me will only make me take Erika further from you and make her grow up believing that her mother abandoned her and that she was unwanted," Yaroslav chuckled bitterly, all the amusement gone.

What Milan was talking about was not possible.

His father was not that insane.

Yet at the same time, the day Sergei had cut off his ear in the hospital, Anya had come to Yaroslav with unsigned divorce papers. Yaro never signed them at all, so this was a mistake. Maybe Milan was playing with him.

"I’m the head nurse at Frolo General Hospital, Yaro. Why the fuck would I need your signature to deal with my own leave papers?

"There is a system for leave applications. Surely, you’re intelligent enough to know it’s as linear as the leave system Moskowsky employees use, no?" Milan laughed, and Yaroslav didn’t find it funny at all.

"They were administrative leave papers."

"They were papers you signed after you blacked out for three days... I thought that crazy barbarian taught you better than to sign anything without reading?" Milan laughed, enjoying all this.