Chapter 6 #2
I reached for his hand, fingers trembling despite my efforts to appear composed, and slid the band onto his finger. His grip didn’t waver. Mine did.
The priest’s voice rose, a thin thread of ritual cutting through the tension.
“I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride.”
I braced myself, expecting a ceremonious brush of lips. Instead, Dmitri’s hand snapped to my waist, hard and possessive, pulling me against him so violently I gasped. My cheek brushed against his chest, his heartbeat thrumming like a warning.
He leaned closer, lips brushing my ear, his breath warm and unsettling.
“I won’t kiss you, Pen,” he said, voice low, rough, edged with something I couldn’t name. “The only woman who deserves my lips is six feet under.”
The words slashed through the hollow expectations of the ceremony. My pulse raced, half in fear, half in defiance.
Then, with chilling calm, he released me, stepping back.
His hand lingered just a fraction too long near mine before sliding away. He gestured curtly to the priest, his eyes cold steel over the crowd.
“Wrap it up,” he commanded.
The priest obeyed, but the air between us had already changed. This was no celebration—it was a warning. A game in which I knew the stakes, yet the rules were entirely his, and every move he made reminded me how little I truly mattered.
The twenty witnesses shifted in their seats like live coals.
A few exchanged uneasy glances. One older woman, sharp-featured, actually looked relieved. Most looked stunned, as if the infamous Dmitri Volkov had somehow married a nobody in a hushed ceremony, no fanfare, no spectacle—nothing.
Giovanni clapped once, loud in the awkward silence. Others followed with scattered, hesitant applause, like a flock of birds startled into motion.
Dmitri took my hand—firm, impersonal—and led me through a side exit. A black Rolls waited, sleek and menacing in the courtyard light.
I glanced back. Giovanni was already shepherding Vanya out a separate door, my son’s small hand trusting in his without hesitation. Only then did I allow myself to exhale.
When we reached the Rolls-Royce, he stepped in without so much as a glance my way, as if I were the one who had demanded this marriage. In reality, he had been the one desperately begging me into this farce of a three-month arrangement.
I climbed in anyway, letting the door shut behind me with a heavy, satisfying thunk.
The engine purred—a predator stretching its limbs.
He gripped the wheel so hard that his knuckles blanched, veins standing out like taut cables beneath the skin. Every motion radiated control, precision, and barely contained fury.
Then the car shot forward. Faster than necessary.
“It’s just three months,” I said quietly, trying to anchor myself, trying to inject reason into the madness.
I watched the lake blur past like molten silver. “You begged me for this, remember? And yet here you are... looking like you might strangle someone. Funny, how desperate men change when they get what they want.”
No answer.
The speed climbed—eighty... ninety... a hundred—on winding coastal roads carved into cliffs that plunged straight into the lake.
“I’m not ready to die yet,” I said sharply. “Slow down.”
He glanced at me, his storm-grey eyes blackened, edged with something feral.
Then—without warning—he slammed on the brakes.
The seatbelt jerked across my chest. My head snapped forward, heart hammering. Dust and pebbles danced in the air as the car skidded onto the shoulder, tires shrieking against asphalt.
Dmitri killed the engine.
Silence fell like concrete.
He turned toward me. Cold, deadly, unwavering.
“I think you know something about Penelope,” he said, voice smooth, and lethal.
Every word hit like ice.
My blood froze in my veins. I swallowed hard, forcing confusion into my tone. “Your late wife?”
His eyes narrowed, scanning my face like a man dissecting prey. A flicker of something—rage, disbelief, obsession—passed through him, but the control remained.
He leaned in.
Close enough that I could see the silver threading through his stubble.
His presence filled the car, heavy, suffocating, intimate in the most dangerous way.
“Don’t play games with me,” he said quietly.
Not a shout. Not a threat.
Worse.
“You wear her face,” he continued, his voice controlled, taut with barely contained violence. “You have her fire. And your son... he looks exactly like I did at that age. The same age as the son I lost—taken from me by my treacherous father-in-law.”
His gaze seared into mine. “I tried—tried so hard—to believe your presence here in Lake Como was a coincidence. But everything points otherwise. The way you stood at that altar... it was the same way my Penelope stood before me when I forced her to marry me six years ago.”
Each sentence landed like a nail driven deeper.
He searched my eyes as if he could excavate the truth with sheer will, peel me open and drag Penelope’s ghost out of my ribs.
“Tell me the truth,” he said. “Who the hell are you?”
The silence stretched.
Not empty—loaded.
I looked at the man who had broken me.
The man who had buried me.
The man who had just locked me back into his world—sealed with a ring, bound by a contract, convinced he still owned me.
And I was torn—between revealing the truth and keeping him in the dark.