Chapter 3
PENELOPE
My gaze ricocheted between the side exit Dmitri had disappeared through and the small, furious boy now kicking and twisting in the iron grips of two guards twice his size.
Vanya was screaming—half Greek, half English—his little sneakers flailing in the air, his face blotched red with rage and tears.
“?φησ? με! Let me go! That’s my dad! You can’t touch me!”
My heart didn’t just break—it detonated.
I didn’t remember deciding to run. My body moved on instinct, feral and unstoppable. I flew down the aisle, black dress snapping at my legs, heels striking the marble like a string of gunshots.
“He’s my son!”
My voice tore through the cathedral like lightning cleaving a tree.
“Get your filthy hands off him!”
The nearest guard didn’t have time to react—my palms slammed into his chest with all the strength I had earned over five years of rage and grief.
He stumbled back, shock painting his features. The second guard froze mid-grip, mouth falling open.
They looked at me like a ghost had walked out of the grave and demanded her child.
I ripped Vanya out of their hands and crushed him to my chest, wrapping myself around him like living armor.
His small body was shaking—fury, fear, heartbreak all tangled into one. He curled into me instantly, like he had been trying to climb back into my ribs.
“Mom,” he hiccupped, “I found him. I found him.”
I couldn’t speak. I could only hold him.
We barely made it two steps before a third guard—new, arrogant, and too stupid to live long in this world—stepped into the aisle, blocking us. A cigarette hung from his lip, ash dangling precariously.
“Well, well.” He looked me up and down with oily amusement. “Trying to get the boss’s attention with a kid? Women like you—”
He flicked his eyes over my hips.
“—are a dime a dozen in this territory.”
I went still.
Still in the way knives go still right before they slice.
“Step. Aside.”
He smirked. Took a slow, lazy drag. And then—he exhaled the smoke directly into my face.
The nicotine hit my lungs like acid washed in razors.
My asthma slammed into me with instant, merciless force. My throat closed. My lungs seized. A strangled wheeze ripped from me. Air became a stranger.
I staggered backward, clutching Vanya with one arm while the other clawed at my collar, at my chest, at the air that wasn’t coming.
My knees buckled.
“Mom? Mom!” Vanya’s voice cracked, shrill with terror.
Through the blur of my watering eyes, I saw him twist in my arms—and then my son, my sweet five-year-old boy, launched himself at the guard.
He punched the man’s thigh with all the righteous fury of a child whose world was being ripped apart.
One tiny fist.
Then another.
Then another.
“How dare you!” Vanya shouted, voice shaking, face wet with tears.
“How dare you blow that in her face! You wicked, wicked man!”
He kept hitting him, small palms slapping against muscle, each blow fueled by pure, unfiltered rage.
For a moment the entire cathedral—hundreds of crime lords, billionaires, heirs—went dead silent.
Watching a five-year-old try to defend his mother.
Air still wouldn’t fill my lungs. My vision darkened at the edges.
The guard laughed—an ugly, barking sound—amused by a five-year-old’s fury and an asthmatic woman on her knees.
He didn’t laugh long.
Because I used the last molecule of oxygen left in my collapsing lungs to launch forward, dragging air through the tightening vise in my throat, and I drove my fist straight into his nose.
CRUNCH.
Cartilage shattered under my knuckles. Blood sprayed across the marble in a red arc.
He staggered back, eyes rolling, hands flying to his face.
I didn’t give him time to breathe.
A vicious uppercut—years of boxing classes, grief, and survival distilled into one strike—snapped his head back. The cigarette flew from his mouth, hitting the floor in a pathetic little bounce.
He toppled like a felled statue, crashing onto the marble with a wet thud.
Out cold.
The other guards didn’t move to help him.
They just stared.
Then—they started laughing. Deep, rumbling, mafia-born laughter that climbed the frescoed ceiling and bounced back down like mockery from God Himself.
“Holy shit—did she just fold him with one hit?”
“Yeah Riccardo is out cold. Hard to blame him, though—she hits like she’s got steel in her bones.”
“Oh, I’m waking him up with a bucket of ice and one question: ‘How’s it feel to get knocked out by a lady?’ Man’s never living that down.”
Another guard whistled under his breath. “Wild, though... she’s got the same face as—”
“Shut the hell up.”
The senior guard stepped forward, eyes ice cold. “You got a death wish? Boss doesn’t tolerate anyone talking about his late wife. Not a whisper. Not a comparison. Keep your tongue or lose it.”
I didn’t wait for round two.
