Chapter 1 #2
He wanted me to terminate it, claiming it was dangerous for my health.
I refused. That was the first time I had truly challenged him.
He didn’t shout. He didn’t strike me.
But he persisted.
Desperation forced my hand.
Giovanni—his assistant—was quiet, observant, and kinder than anyone in Dmitri’s inner circle had a right to be.
He saw the fear I lived with. The way my hands trembled. The way I clung to the smallest kindness like it might save me.
Together, we wove the lie that I had lost the baby—because lying was the only way to keep it safe.
And he believed it.
Then, at the height of his cruelty, he sent me to New York, insisting I spend time with my parents.
Later, through overheard whispers and careful listening, I uncovered the truth.
He wanted me out of the way so he could marry Seraphina—sleek, composed, dangerous in her own way. A woman who fit perfectly into his world. A woman who never resisted.
Seraphina.
The name still burned like acid in my veins.
Dmitri had wielded it with surgical precision throughout our marriage, carving it into me whenever he sensed weakness.
He never shouted when he compared us. His voice was always calm, almost bored—like a man stating facts.
“Look at Seraphina,” he’d said once, circling me slowly, eyes cold. “Slim. Composed. Elegant. A woman who understands discipline.”
“And you,” he continued softly, “are indulgent. Fat in the wrong places. Uncontrolled.”
He never called me beautiful. Not once.
A few months after he sent me away, I gave birth in a small, quiet hospital in New Jersey—far from New York’s scrutiny, and far from Dmitri.
I had left New York, leaving my parents behind, and with them, the fragile sense of safety I once knew.
The truth about my parents had finally surfaced in fragments. They had shaped me like a project, not a daughter.
‘Treatments.’ Carefully curated gaps in my memory, all disguised as concern.
“We’re preparing you,” my mother had said, “You’ll inherit everything one day, Penelope.”
What they’d really done was erase me.
They had manipulated events from my youth, ensuring that Dmitri would believe I was a cheat, a betrayer, a killer complicit in his mother’s death. They were the architects of his hatred.
Isolation had always been their goal: control their daughter, control the empire.
After everything Dmitri had done to me—the cruelty, the manipulation, the way he had hollowed me out piece by piece—I still took a bullet for him, just after giving birth in that quiet hospital. I should have stepped aside and let fate finish what it had started.
I should have let the bullet take him.
That was the truth I never spoke aloud.
But truth was rarely clean where Dmitri Volkov was concerned.
I had fallen in love with him at fifteen, hopelessly and completely, and that kind of love did not obey logic or morality.
It lodged itself deep, feral and stubborn, refusing to die even when starved.
Even through the years of resentment, the nights I cried myself to sleep in silk sheets that felt like restraints, my heart betrayed me again and again.
Dmitri was a monster—but he was my monster.
He had never betrayed me with other women while I was his wife. Never allowed another man to touch me. Never let me lack for anything tangible. Jewels, security, protection—those he provided with ruthless efficiency.
His loyalty, twisted as it was, remained absolute.
Emotionally, though, he was a wasteland.
Affection was rationed. Kindness was conditional.
Love—if it existed at all—was buried beneath layers of vengeance he refused to release.
I had passed out after taking that bullet meant for him. Days—or perhaps weeks—slipped by in fragmented shadows.
When consciousness finally returned, it did so gently, almost kindly. Sunlight filtered through sheer curtains, warm against my skin. The air smelled of salt and olives instead of antiseptic and gunpowder.
I was no longer in that hospital.
I lay in a quiet room overlooking an endless stretch of blue—sea melting into sky. Greece. Somewhere remote. Somewhere deliberately chosen.
Beside me, swaddled in white, slept my son.
Vanya.
His tiny fingers curled instinctively around mine, his grip impossibly strong for something so small.
Dark hair crowned his head, already thick. Even then, I could see Dmitri in him—the sharp lines, the intensity waiting beneath the softness.
But Dmitri himself was gone.
The man responsible for pulling me from the chaos and bringing me to a safe, quiet place was Ruslan.
Ruslan Baranov.
A name that carried weight in the underworld, spoken with caution, never lightly.
When he entered a room, conversation died—not because he demanded it, but because his presence made it so.
Tall. Imposing. Eyes dark and unreadable, like obsidian polished smooth by centuries of violence. He looked at me once, assessing, then nodded.
“You’ll be safe here,” he said simply.
And he made it so.
Ruslan arranged everything—the secluded villa hidden among olive groves, the doctors who asked no questions, the security that never slept. For five years, I lived under his protection, carefully erased from the world that had hunted me.
