Chapter 1 #2
I can’t claim Dmitri was innocent. He hurt you—his cruelty, his possessiveness, his silence, his secrets. But he has paid for every one of those sins. And I believe you still love him, even if you no longer admit it aloud.
Penelope... your son deserves the truth of who he is.
He deserves the chance to know his father.
And Dmitri deserves one moment—one chance—to choose you again with open eyes.
As a friend to you both, I am asking you to return to Lake Como and put an end to the wedding. If your marriage can be salvaged, let it be rebuilt with the knowledge of what it is to lose everything. If not, at least let truth replace the ghosts haunting him.
Speak to Elias when you’ve made your choice.
A jet will be ready to fly you wherever you decide.
This isn’t a debt.
You owe me nothing.
Ruslan Baranov
The sunlit room of Ruslan Baranov’s estate suddenly felt smaller—too suffocating for the storm rising inside me.
The letter trembled in my hand, its edges cutting into my palm as though trying to anchor me to the present.
My nails dug crescent moons into my skin, drawing thin lines of blood, but even that sting couldn’t ground me.
Ruslan’s words blurred, rearranged, sharpened again.
Dmitri. Wedding. Tomorrow.
A tremor ran through me, and the past—my carefully buried, stitched-together past—ripped itself open.
Five years ago—on the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday—I had choicelessly honored Dmitri’s invitation to his wedding.
I had no idea I was walking into a trap.
No idea I was the bride of the day.
I remember the moment everything shifted.
The marble floors shone like polished bone under the cathedral’s chandeliers. The candles were too tall, burning too cold, dripping wax like tears.
And then he appeared.
Dimitri Volkov.
The boy I once loved—now a man carved from ice and violence.
He approached me with a calmness that felt like a loaded gun pressed against my spine.
He cupped my jaw, his thumb sweeping across my cheek in a gesture too tender, too deceptive, and he murmured. “Didn’t you promise to marry me at twenty-five, sweetheart?
Or did you truly think I’d let you forget?”
There was no affection in his voice.
Only possession.
Only the terrifying certainty of a man who had already decided that my life, my choices, my future—all belonged to him.
He pressed the diamond ring into my shaking palm.
Not as a symbol.
Not as a promise.
But as a command.
The weight of it felt wrong, foreign, cold—a shackle masquerading as love.
I felt it cut into my skin, sharp edges biting, marking me before it even touched my finger.
For a moment—one impossible, foolish moment—I tried to search his face for the boy I once knew.
The one who wrote me poems.
The one who kissed me under the old oak tree.
The one who promised the world without having anything to give.
But he was gone.
Buried.
Replaced by a monster shaped by power and cruelty—and by a world that rewarded both.
That very night, as his wife, I waited for him. Still clinging to hope like an idiot.
Still praying there was something left of the boy I remembered.
He came home late.
Too late.
It was impossible to miss the way he slid his ring back onto his finger—smoothly, carelessly, like it had been taken off for convenience rather than sentiment.
I could smell another woman’s perfume on him.
Sweet. Floral. Expensive. Foreign to me.
My voice shook when I asked, “Who is she?”
I wanted him to lie.
God, I wanted him to lie.
To soften the blow, to pretend, to give me anything that resembled mercy.
Instead, he delivered the words like bullets:
“Seraphina.”
A cold smirk.
“Graceful. Slim. Desired. Everything you’ll never be.”
The cruelty wasn’t accidental. It was deliberate—a warning wrapped in venom.
A reminder that I was trapped now, legally, physically, emotionally—branded as Mrs. Volkov, whether I wanted it or not.
And that the boy I loved at fifteen...had died long before I ever walked into that cathedral.
From that moment on, our marriage became a slow, waking nightmare.
Every word from him was a cut—cruel, calculated, demeaning—carved into me like a blade meant to shape me into someone I could never be.
He mocked my body constantly, sneering at my softness as if it were a crime. Too soft. Too big. Too slow. Too unlike her.
He made a ritual of it, a daily liturgy of humiliation.
Each comparison was deliberate, each insult placed with surgical precision, designed to remind me I was an inconvenience draped in a crown meant for another woman. A placeholder. A stand-in. A wife he never wanted.
He hated my father, hated the marriage, hated me—and I tried anyway. God help me, I tried.
I cooked his favorite borscht with trembling hands.
I wore the dresses he admired on other women.
I whispered love into the dark, hoping he might whisper something—anything—back.
But nothing melted him. Not tenderness. Not vulnerability. Not even my desperation.
