Chapter 3 #3
I kept walking. “Why do you care?”
He didn’t answer. Which meant he did care.
We stopped at the ornate double doors at the end of the hall. Old Italian wood. Heavy. Expensive.
Giovanni placed his hand on the brass knob.
Then he turned to me, eyes colder than the lake outside.
“One warning,” he said. “And I give it only because you look like her.”
My lungs squeezed tight.
“Dmitri hasn’t been sane since the day his late wife, Penelope, died. He kills faster now. Laughs less. Eats almost nothing.” Giovanni’s voice lowered to a gravelled whisper. “If you play games in there, he will end you.”
A beat.
“And your child becomes collateral damage.”
The air froze.
“Remember that.”
Then—he twisted the knob and pushed the door open.
The suite beyond was pure Volkov: dark walnut walls, black Italian leather, floor-to-ceiling windows framing Lake Como like a slab of obsidian.
Only one lamp burned in the corner, throwing long shadows across the room. And beneath it—
Smoke.
Thick, heavy, suffocating.
Like even the air had been grieving.
Dmitri sat on a low leather couch, back to us, elbows braced on his knees.
The charcoal shirt stretched across shoulders broader than I remembered, and the sleeves were rolled to the elbows, veins running like blue fire along his forearms.
Silver threaded through the black curls Vanya had inherited—streaks earned from sleepless nights, bloodshed, and the kind of mourning that never healed.
An ashtray in front of him overflowed with crushed filters. Another cigarette burned between his fingers like a fuse approaching its explosion.
He didn’t turn. “Step forward.”
The voice.
God.
Deeper. Rougher. Shredded by grief, liquor, and five years of talking to ghosts.
I walked forward until the lamplight brushed my face.
My spine was straight, my chin high—trying to look like a woman named Pen, not the corpse he buried under marble and roses.
He took a slow drag.
Exhaled. Then turned.
The cigarette stopped halfway to his mouth.
His grip on the cigarette tightened so hard the filter crumpled. His breath hitched—so soft no one else alive could have heard it.
“Your name,” he said, voice low as a firing squad.
“Pen.”
Something flickered. Something dangerous.
One corner of his scarred mouth lifted—not in humour, but in a smile that could carve a throat.
“First,” he murmured, “you send a child who looks exactly like me to ruin my wedding...”
He leaned forward, eyes stripping me to bone.
“Then you walk in wearing the face of my dead wife—answering to the name she used to beg me to call her in bed.” His gaze darkened, pupils swallowing the grey. “Tell me, little ghost. Are you trying to mock me?”
“Mr. Volkov, I—”
He cut the air with a flick of his fingers. “Who invited you to my wedding?”
His voice had dropped to something lethal. Something ancient.
“What the fuck are you doing in my city?”
“Lake Como is open to tourists,” I said, surprising myself with my steadiness. “Last I checked.”
A jagged, humourless laugh slashed out of him.
“A tourist crashes the wedding of the century, assaults my men, and steals my phone?” He flicked ash with a sharp snap. “Try again.”
So he did know. Of course he did.
No wonder they found me so fast.
Vanya—sweet, reckless Vanya—had shoved me straight into the lion’s jaws.
“I apologize for my son’s actions,” I said, forcing my voice to stay level even as my pulse rioted. “He acted on his own and... took your phone. I’ve already reprimanded him.”
I pulled the matte-black device from my pocket, the weight of it suddenly immense, and walked toward him with an unsteady breath trapped somewhere in my chest.
He didn’t lift a hand to take it.
Didn’t blink. Didn’t move.
So I set it gently on the table beside him and stepped back, putting distance between my body and his unreadable stare.
“I truly apologize for my son’s... barbaric impulsiveness,” I managed. “We’re leaving tomorrow. You won’t have to deal with us any longer, Mr. Volkov. Please forgive the intrusion.”
