Ruthless Addiction (Doomed Vows #3)

PROLOGUE

DMITRI VOLKOV

The cemetery in Lake Como was a somber expanse of ancient stone and whispering cypress trees. Mist drifted low across the ground, curling around marble angels eroded by centuries of sorrow.

Tens of men stood encircling the grave—elders of the four families, their sons, capos, and soldiers. All dressed in immaculate black, their faces carved in stoic reverence, the weight of old codes pressing on their shoulders.

They came not out of love, but allegiance. Out of duty. Out of fear.

Their presence blurred at the edges of my vision.

My world had narrowed to a patch of fresh soil and the coffin beneath it—the place where my heart now lay buried.

Penelope.

My Milaya.

The only woman I had ever loved, and the one I could never save.

She had died in my arms, her father’s bullet tearing through her chest before it could reach mine. I still felt the heat of her blood on my hands—still saw her lips trembling into that final, impossible smile. It was not forgiveness she’d given me in that look. It was goodbye.

I stood motionless, my black coat heavy with rain and grief, my eyes burning from the effort of not weeping before these men. The pain inside me was vast, bottomless—an ocean I could drown in but never escape.

Her absence was a physical wound.

Her voice—soft, defiant, endlessly alive—echoed in the hollow corridors of my mind.

PENELOPE VOLKOV.

The name was carved in white marble, cruelly binding her to the family that had destroyed us both. To me. To blood and betrayal.

My knees threatened to give way, but I refused them that weakness. My fists clenched, nails cutting into my palms until blood welled and dripped to the earth.

I wanted to claw through the dirt, rip the coffin open, pull her back to me. Just once more. To feel her warmth, her fire, her stubborn heart still beating beside mine.

But the ground remained mercilessly still.

The woman who’d been my light at fifteen, my obsession at twenty-five, my salvation and my torment. I’d failed her—failed to protect her, failed to save her from her father’s betrayal, from the bullet meant for me.

“Dmitri.”

The voice came from beside me—low, steady, iron in its restraint.

Ruslan Baranov stood at my shoulder, a towering figure of grief and composure.

His hair, streaked with silver, caught the gray light like steel. At his side, his young son clung to his leg—a pale, silent boy of four whose eyes said what neither of us could: the world takes, and takes, and never gives back.

Ruslan’s wife had been buried just a week before, oceans away in Athens. Yet he had come here—come for me, for her. For Penelope. His presence was a quiet vow between us.

Two men bound not by business, but by loss.

He looked down at the grave, his jaw hard. “She didn’t deserve this.”

“No one ever does,” I said, though my voice was a hollow thing. “But she chose me. And for that, she paid.”

Ruslan’s eyes flicked to mine. “Then make them pay for her.”

The words landed like a spark in dry grass. The first whisper of rage beneath the grief.

But vengeance, even then, felt meaningless. What was retribution to a man who had already lost everything that made life worth the living?

My thoughts, unbidden, drifted to another grave—not one of stone or earth, but of memory.

I was nineteen when I left my mother in that squalid hotel room, clutching a letter meant for Penelope.

When I returned, the room was empty.

No sign of my mother but the chaos left behind—torn sheets, shattered glass, the metallic scent of blood heavy in the air. Her scarf lay crumpled near the bed, stained and torn. The silence was unbearable, as though the walls themselves had witnessed and could no longer speak of what they’d seen.

She was gone.

Taken.

And the proof of what they’d done to her lingered in every corner, in every breath I drew.

I had tracked the address the receptionist gave me, my heart pounding with desperate hope.

The rain that night fell in thin, slanted lines, slicing through the city’s glow, soaking my clothes until they clung like regret. New York’s streets reeked of gasoline and fear, the kind that lingered in every alley, every flickering streetlamp.

I drove fast, reckless, my hands white-knuckled on the wheel, headlights cutting through the storm. Each turn of the tires felt like a countdown—to finding her, to saving her, to undoing whatever nightmare had begun.

When I reached the place—the hill just outside the Bronx, where the streetlights died and the city’s hum faded into silence—I knew, even before I saw her, that something had gone terribly wrong.

The wind carried the smell of rain and rust, the kind that clung to old fences and forgotten places. My heart hammered in my chest as I climbed the slope, my shoes slipping on the wet grass.

And then I saw her.