And when I finally let him into my bed, hoping it might bridge the chasm between us, he took what I offered and disappeared into the night like a ghost.
I was left alone in that mansion of marble and shadows, clutching the sheets he’d abandoned, unaware that another life had already sparked inside me.
If my evil ex, Antonio, hadn’t kidnapped me on the day I thought I’d miscarried—hadn’t dragged me to his father’s house in Rome with my grief bleeding through every breath—Dmitri might never have returned home.
He might never have learned I was pregnant.
And when he did find out, when the truth finally reached him, any na?ve part of me that hoped for joy... died.
One would think a man might soften at the knowledge of a child, of a legacy, of a tiny heartbeat made from his own blood. But Dmitri did not.
His face hardened. His hands curled into fists.
His voice—cold, precise—repeated the same demand every day: abort it. As if my baby was nothing more than an inconvenience in his perfectly controlled world.
If not for Giovanni—the only man in that house who saw me as human—I wouldn’t have my child today.
Giovanni hid me when Dmitri’s rage became unbearable.
When Dmitri ordered that I be locked in a windowless basement for two days as punishment, Giovanni was the one who smuggled food to me in the dark.
I remember the cold first. Not the shivering kind—no, this was the kind that sank into the bone, settling in my spine like ice.
No light. No warmth. Just cement beneath me and the thud of my heart echoing in the darkness.
Every hour that passed, the fear grew sharper.
Would the stress make me lose the tiny life inside me?
Would Dmitri even care if I did?
I curled my hands around my belly, whispering to the baby—pleas, prayers, promises—while tears slipped down my face unchecked. The hunger gnawed at me, but the terror of losing my child gnawed harder.
Giovanni would slip in like a ghost—soft knocks, whispered warnings, a small flashlight cupped in his palm, a piece of bread, a bottle of water.
“You have to eat, Penelope,” he’d murmur, eyes frantic. “For the baby. For yourself. I won’t let him break you.”
But Dmitri’s punishment did break something.
By the time Dmitri dragged me out, my legs were numb, my vision fading, my mind slipping into blackness.
The coma took me for three days. Three long, silent days where the world moved on without me, where my baby’s heartbeat was the only thing tethering me to life.
And still... Dmitri didn’t apologize. Didn’t ask. Didn’t care. Or so I believed then.
If not for Giovanni, who risked everything by hiring Russian doctors behind Dmitri’s back to check on my pregnancy, my son wouldn’t be alive today.
My sweet little boy. My whole heart.
My reason for breathing.
My son, Vanya saved me in ways he will never fully understand. His first cry cracked open the darkness that had been swallowing me for months. His tiny fingers, curling around mine, stitched pieces of me back together that I thought were gone forever.
Every laugh he’s ever given me has been a healing salve. Every time he calls “Mom,” my world straightens, my heart steadies, my lungs remember how to breathe.
He is the one bright thing I claimed from that hell—my miracle born in chains.
And I would walk through fire before letting anyone take him from me.
But then again... Dmitri Volkov had his good side—buried deep beneath the cruelty, the walls, the coldness he wore like armor.
While I spent those first four months of pregnancy alone in his empty mansion, believing he was out drinking, cheating, or simply avoiding me, he was actually hunting my rapists—my uncles. Tracking them across borders, tearing apart every safe house and every man who sheltered them.
I hadn’t known.
Not then.Not when the loneliness felt like a noose.
Not when I slept alone, holding my stomach and whispering to the baby I hoped would survive.
Not when I begged myself to stop hoping he’d walk through the door.
It never occurred to me that the silence, the distance, the absence that hollowed me out... was him trying, in his own broken, violent way, to protect me.
But he didn’t tell me..
He just carried it like another secret—another truth he thought I didn’t deserve.
Because to Dmitri, I wasn’t a partner.
I wasn’t someone he could confide in, lean on, or trust with the truth.
I was a burden. An obligation he wore like shackles.
And even his acts of protection—acts any woman might cherish in another man—became twisted in the shadows between us, because he refused to let me see them.
He fought for me in silence...while I suffered in silence.
My fingers spasmed around the letter, nails biting into paper as the memories clawed up my throat.
After surviving a boy who grew into a monster, a husband whose cruelty hollowed me out until I couldn’t recognize my own reflection—Ruslan wanted me to return.
Wanted me to confront the wedding of Seraphina, the woman whose name Dmitri used like a knife against me, slicing me apart with every comparison.