Chapter 2
PENELOPE
The ancient chapel on the shore of Lake Como was a cathedral carved from shadows and gold.
Candlelight trembled along the vaulted ceiling, illuminating frescoes of saints who seemed to avert their eyes—as though refusing to witness the sins about to be sanctified beneath them.
The marble aisles gleamed like polished bone.
The air itself felt heavy, thick with incense, orange blossom, and the metallic whisper of gun oil.
Every pew was a gallery of power and ruin.
Russian vor lounging like kings, Sicilian capos with their jawlines carved in stone, Albanian traffickers with cold, assessing eyes, Greek smugglers with tattoos peeking from beneath Brioni cuffs.
Their wives glittered beside them—draped in couture, diamonds, and grudges older than their marriages.
This was no wedding.
This was a summit of empires. A coronation disguised as vows.
Vanya and I touched down in Lake Como earlier today, the winter air sharp enough to sting as we stepped off the jet. After freshening up in the secluded villa Ruslan had arranged, we didn’t linger.
Within an hour, we were on the road, winding through the familiar mountains I once escaped from, heading straight toward the most whispered-about event in Italy:
The wedding of Dmitri Volkov and Seraphina Orlov.
The wedding everyone in this world feared to miss.
The wedding of the man I married.
The wedding of the woman he once compared me to as though she were gold and I were rust.
And now here I was, walking back into the lion’s mouth with my son at my side—toward the man who didn’t know I was still breathing.
Vanya and I sat in the final pew, half-swallowed by the shadow of a towering marble pillar. Ruslan’s pull had bought us two anonymous seats at the back and a secluded villa for the night—far from prying eyes, far from anyone who might recognize the woman who died five years ago.
No one looked our way.
Why would they?
Penelope Volkov had been lowered into the ground in a mahogany coffin, four mafia families in attendance. They’d watched the dirt cover the lid. They’d heard Dmitri Volkov’s roar split the sky as he screamed her name until his voice shredded to ash.
The dead did not return to weddings.
My palms were damp. My heart beat so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
My eyes never left the empty altar.
That cruel, blinding stage of gold and candlelight. Waiting. Waiting for a groom who had once been my nightmare, my husband, my captor—and a bride whose name had been the weapon he used to carve me open every day of our marriage.
They told us the couple was still in the sacristy, preparing.
The knot in my stomach had only tightened since last night.
And tightened again.
And now it sat like iron lodged beneath my ribs.
He forgot me so quickly.
The thought was poisonous. It burned going in, burned sitting there, burned every time it circled back around.
I didn’t know if he had—or if he ever would—forgive a “betrayal” I had no memory of committing.
A sin I never recalled.
A wound I didn’t cause.
Yet it was the backbone of his hatred. The reason he looked at me with loathing in the early mornings, the reason his voice cut me to ribbons at night. The poison running through every day of our marriage.
He clung to that phantom betrayal with a zeal that bordered on devotion, as if hating me kept him alive. As if resenting me was easier than facing the truth of what had really broken him.
He could not forget—could not forgive—the rape and torture my father’s men inflicted on his mother, violence meant to keep her from fleeing with him to Russia. And in his grief-soaked rage, he convinced himself I was there on that hill, watching, approving, supervising their brutality.
He held that old tragedy between us like a blade, pressed to my throat every day of our marriage.
He swore he hated me.
Spat it.
Swore it again.
Yet every time he kissed me, it felt like a man drowning, gasping, clawing for breath—like I was the only thing in the world keeping him from slipping under.
Every time he touched me, it was desperation, violence, need—all tangled so tightly he couldn’t tell them apart.
He once severed a man’s hand for daring to slap my backside.
Anyone else would have mistaken it for love—some brutal form of protection.
But it was only possession, wearing devotion like a borrowed coat.
But I had finally accepted the truth in the quiet, bleeding parts of myself:
Dmitri Volkov was too shattered to love.
And far, far too broken to ever be loved in return.
Not by me.
Not by anyone.
Not even by the ghost of the woman he buried.
Vanya’s small hand slipped into mine, warm and steady, the single fragment of peace in the whole damned chapel.
“Mom,” he whispered, leaning close, his voice barely audible beneath the rising hymn. “Your hands are shaking.”
I hadn’t even realized. His fingers curled around mine as if trying to anchor me so I wouldn’t float away. I forced a smile—thin, brittle, like glass about to crack.
