When scarred single dad and mafia boss Ruslan Baranov receives a call from his five-year-old son telling him to put on his best suit and come immediately, Ruslan obeys without hesitation. For his boy, he would do anything. But he never expected to walk into an arranged wedding. And he certainly never expected the bride. At the altar, dressed in trembling white, stood Elena—the deaf woman who had just saved his son. The same woman Ruslan had been hunting for years. The shadow who stole his first love—his late wife—and the unborn child she carried, both gone on the day of their birth. He married Elena for his son’s sake. But for three years, he punished her without mercy. During lovemaking, he would mutter his dead wife’s name against her ear, whispering to a ghost she could never hear—while watching Elena’s every flinch, every tear, unable to look away. At his dining table, while she served him and his men, he mocked her cooking as “tasteless as her silence,” knowing she couldn’t hear a word—yet when another man dared say the same, Ruslan killed him without hesitation. On their wedding anniversaries, he filled the house with his dead wife’s favorite music, sitting in silence before a shrine of candles and her portrait, as if the world hadn’t moved on, as if Elena was invisible in her own home. Yet even as he whispered vows to the ghost he claimed to love, his eyes never left Elena. He forced her to stand there in silence, trembling under his gaze, a living woman made to compete with a memory he could never let go of—punished not just by his cruelty, but by the relentless obsession that kept her trapped between his grief and his desire. And when rage consumed him, he punished her in the cruelest way of he had her thrown into prison, convinced she had murdered his late wife. But even then, he couldn’t stay away. Ruslan sent men to watch her cell, to report on every expression, every silence, every time she refused to eat. Months later, when the truth came out and he ordered her release, Elena returned with nothing but silence. “I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely, chasing her down. “I’ll do anything to make it up.” His butler’s voice was grave. “Sir… she lost her voice in prison. They called it an accident.” Elena had loved him long before the wedding. She thought marriage might melt his heart. Instead, it made her his prisoner. Deaf, despised, she bore his hate in silence while he burned with an obsession he refused to name—watching her every movement, chaining her to his grief, punishing her because she reminded him too much of what he had lost. Until the day Elena collapsed, clutching her secret. Pregnant. Dying. And still unseen. When Ruslan discovers her diaries—page after page of aching loneliness, unspoken cravings, tear-stained confessions of the love she still carried for him—his world shatters. For the first time in years, the cold mafia boss unravels. Screaming her name. Begging for forgiveness. Raging against the silence he created. But Elena is gone—and Ruslan must face the He destroyed the only woman who ever loved him, and now he is obsessed not with the ghost of his wife… but with winning back the deaf bride he once swore to hate.