He studied me the way a wolf studies a deer that suddenly grew fangs—head slightly tilted, lashes lowered, pupils blown wide with something feral and unnameable. The silence stretched so long it became a blade, thin and trembling, waiting for one of us to bleed first.
Then—
Without warning—
He unfolded from the couch in one single, fluid, predatory motion.
Six-foot-four of controlled ruin.
And even after five years, even after the hatred, even after the world had collapsed between us—he was devastating.
He stepped closer, until the air between us trembled. Until I could smell every piece of him: tobacco, lake water, clean soap, and the same dark cologne that once soaked into my pillows and made me ache for him even when I hated him.
He lifted the cigarette to his lips—not rushed, not casual, but with the lazy confidence of someone who had killed men with less effort than breathing. He inhaled, exhaled...and angled the smoke away from my face.
A small thing. But it hit me like a punch.
He hadn’t done that consciously. It was an old habit. A reflex from a life he believed was buried.
His eyes—those storm-grey eyes that once softened only for me—dragged down my face, my throat, my shoulders, my waist.
He took in the muscle I’d built—my arms, my back, my posture. The cautious strength in my stance. The fire in my gaze.
You’re... different,” he murmured, not as a compliment, but as a puzzle he was trying to solve. “She was unmistakably plus-sized.”
She.
My ghost.
His ghost.
‘Penelope Volkov.’
Dead.
Gone.
Rotting in a grave I never lay in.
My mouth dried.
He moved. Circling me—slowly, languidly—like a man orbiting a memory he doesn’t trust.
“Same eyes,” he said softly.
A step.
“Same mouth.”
Another step.
“Same stubborn tilt of the chin.”
He stopped behind me.
Close enough that I felt the heat of him through the thin fabric of my dress.
Close enough that if he lowered his head an inch, his lips would touch the place he used to kiss to make me melt.
His breath brushed the back of my neck, warm and devastating.
“But Penelope,” he whispered, “hated cigarette smoke. Triggered her asthma.”
A pause.
A sharper inhale.
“Funny.”
I forced my spine straight, chin high, heartbeat a war drum in my ears.
He drifted around me again—closer this time. Much closer—until our breaths mingled. Until my pulse had no choice but to answer his.
Face-to-face now.
Too close.
Far too close.
And for the first time...
I saw him.
Not the mafia boss. Not the monster. But the man who had slept with his hand under my cheek.
The man who carried my inhaler in his coat pocket.
The man who once stared at my body like it was the only prayer he’d ever believed in.
“Marry me, Pen,” he said.
His voice was velvet and venom, a caress sharpened into a threat.
The cigarette slipped from his fingers, ash scattering over the Persian rug. He didn’t even glance at it. His full attention—every ounce of his focus—was on me.
My heart stopped.
Time stopped.
“What?” I whispered.
“You heard me,” he repeated, voice low and absolute. “Marry me. Tonight. Right now.”
A sound ripped out of me before I could stop it—a laugh, jagged and disbelieving, the kind that hurts on the way up because it’s made of shock and old wounds.
“Tell me this is a joke,” I said, barely holding my voice steady. “Because I don’t find it funny. I don’t know you, Mr. Volkov. And you certainly don’t know me.”
His face remained a stone wall—cold, unreadable.
“She collapsed. Fell into a coma right before the vows could be finalized,” he said, his tone almost casual. “The wedding couldn’t go on. And now... I’m single. Exactly as I’ve always wanted.”
He shrugged lightly, like Seraphina’s life didn’t weigh anything at all.
“I need a wife to quiet the politicians and the vultures,” he said. “You resemble my Penelope just enough that I can bear it. Good enough for my purposes.”
Good enough for his purposes?
The words sliced through me—sharp, merciless.
I lifted my chin.
“You do realize,” I said, voice steady but edged with steel, “that I have a son... and could possibly have a husband?”
Something changed in his eyes. A flicker—quick, pained, hunted.
But then it vanished beneath steel.