Vanya grew fast. Too fast.
By five, he was tall for his age, sharp-eyed and fearless, with Dmitri’s piercing blue gaze and an unsettling awareness that made adults uneasy.
He asked questions I didn’t always know how to answer.
“Where is my father?”
I learned how to deflect. How to lie gently.
Our life was quiet. Healing. Almost normal.
I baked bread in the mornings. Read him stories beneath starlit skies. Learned to exist without fear tightening my chest at every unexpected sound.
All was peaceful for me and my son, Vanya, in Ruslan’s estate—until a sudden message arrived.
Ruslan didn’t deliver it himself. He sent an emissary—precise, emotionless.
“Dmitri Volkov is remarrying,” the sealed note read. Ruslan had advised me to go.
I shouldn’t have gone.
God knows I shouldn’t have.
I should have stayed in Greece, protected and forgotten, pretending the past no longer had teeth. But curiosity gnawed at me—and beneath it, something more dangerous.
Hope.
I told myself I only wanted to see. To witness from a distance. To confirm the chapter was truly closed.
The wedding at Lake Como never made it to the vows.
Seraphina—elegant, polished, chosen for him by politics rather than desire—collapsed at the altar before a single promise could be spoken. Foam spilled from her lips as panic ripped through the church. Screams echoed.
Chaos erupted.
And in the confusion, Vanya slipped from my grasp.
He darted forward, fearless and curious, and collided with Dmitri. The commotion drew his attention to me.
And despite believing I was dead, he chose to marry me again.
I wasn’t Penelope to him.
I was Pen—a woman who resembled his late wife so closely that he had tried, desperately, to make me her.
Sometimes I wondered if he truly didn’t know.
Other times, I was certain he did—and chose ignorance because acknowledging the truth would mean facing his guilt.
Dmitri Volkov had always been a master at burying pain beneath control.
Vanya knew.
My son’s eyes—so sharp, so observant—missed nothing.
He never called Dmitri father. Never slipped. He addressed him as sir, polite and distant, a small smile playing on his lips as though he understood the strange game we were all playing.
Dmitri noticed, of course, but mistook it for shyness.
He had no idea the child he watched so closely already knew who he was.
Dmitri believed Penelope Volkov had died in that hospital.
A casualty of chaos. An irreversible mistake.
I saw the regret in him every day—in the way his jaw tightened when my name was mentioned by others, in the long silences that followed memories he refused to share.
His remorse lived in his eyes, dark and restless, never spoken aloud. Dmitri did not apologize. He punished himself instead.
What began between us was sharp-edged and volatile.
We spoke like enemies forced into proximity—barbed remarks, measured cruelty, glances that lingered too long.
There was anger there. Suspicion. And something far more dangerous beneath it all: familiarity.
The passion crept back slowly, unwelcome but undeniable.
It culminated in a night heavy with tension and unspoken history.
It wasn't tenderness we reached for—it was desperation. A reckless attempt to reclaim something broken beyond repair.
Part of me knew I did it to spite Seraphina.
She had slithered back into Dmitri’s orbit through manipulation and timing, embedding herself into his household..
The next morning, I woke to darkness.
Not silk sheets or filtered sunlight—but cold concrete beneath my feet and the metallic sting of fear flooding my senses.
My wrists and ankles were bound to a splintered chair, rope cutting into skin already raw. The air was thick with rust, dampness, and decay.
Seraphina sat beside me.
Her once-perfect gown was torn, dirt smeared across silk and skin alike. She looked afraid
Then Dmitri was dragged in.
Blood streaked his face. His suit—always immaculate—hung in ruins. He barely stayed upright as they forced him to his knees. The men surrounding us spoke in harsh Albanian accents, their smiles cold and businesslike.
They gave him a choice.
Save me.
Or save Seraphina.
Time fractured.
Dmitri’s eyes lifted to mine, anguish written plainly across his face. For a heartbeat, I thought—I hoped—he would choose me. That somewhere beneath the guilt and fear, he would see Penelope.
“Seraphina,” he rasped.
The word shattered something inside me.
I didn’t scream.
The pain that followed was worse than any bullet—cleaner, deeper, final. My heart splintered, each shard embedding itself somewhere vital.
Dmitri Volkov had chosen who mattered.
And it wasn’t me.
The Albanians stepped forward next, their leader speaking in clipped tones, bargaining as though negotiating livestock. I was sold. Purchased. Reduced to a transaction.