PROLOGUE #2
As I stood at Penelope’s grave I thought of how quickly the world had made me.
In a few brutal years I’d gone from nothing to being called the most feared capo in Italy.
Power between Ruslan and me was a quiet division of empires: he kept his marble throne in Greece; I kept the streets of Lake Como under my boot.
The priest was calling me now, his thin hands raised in benediction, the Latin words drifting like ash through the rain. But I could not move.
I saw Penelope everywhere—in the wind through the cypress trees, in the flicker of the candles, in the hollow ache of my chest.
Her laughter under the oak tree.
Her defiance.
Her blood on my hands as she whispered my name one last time.
I would never recover from her.
She had taken my heart, my life, my soul—and buried them with her beneath the cold, unyielding earth.
I eventually bent when the priest gestured again, my body moving of its own accord.
My hand trembled as I scooped a handful of the grave’s fresh earth—cool, damp sand sifting through my fingers like time losing its hold.
In our tradition it was a final benediction, the living returning the body to the soil.
I let the grains fall, watched them scatter across Penelope’s coffin, each fleck feeling like a sliver of me crumbling with her.
The priest’s hymn rose then, low and ancient, a dragnet of sound that pulled at the ribs of the world. Voices joined—men who had come out of duty reciting words they did not always feel—until the melody filled the air and made my chest ache.
I stared at the tombstone as if, by will alone, I could make the cold stone split wide and let me into the dark where she lay.
The rites continued, each small ceremonial gesture a new notch in the wound.
Elder men placed white lilies atop the coffin; their petals shone like small traitorous moons against the dark soil—purity where none remained.
One of my soldiers uncorked a bottle of aged grappa and poured a measured stream over the earth, the spirit’s sharp heat rising and mingling with the cold, loamy scent.
It was an old offering—fire to guide the dead.
The priest sprinkled holy water, bright beads that caught the dying light, and intoned prayers in Italian that blurred in my ears into the same rough sound: loss.
I held myself upright as long as I could.
I honored her the way she deserved—eyes dry, back straight—because the men around me expected strength from the Don. But strength in me now was a paper thing: easily folded and set aflame.
When forced smiles and coined condolences slid across my path—“Our deepest sympathies, Don Volkov”—they tasted of tin and bile. Men who had once smiled at our table and cut deals over wine now gave me the politest of bows and the coldest of hands.
When the crowd thinned and the engines of black cars rumbled away, only four of us remained: Giovanni—the quiet iron that had always steadied me; Ruslan Baranov—immovable, patient as a mountain; Ruslan’s small silent son, who clung to his father’s coat as if the fabric alone might hold him to the world; and me, a hollow shell leaning on the edge of all I had left.
Penelope’s face returned to my mind—the way she’d argued with me over the smallest things, the way she’d folded herself around my faults until I believed I could be better.
Her last question in the hospital—“Do you ever love me?”—had been a small, fragile thing.
My answer—“Eternally”—had been a vow I had not kept safe enough.
I let myself kneel at the edge of the grave, palms pressing into wet earth, feeling the grit catch under my fingernails.
I pressed my fingertips into the soil where her name was carved, as if I could anchor myself to something that had not betrayed me.
Giovanni lingered near the edge of the plot, a hulking outline against the gray sky. His face, usually a fortress, was undone.
The scar that cut across his cheek caught the dying light, a pale, crooked reminder of every battle we’d fought together.
But this—this loss—had gutted him.
His shoulders bowed beneath a grief that wasn’t his to bear.
I couldn’t look at him for long.
The guilt was too sharp, twisting in my chest until it felt like punishment.
She had died shielding me.
Ruslan Baranov approached then, his presence cutting through the stillness like the edge of a blade. The dying sun caught in the silver of his hair, turning him almost spectral—part man, part legend.
His mute son trailed behind, a small, silent shadow of sorrow.
“I’m heading back to Greece, Dmitri,” Ruslan said, his deep voice steady, threaded with that rough Greek accent that always made every word sound like an order.
He looked at me for a long moment. “Give yourself time,” he said finally. “Bleed if you have to. But when you rise—make it count.”
He clasped my shoulder—firm, grounding.
The touch steadied me more than I wanted to admit.
We were born the same year, but Ruslan carried the weight of decades: harder, colder, forged in darker fires. Had he not pulled me out, the Volkovs or my aunt would have crushed me.
“Appreciate you coming, Ruslan,” I said after a long pause. “I should’ve been there when you buried your wife.”
He didn’t answer, just studied me with that calm that made men nervous.
“Tell me,” I asked finally, “does it ever stop hurting?”
A faint smirk touched his mouth—thin, aristocratic, and cold.
