Chapter 12
DMITRI VOLKOV
THE NEXT DAY, I BOARDED my private jet to New York.
The engines roared, and Lake Como vanished beneath clouds.
The flight was a blur of turbulence and ghosts.
Penelope at fifteen—knees scraped, hair pulled into a careless ponytail, laughing like the world couldn’t touch her.
Me at nineteen—angry, hungry, convinced love was the one thing no one could take from me.
Our first kiss behind that Brooklyn deli, mouths clumsy, desperate, swearing forever like idiots who didn’t understand how vicious adults could be.
I slept maybe twenty minutes. When I woke, my chest felt bruised from memories pressing outward, demanding to be acknowledged. Every mile east dragged me closer to the truth I’d spent years refusing to see.
We landed after midnight.
New York greeted me the way it always had—cold, indifferent, humming with violence beneath neon lights.
I didn’t linger. A convoy met me on the tarmac and drove straight to a derelict warehouse on the outskirts of Brooklyn, a place that smelled of oil, rust, and old crimes.
My local crew waited inside.
“They’re secured,” one of them said. “Picked up clean. No witnesses.”
I didn’t ask where.
In the back of a black van, hog-tied and blindfolded, sat Marco and Isabella. My chest tightened at the sight of them—older now, softer, dressed in money and lies.
They’d aged, but the rot was the same.
“Drive,” I said.
We left the city behind, headlights cutting through darkness as we headed north.
The road narrowed. Civilization thinned. Eventually, we reached an abandoned farmhouse—boards warped with age, windows blackened, fields choked with weeds and buzzing flies.
The kind of place the world forgot because it wanted to.
Perfect.
They were dragged into the basement—concrete walls sweating damp, a single bulb swinging overhead. Chairs bolted to the floor. The smell of mold and fear.
I removed Marco’s blindfold first.
His eyes widened.
Recognition slammed into him like a fist. “Volkov?” His voice cracked. “What the hell is this? You can’t—”
I backhanded him hard enough to snap his head sideways.
The sound echoed sharp and final. Blood bloomed at the corner of his mouth.
“Shut up,” I said calmly. “We’re going to talk about Penelope. Everything.”
Isabella’s blindfold came off next.
She shrieked, struggling uselessly against the restraints. Her hair—once perfectly coiffed—was tangled, mascara streaking down her face.
“Please,” she sobbed. “Dmitri, we didn’t—”
“Lies,” I growled, dragging a chair forward and sitting inches from them. “Start from the beginning. Why did you sabotage us?”
They resisted at first. Denials. Tears. Appeals to family. To history.
It took hours.
Threats. Silence. The slow, deliberate sharpening of my knife where they could hear it but not see it.
A calculated blow when words failed. Fear does strange things to people—it loosens tongues eventually.
And when they broke, the truth spilled out like sewage from a ruptured pipe.
That night—the one that destroyed us—Penelope hadn’t cheated.
They’d arranged it.
They’d drugged her with something strong enough to erase hours, maybe days. Paid a man to stage the scene. Positioned him just right. Timed my arrival down to the minute.
“She wouldn’t listen,” Marco choked. “She was obsessed with you. You were nobody. A thug. We were protecting her—”
I slammed his head back against the chair. “You destroyed her.”
And the hill.
God, the hill.
Penelope hadn’t supervised those men out of cruelty.
She hadn’t watched my mother die with indifference. They’d drugged her again, propped her up like a doll at the scene—ensured I would see her, hate her, blame her.
“She didn’t even know where she was,” Isabella sobbed. “We just needed you to believe it. If you hated her, she’d leave you. She’d be safe.”
Safe.
The word nearly drove me to my knees.
The truth hit like a freight train, crushing the breath from my lungs.
Guilt crashed over me in relentless waves.
Every punishment. Every insult. Every locked door. Every night I let her cry alone.
She’d told the truth.
Every time.
And I’d called her a liar. A whore. A monster.
I stood slowly, my hands trembling—not with rage this time, but something worse.
For Marco—the man who’d later tried to shoot me in the hospital, only for Penelope to take the bullet meant for me—I felt no mercy.
“Hold him down,” I said.
They pinned him as I took my knife and severed his left ear in one clean motion.
His screams ripped through the basement, raw and animal. I tossed the ear onto the floor, where flies immediately swarmed.
“That’s for starters,” I said quietly. “You’ll rot here until I decide what comes next.”
Isabella sobbed hysterically as I grabbed the clippers.
“You enabled him,” I said flatly. “You orchestrated everything.”
