Chapter 5
PENELOPE
Four days had crawled by in a haze of silence and shadow.
Not the peaceful kind—the kind that pressed in on your chest until breathing felt optional.
I moved through the mansion like something already half-dead, gliding from room to room in borrowed skin.
Giovanni had replaced the black silk pajamas with simple gray dresses and soft-soled slippers, left neatly folded on the bed each morning.
He never spoke when he delivered them. Never lingered.
Just a quiet nod and gone. Practical. Efficient.
Kind in the way men learned to be when kindness was the only rebellion left to them.
The dresses felt like a uniform. Neutral. Unmemorable. Designed to erase me.
Dmitri hadn’t summoned me once.
No late-night knock. No cold order barked down a corridor. No deliberate cruelty wrapped in control.
Nothing.
That was almost worse.
The words ‘sex slave’ still hovered between us, unspoken but thick as smoke, and yet he hadn’t lit the match.
I didn’t know whether that meant he’d forgotten me entirely—or whether he was watching, waiting, deciding how best to break me.
I lived in the in-between.
I avoided Vanya with a precision that bordered on self-harm.
Every time his laughter echoed down a hallway, bright and unguarded, I turned the other way.
Every glimpse of dark curls vanishing around a corner or the flash of small sneakers pounding over marble sent a sharp, involuntary pain through my chest. It wasn’t just emotional—it was physical. A tightness beneath my ribs. A tremor in my hands.
I wanted—no, needed—to run to him. To drop to my knees and crush him against me, breathe him in, whisper the truth into his hair until something in him remembered. Until he looked at me with recognition instead of polite curiosity. Until he said Mama again.
But I knew the rules.
One wrong word. One lingering look. One slip.
And Seraphina would have me handed back to the Albanians before Dmitri finished his morning coffee.
So I stayed invisible.
I ate alone in the small staff kitchen, sitting at the far end of the table with my back to the door. I moved only when necessary. I learned the rhythm of the house—when Seraphina took Vanya to school, when Dmitri left for meetings, when the halls emptied and the walls breathed.
I waited.
The letter to Ruslan Baranov had been written on the second night.
Three pages. No embellishment. No begging. Just facts and truth and the kind of desperation that didn’t need dramatics. I folded it into an unmarked envelope and sealed it with hands that shook despite my resolve.
Giovanni had taken it without meeting my eyes.
“I’ll get it to Greece,” he’d said quietly. “Discreetly.”
I trusted him to deliver it.
I didn’t trust time.
Ruslan received hundreds of pleas every month. Requests. Confessions. Warnings. Mine was just another envelope in a mountain of need. Would he open it? Would my name still mean something? Or would it sit unopened, ink fading, until hope became irrelevant?
That question gnawed at me constantly.
This afternoon, I sat on the wide landing halfway down the grand staircase—just a shallow step overlooking the foyer below.
Sunlight slanted through the tall windows, gilding the marble in gold, but the warmth never reached me. I hugged my knees to my chest and stared at the empty space where my life used to be.
My thoughts kept circling the same fork in the road.
Stay and fight for Vanya—slowly, silently, risking discovery while trying to trigger whatever memories Dmitri still carried buried deep in his mind.
Or leave.
Find the other women who’d escaped with me and disappear completely.
Ana. Sofia. Christina. Simona. Carina.
And Bianca.
The thought of her lodged like a stone in my stomach. Still trapped. Still suffering under the Kompania brothers.
I prayed the others had found safety—borders crossed, new names claimed, some scrap of kindness in a world that had devoured us whole.
But Bianca...
I closed my eyes.
Footsteps descended behind me.
Light. Unhurried. Confident.
I didn’t need to turn.
Seraphina stopped two steps above me. No Vanya at her side this time. No performance. Just her—immaculate, composed, victory humming beneath her skin like a private anthem.
I smelled her perfume before I saw her—something expensive and floral, designed to linger.
She extended her phone toward me.
“Here.”
I stared at the device like it might bite. “Why are you giving me your phone?”
Her lips curved faintly. Not a smile. A concession. “Your father wants to speak with you.”
The words hit like ice water poured straight down my spine.
My chest collapsed inward.
Marco Volkov.
The architect of my childhood nightmares.
The man who’d poisoned my earliest memories with control disguised as love.
Who had orchestrated my teenage heartbreak with Dmitri like a chess move, nudging two damaged souls together for his own gain.
Who had wiped chunks of my memory when I was still young enough to believe forgetting meant healing—so I wouldn’t remember the worst of what he’d forced me to endure.