“Weddings make me emotional, baby.”
He didn’t look convinced. His brows pinched, the same way Dmitri’s used to when he was trying to understand something that didn’t make sense.
“Is it because the music is sad?” Vanya asked, glancing toward the organ. “Or because you know the people?”
A breath hitched in my chest.
Oh, sweetheart... if only you knew.
I brushed my thumb over his knuckles, needing the grounding of his warmth.
“A little bit of both,” I murmured.
He nodded seriously, accepting that answer the way only a child could, though his eyes lingered on me, curious and too perceptive.
The priest raised his arms, and the organ swelled, notes ricocheting against the frescoed walls like a warning.
“Presenting the groom!”
The double doors at the far end creaked open, and Dmitri Volkov stepped into the light.
Time had carved him differently than I remembered.
The sharp, ruthless beauty of his youth remained, etched with the scars of a mind haunted by loss and obsession.
Five years had aged him, hardened him, deepened the shadows in his face.
His cheekbones were sharper now, cut like obsidian, his jaw clenched so tightly the muscle twitched with restrained rage.
The midnight-blue suit was tailored to perfection, hugging every angle of his body, while the white rose in his lapel gleamed like a spotlight in the darkness.
His hair was shorter, flecked with silver, and the hollows beneath his eyes told the story of countless sleepless nights spent wrestling with ghosts—some of them mine.
He looked like a man who had clawed his way out of hell only to find hell had followed him home.
Vanya’s tiny hand squeezed mine. “Mom... who is that, uncle?”
I swallowed the lump in my throat, forcing a fragile smile that cut through me like broken glass.
His fingers covered mine, grounding me even as my heart threatened to shatter.
When our eyes met, the resemblance was unbearable. Same storm-grey irises, same thick black lashes, same stubborn frown between the brows. My son. My living son. The miniature echo of a man I had once called mine.
The realization hit me like a hammer: this might be the first and last time Vanya sees his father.
I had brought him here for that single, selfish reason—to plant a seed of memory in him, so one day he could never accuse me of keeping his father away.
After today, we would return to Greece, and until Vanya turned eighteen, I would raise him alone, far from this world of blood, crowns, and debts paid in pain.
Vanya’s dark curls fell over his forehead just as Dmitri’s had before grief had silvered the temples. Every tilt of his head, every narrowing of his eyes, every delicate motion reminded me that he carried Dmitri’s soul in miniature. And now he would watch that soul pledge himself to another woman.
My throat tightened. “That’s the groom, sweetheart. That’s... the man whose wedding we came to see.”
Vanya didn’t blink.
His gaze was fixed, tethered to the altar by some invisible string.
I hated this, every fiber of me recoiling at the thought. The first time my son saw his father was not in a hug, or a quiet revelation, but here, across a cathedral aisle, with vows and a white dress in between.
I wanted to scoop him up, shield him from the betrayal of witnessing the man I loved promise eternity to someone else, but I could do nothing.
My heart ached at the knowledge that this memory—the first image of his father—would linger, burned into his young mind.
The priest lifted the microphone again.
“The bride may now enter the nave, accompanied by her paternal guardian.”
The words hung in the air like a blade suspended over my chest.
The organ shifted seamlessly into the bridal march. Every head in the chapel pivoted, eyes bright, cameras glinting in the candlelight.
My pulse throbbed violently in my ears, each beat hammering against the hollow cage of my ribs.
The doors at the far end creaked open.
Seraphina Orlov appeared, gliding forward like a shard of ice cutting through the warmth of the room.
She was flawless, untouchable—a living echo of every cruel comparison Dmitri had ever thrown at me.
The gown was liquid silk, off-the-shoulder, hugging every line of her slender form, the cathedral-length train pooling behind her like untouched snow.
Her platinum hair gleamed in the morning light, swept into a chignon that spoke of impeccable control.
Diamonds flashed at her throat, at her ears—tiny constellations of privilege and power.
Beside her, the patriarch of the Orlov family, walked with that smug, assured triumph of a man who had bought not just a daughter’s hand, but the illusion of victory.
The world bowed to him, and today, it seemed, the world bowed to Dmitri as well.
My chest constricted so tightly I felt the air waver in my lungs.
A heart attack, or the sensation of one? I couldn’t tell.
Dmitri and I were still married. Legally. No divorce, no annulment, just the farce of a death certificate I had endured.