“There’s nothing to heal from,” he said evenly. “She was a deal, not a wound.”
The simplicity of it hit harder than any confession.
Ruslan’s gaze found mine again, sharp and appraising, as though weighing the worth of my heart. “Love,” he said, almost as a lesson, “is a frailty. It renders men feeble. You’ve already been through hell and survived. Don’t lose yourself now by obsessing over the dead or the past.”
He tilted his head, a faint glint of approval breaking through his detachment. “When you have taken a new bride, come to Greece. We’ll drink like men who outlasted the pain.”
My answer came without hesitation. “I’ll never remarry,” I said flatly. “She was all I ever wanted. All I ever will.”
His smirk deepened, almost indulgent. “That’s what we all say—until the next war, or the next woman.”
Then he turned toward his boy.
The child waited a few feet away, small hands clasped in front of him, the collar of his black coat too large for his thin neck.
Ruslan knelt, lifting him into his arms with a tenderness that seemed foreign to a man like him.
He brushed a strand of dark hair from the boy’s forehead and studied his face in silence—a look heavy with possession and something close to fear. Whatever humanity still lived in Ruslan Baranov, it was buried in that child.
He straightened, the boy now perched on his shoulders, small hands gripping his father’s silver hair. The soldiers waiting by the chopper stiffened to attention, their salutes sharp and wordless. The rotor blades began to turn, slicing through the evening quiet.
Ruslan paused before boarding, the wind from the helicopter whipping his long coat around his frame.
He turned once more, the dying light catching in his pale eyes.
“I’ve heard the stories,” Ruslan said, voice low, deliberate. “How you treated her. How she became the outlet for your rage.”
He paused, gaze steady. “And now she’s gone, you wish you’d loved her better. Now you tell the world she was everything.”
A faint smirk tugged at his mouth—dangerous, knowing. “Regret looks good on you, Dmitri. Almost makes you human.”
The words hung in the air, stark and heavy, before he climbed aboard.
I stood rooted to the ground, watching that towering figure—the man who’d once torn a world apart just to build his own from the ruins. Ruslan Baranov: the ghost king of Europe.
In his rare moments, he could seem almost kind, even fatherly. But beneath that veneer lay a man forged in violence and sharpened by empire.
His reach bled through continents. Governments bent under his influence. Interpol called him a myth. But I had seen the man himself—and the nightmare he ruled.
As his chopper rose into the twilight, I watched the man vanish into the darkening sky—cold, unshaken, untouched by the grief that devoured me. I envied him. His ability to cut emotion cleanly from his soul was something I could never master.
But his words lingered long after the chopper disappeared into the dusk. He spoke as if he knew things he shouldn’t have, as if he’d been inside the walls of my home, listening to the cracks in my marriage, watching the way Penelope’s smile dimmed
He lived continents away, running his empire from Greece. Yet something in his tone—too knowing—made my gut twist. Ruslan never spoke without reason.
The cemetery fell silent again.
Then came the crunch of footsteps behind me—heavy, familiar.
Giovanni.
He stopped beside me, his broad shoulders hunched, his eyes red-rimmed and swollen, as if he’d fought his grief until it broke him anyway.
His voice came out rough, gravel rubbing against stone.
“What’s next, boss?”
“To find her father,” I said, the words pulling me upright as if I’d been yanked by a rope.
Authority flared through the despair—precise, unrelenting. “I want everything on the Romanos. Their allies, their safehouses—every name, every route, every habit. Even the damned things they do at breakfast. Marco Romano has my son. I want him bleeding information before I put him in the ground.”
Giovanni blinked once, then nodded. “Understood. We’ll move quiet and hard.”
He hesitated, then dropped news like a stone. “The Orlovs demand a meeting tonight. They say—now that your wife is dead, it’s time to seal the alliance. They want you to finally honor that age-old promise and marry Seraphina, their eldest daughter.”
Rage snapped like a wire.
I felt it explode through me—pure, scalding. “My wife’s still warm in the ground, and they’re already planning my next wedding?” I roared.
My fists clenched until my knuckles bled white. “Tell them I’m not interested in their rings or their contracts. Tell them to take their alliance and shove it.”
I stalked to the grave’s edge, gravel crunching under my boots.
The stone stared back: PENELOPE VOLKOV. The letters were a verdict and a vow. I crouched, the wind tugging at my coat, and placed both hands on the cold marble as if I could anchor myself to her name.
“I’ll find our son, Milaya,” I whispered. The promise cracked my throat. “I swear it.”
My Penelope. I would miss her until my last breath.
Giovanni fell into step beside me, the cemetery emptying into twilight’s embrace.
The hunt began now—for my son, for vengeance, for the fragments of a life Penelope had given everything to protect.