I grabbed Vanya, who latched onto me like a terrified little monkey—arms around my neck, legs locking around my waist—and I ran.
We tore down the aisle, out through the carved wooden doors, and burst into the blinding Lake Como afternoon. Sunlight stabbed my eyes.
I sprinted across the courtyard, heels skidding on the cobblestone, Vanya clinging to me with his whole trembling body.
We reached the rented black Mercedes.
I threw us inside, slammed the doors, and hit the locks so hard the car shook.
My hands fumbled on the gear shift.
Then—
SCREEEEEECH—
We shot out of the gravel drive, tires spitting stones, engines roaring, leaving a trail of dust, gasps, and scandal behind us.
Twenty minutes later, we were inside the hotel suite.
Door triple-locked. Curtains drawn. Shoes kicked off.
My lungs finally cooperating again.
I collapsed face-first onto the bed, chest heaving, adrenaline draining out so fast I felt boneless.
“Vanya,” I rasped, rolling over onto my back, “why in God’s name did you run to him?”
He stood at the edge of the bed, his cheeks flushed, fists still balled like he was ready to fight the entire mafia for me.
“He’s my dad,” Vanya said fiercely. “Isn’t he?”
I pressed my hands over my face. “He doesn’t know that, Vanya. And you do not—you do not—just march up to a man like Dmitri Volkov. Things could have gone so much worse.”
“He’s not a stranger.”
Vanya’s voice softened, but the stubborn line of his mouth didn’t move.
Then his little body straightened, like he’d just remembered why he wasn’t afraid.
He dug both hands into his pockets—rummaging, determined, lips pressed tight the way he did when solving a puzzle.
“Vanya,” I whispered, warning and plea tangled together.
But he ignored me.
A second later, he yanked his hand free and held something up with small, triumphant fingers.
A phone.
Matte black. Titanium case. The faint scratch on the corner—so familiar it made my chest seize.
My lips parted, breath catching. “Where... where did you get that?” I whispered, barely
Vanya lifted his chin, eyes blazing with small, fierce pride, the triumph of a child who had just outwitted a giant. “I took it when I tugged at his trousers. I wanted proof.”
The words hit me harder than any blow.
My body froze, time stretching, the world narrowing to the tiny, perfect figure in front of me and the phone burning like a secret in his hand.
For a moment, I couldn’t move.
Then I snatched the phone, hands shaking so violently I nearly dropped it. The screen flared to life the moment my thumb brushed it.
I went still. Completely, utterly still.
Wallpaper: Me.
Not the woman I was now—older, harder, carved by grief and survival.
But her.
The girl I used to be.
Asleep beneath the old oak tree at the Brooklyn estate, sunlight filtering through the leaves in warm gold patches across my skin.
Hair spread like a dark halo over the grass.
One bare shoulder exposed from the loose white summer dress he loved.
My lips parted in that soft, unguarded way he used to kiss me awake.
Fifteen.
Fifteen years old.
Long before the blood. Before betrayals. Before the grave he dug in his heart and lowered my memory into.
The world tilted like it was trying to shake me out of myself.
He had kept it. He had kept me.
Not tucked away in some forgotten gallery, not sealed in a dead phone or an encrypted archive—
But here.
Front and center. As his lock screen. As his home screen.
Every day. Every morning. For half a decade.
A relic of a girl he once loved more than oxygen—preserved in pixels, protected by titanium, carried into every room, every meeting, every battlefield of his life.
I felt something inside me crack. Not break—crack, like a vault door forced open by something too heavy to ignore.
Vanya watched me, chest rising and falling with anxious curiosity, but I couldn’t look away from the screen.
I finally shoved the phone into my pocket, swallowed the sob clawing at my throat, and forced my face into a mask of stern control.
“You,” I said, pointing at him with a trembling finger, “have gotten us into so much trouble, Vanya.”
Vanya blinked up at me, confused. “...Why?”
I took a shuddering breath, voice tight with equal parts fear and fury. “I know you’re desperate to see your dad. It hurts me—God, it hurts me too—that you don’t have him in your life. But you can’t go around acting reckless. Do you understand? Reckless.”
His brow furrowed.
“First,” I continued, pacing a little, “you march up to a mafia boss at his own wedding, in front of hundreds of people, and—what?—call him ‘Papa’ as if he’d magically know who you are.
He doesn’t know he has a son. Anywhere. I’ve told you that already!
” My voice rose, cracking at the edges. “Then you make me expose myself in front of all those people, having to fight just to keep you safe. Do you know how close I was to fainting when that guard blew smoke into my face? That was it, I was done!”