The man who’d later tried to steal my newborn son because I was, in his words, unworthy of carrying the family legacy.
And the man whose bullet I had taken for Dmitri.
Because even after everything—after the cruelty, the manipulation, the erasure—I had still loved the monster my father helped create.
I took the phone with numb fingers and pressed it to my ear, deliberately switching the speaker on. Loud. Unavoidable. Let Seraphina hear every syllable. Let her know exactly who was calling and why.
“Penelope,” Marco’s voice came through smooth and paternal, wrapped in the same false warmth he’d always used before the knife came out. “I believe you’ve finally learned that family is everything.”
I didn’t respond.
I stared at the glowing screen, at his name spelled out in neat black letters, as if it weren’t attached to a lifetime of damage.
“I knew the Albanians had you,” he continued, unbothered by my silence. “I knew where you were the moment you disappeared. Their reputation isn’t exactly subtle.”
My fingers curled tighter around the phone.
“I could have bought your freedom months ago,” Marco went on, voice almost indulgent. “But some lessons have to be learned the hard way, don’t they? Independence. Defiance. Running off without protection. You needed to be reminded what the world does to women like you.”
There it was.
The justification.
The cruelty framed as discipline.
“Why are you calling now, Marco?” I asked. My voice sounded flat, distant, like it belonged to someone else.
“Because it’s time to put the past behind us, child,” he said smoothly. “Come home. You’ve suffered enough.”
Home.
The word tasted bitter.
“Dmitri thinks you’re dead,” Marco continued, and I felt Seraphina’s attention sharpen instantly. “To him, you’re just a used-up Albanian slave he pitied enough to keep breathing under his roof. That mercy can expire at any moment. He could tire of you tomorrow and send you right back.”
A calculated pause.
“But I won’t.”
I clenched my free hand until my nails bit into my palm, grounding myself in pain. He knew. He knew exactly how close the Albanians were to tracing me.
How precarious my position here was. He was leveraging that fear like a blade at my throat.
“If you come to the States,” he said, voice lowering into something coaxing, “I can guarantee your safety. Real safety. Federal borders. Actual laws. No contracts that sell women like cattle. No councils deciding who lives and who disappears. A fresh start. Protection. A life without chains.”
I swallowed.
The United States meant courts. Paper trails. Police who answered to judges, not patriarchs. It meant no public executions for breaking unwritten codes. No legal slavery disguised as business agreements.
It was tempting.
Painfully so.
“And Vanya?” I asked quietly.
The pause this time was longer. Deliberate.
“Your son is Dmitri’s now,” Marco said at last. “No one can take him from Volkov custody—not legally, not practically. He’s protected. He’s well cared for.”
I almost laughed. Almost.
“But you,” Marco continued, as if offering a consolation prize, “can still have a life. Marry someone of your choosing here. Have more children. Build something real. You’re still young enough, Penelope. Don’t waste yourself clinging to a past that’s already buried.”
I closed my eyes.
The offer dangled like poisoned fruit—sweet on the surface, lethal underneath.
Leave Lake Como.
Leave Seraphina.
Leave Dmitri.
Leave the danger.
Leave my son.
“Do you accept the offer or not?” Marco pressed, impatience creeping through the polish.
I didn’t answer immediately.
Seraphina leaned against the banister now, arms crossed, watching me openly.
There was no pretense of privacy anymore. She wanted to see which way I’d bend. Whether I’d choose survival or motherhood. Whether I’d remove myself neatly from the board.
I thought of Bianca—still in that cell, still whispering Ricci’s name into the dark.
I thought of the other women who’d escaped with me—scattered, terrified, but alive.
I thought of Vanya’s small, serious face as he told Seraphina, My real mom is dead. I can’t forget about her. Ever.
I thought of the letter somewhere between here and Greece.
I lifted my gaze and met Seraphina’s eyes deliberately.
Then I looked back at the phone.
“No,” I said.
The word landed cleanly. Sharply.
A beat of silence.
“Penelope—”
“No,” I repeated, firmer now, my spine locking into place. “I’m not leaving my son.”
Marco’s voice hardened, the warmth draining out of it like a switched-off lamp.
“You’re making a mistake,” he said. “You’ll regret this when Dmitri tires of you and the Albanians come knocking. Men like him always do. And when they do, you won’t have anywhere left to run.”
I let the threat settle instead of flinching from it. Marco always expected fear. He fed on it.
“Maybe,” I said evenly. “But I’d rather regret staying than regret walking away.”