I shaved her head bald, hair falling like confetti of humiliation, then shoved a cracked mirror into her hands.
“Look at yourself,” I said. “This is what you made.”
I didn’t kill them.
Not yet.
They were Penelope’s parents—no matter how vile. Their fate wasn’t mine alone to decide.
I left them locked in that forgotten hellhole, guarded, alive, afraid.
Exhausted. Hollowed out.
I caught the next flight out—east again, toward Greece.
The engines lifted us into the sky, and I closed my eyes, replaying every moment I’d wronged her.
I would make this right.
Or I would die trying.
I ARRIVED AT RUSLAN Baranov’s empire on the Greek coast.
The Mediterranean sun bore down without mercy, bright and indifferent, the kind of beauty that mocked men who came here carrying sins.
I stepped out of the car with nothing but a single duffel bag slung over my shoulder.
No entourage. No armored convoy. No visible reminder of who I was beyond my own body.
At the gates, my men were turned away without ceremony.
Ruslan’s guards took over immediately—efficient, cold, reverent.
They patted me down with thorough, professional indifference, hands lingering just long enough to make the point clear: here, I was not Dmitri Volkov, ruler of anything. I was tolerated. Allowed. Watched.
Their loyalty to Ruslan wasn’t transactional. It was absolute. Fanatical.
I’d seen it before—men who would walk into fire smiling if he asked.
Even with him gone—off hunting the bastards who had dared kidnap his son—the estate ran like a machine that didn’t require its master’s presence to crush intruders.
High stone walls crowned with razor wire enclosed the grounds. Armed patrols moved in silent rotations, rifles cradled like extensions of their bodies.
Surveillance cameras blinked from hidden corners, and somewhere above, drones hummed softly, circling like patient predators.
It reminded me of my own fortresses.
Only cleaner. Sharper. Older.
After the final check, a grim-faced guard handed me a keycard. His eyes were flat, unimpressed.
“Your apartment,” he said. “Next to hers. As instructed.”
A beat.
“Don’t cause trouble.”
I nodded once, swallowing the instinct to bristle.
Pride had no place here—not if I wanted to leave with what mattered.
I followed the winding stone paths through the estate, past ancient olive trees twisted with age, past bursts of bougainvillea spilling color over white walls.
The scent of salt and wild herbs filled the air, carried by a breeze off the sea.
And with it came memory.
I had walked these paths before—years ago—when I was younger, meaner, hollowed out by grief and rage.
Ruslan had found me here back then, broken on that hill, half-dead from exposure, my mother freshly murdered, Penelope’s supposed betrayal still burning like acid in my veins.
He had pulled me from the dirt.
Trained me. Hardened me. Given my fury purpose and direction.
I had sworn then that I would return to Penelope—not for love, but for revenge. That I would make her feel even a fraction of what I felt.
And God help me—I had succeeded.
The realization sat like lead in my chest now.
She had never been my enemy. She had been a child—drugged, manipulated, used as a weapon against me.
While I built an empire on blood and ambition, she had lived under the shadow of my hatred, punished for crimes she never committed.
My billions meant nothing here.
My power meant nothing here.
I was just a man walking toward the wreckage he’d created, armed with nothing but regret and time—one year of it, given by a man who could erase me with a phone call.
The apartment building rose ahead—modern and understated, glass and stone designed to blend into the coastline rather than dominate it.
Balconies faced the endless blue of the sea, waves crashing far below like a reminder that nothing stayed still forever.
Mine was directly beside hers.
One wall apart.
One door between me and the woman I had destroyed.
One year.
A blink in the life of an empire. An eternity when measured against guilt.
I would apologize until my throat bled.
Explain everything—every lie, every manipulation, every truth unearthed in that basement in New York. I would beg if she demanded it. Kneel if she wished it. I would show her the man I could have been—the man I should have been—the father our son deserved.
If she wanted my life as payment, I would give it.
I reached my door and pressed the keycard against the lock.
A soft beep. A click.
I stepped inside.
The apartment was... humbling.
No marble. No sweeping luxury.
Just two modest rooms that felt deliberately stripped of excess, as if designed to remind its occupant that status did not pass through Ruslan’s gates.
The living area was small but clean. A worn leather armchair sat in the corner beside a low wooden coffee table scarred with years of use.
The kitchenette ran along one wall—single-burner stove, compact fridge humming quietly, a sink with a slow drip that echoed in the silence like a metronome counting down my sentence.
A narrow window let in slanted sunlight, dust motes drifting lazily in its path, casting gold across a threadbare rug over cool tile.