My mother lay there, beneath the dim glow of a flickering streetlamp—her body broken, her once-bright dress torn and stained, her skin bruised with the violence of what they’d done to her. Her hair fanned across the earth like spilled ink, her eyes open to the sky, glassy and still.

For a heartbeat, the world stopped. Then a sound ripped out of me—something between a sob and a scream, too raw to be human.

“Mama!”

I fell to my knees beside her, mud soaking through my jeans, my hands trembling as I touched her face, her throat, her chest. Nothing. No breath, no pulse, no warmth.

“Mama, wake up!” I begged, my voice breaking apart, tears blinding me as I shook her limp shoulders. “Please—please wake up. Please, Mama.”

But the night gave me nothing. Only silence.

Only the whisper of the wind through the grass, as if the earth itself was mourning her.

I pulled her into my arms, cradling her like a child, pressing my forehead to hers. Her skin was cold—too cold—and she smelled faintly of rose soap, blood, and rain. The scent I would never forget. The scent that would haunt every breath I took after that night.

Something inside me shattered—quietly, completely.

I didn’t hear the footsteps until they were close. Didn’t register the crunch of gravel or the faint rustle of a coat until a shadow fell across us.

When I finally looked up, a man stood there—tall, broad, a dark coat clinging to him in the drizzle. His face was carved with the calm of someone who’d seen too much.

Ruslan Baranov.

“Come with me,” he said. His voice was low, steady—an offer and an order at once.

The world I’d known had died on that hill—under the dim streetlight, beneath the cold breath of the city wind.

Everything that tethered me to life had been torn away, leaving nothing but the hollow echo of her name in my chest.

There was nothing left to question.

Nothing left to lose.

Ruslan Baranov took me from that hill in New York that night—away from my aunt’s cold control, from the Volkovs and their poisoned bloodline, from the ashes of everything I had once loved.

The car waited at the foot of the hill, its black frame gleaming under the drizzle. I remember the sound of the door shutting behind me, the scent of leather and smoke, the city lights blurring into gold streaks as we drove through the night.

I didn’t ask where we were going. I didn’t care.

All I knew was that I was leaving behind the boy I had been—and whatever innocence had still survived in me.

Ruslan brought me into his empire in Greece—a world unto itself.

Ruslan’s estate rose like a fortress above the Aegean, marble gleaming under endless sun, its walls guarded by men who killed without hesitation.

He gave me quarters in the servants’ wing—a bare room with white walls and a single window overlooking the sea. It should’ve felt like a prison, but to me, it was sanctuary.

His men trained me.

Taught me to fight, to shoot, to negotiate, to kill.

Extortion. Arms trafficking. Money laundering. Assassination. Political bribery.

The curriculum of survival.

From nineteen to twenty-five, I was forged in blood and fire. I rose from a nameless boy to a soldier, then to a capo—a man others obeyed, feared, followed.

Ruslan was a ghost even in his own empire.

He appeared rarely, his visits whispered about like omens. When he did appear, the halls stilled, and the air itself seemed to hold its breath.

Ruslan Baranov had taken me from that hill of blood and rain, and turned me into something else. Something dangerous.

He never asked for repayment. Never demanded allegiance. Not once did he speak of that night, or why he’d come for me when no one else had.

I asked him, once.

He only looked at me with those pale, unreadable eyes and said nothing. The silence was heavier than any truth.

I know he had his reasons—for finding me there, for bringing me to Greece, for shaping me in his own ruthless image. But he kept them buried, and the not knowing festered.

That question haunted me more than any nightmare.

When I turned twenty-five, Ruslan called me into his study—a dark chamber lined with books and silence.

“It is time.” He pushed a leather folder toward me.

When I opened it, the pages were a map of ruin—names, bank accounts, safehouses, a step-by-step route to claim the Volkov empire. All that was left was the one instruction he hadn’t written: finish them.

He didn’t need to tell me what to do.

That night, I returned to Lake Como.

I killed them all—my foster parents who’d ordered my father’s death, the guards who looked the other way.

I watched their mansion burn, fed by the records and ledgers I’d uncovered; their empire went up in smoke.

I took everything they’d built on other people’s suffering—fortune, name, power—and wore it like a wound.

I thought vengeance would cleanse me.

It didn’t.

All it did was make me the very thing I’d once sworn to destroy.