Chapter 21
DMITRI VOLKOV
The study tasted of old paper and iron.
Moonlight slanted through the tall windows and cut across the mahogany, turning the scattered documents into islands of pale glare.
My hands were clenched so tight the knuckles were white; the wood beneath them trembled with the pulse I could not make still.
Giovanni stood in the doorway like a man who’d swallowed his fear and decided to wear it.
His scarred face was too calm for the words he brought.
“It’s been two days, boss,” he said. “She won’t eat. She refuses to take the food I leave. You have to release her.”
No. The word rose from a place that had nothing to do with reason. It sat in my throat like a flavored poison and tasted of satisfaction.
“I said no,” I said, and the desk answered my voice with a ripple of scattered papers. “You think I don’t know what hunger is? I know it better than anyone. And I’m not done. I haven’t even begun to break her the way I want.”
Giovanni’s jaw tightened.
He’d been pleading for hours.
“Boss,” he snapped, jaw clenched. “You can punish her, but you can’t kill her. She just had an abortion—she needs care, not a cell. Locking her in the dark—she could haemorrhage. This isn’t punishment. It’s murder.”
His words snapped like a thin twig beneath my boot.
I stood because the room couldn’t hold the storm inside me when I stayed seated.
My shadow stretched over him, long and familiar.
“Murder?” I barked. “She pointed a gun at me, Giovanni. She shot me. Do you think I don’t remember the crack?
Do you think I don’t remember feeling my blood warm the inside of my sleeve?
” My voice was low, but every syllable cut.
“If anyone else had pulled that trigger they’d be dead. She’s alive because I chose it.”
He flinched at the truth, then straightened, voice low and urgent.
“She’s your wife — and by all rights your property,” Giovanni said, voice rough where it might have gone soft. “Aren’t you supposed to care for her? Because this... this isn’t care.”
The words were reckless; he knew exactly where they would land.
“You say you hate her, but you bled to keep her safe. You took a man’s hand when he assaulted her at La Sirena.
You threatened to kill me for daring to look at her the wrong way.
You risked your life going to that Bellanti meeting to force a truce for her, and you tore up the Odessa shipment to buy silence so the Orlovs couldn’t move on her. ”
“You let her sleep on a multimillion contract that could’ve burned this whole empire to the ground,” Giovanni snapped.
“She was lying right there—on the papers—and you told me to let her rest. You’d rather lose millions than wake her up.
Then you hired fighters from five countries to guard her every step.
You call that hate? No, boss. That’s the kind of devotion that ruins men. ”
“She didn’t just defy you — she violated your rules and desecrated that cathedral,” Giovanni said, voice hard as flint.
“I understand the need for punishment. But this”—he gestured toward the heavy door—“locking her in a dark cell that even the devil wouldn’t pray to enter is not punishment.
It’s a sentence.” He swallowed. “Order her released, boss. I know you hate that she’s there.
Let us find a punishment that keeps you in control without burying her alive. ”
His words scraped at me like sand across glass.
I remembered the boy who hadn’t yet learned how to make a life out of vengeance—how memory had been a dull ache rather than an engine.
He’d loved with a purity that had been half pity and half miracle.
That boy existed like a photograph in a drawer: faded edges, impossible to rescue.
What I’d become was the arithmetic of what had been taken from me—my mother’s skull on a hill, my father never known, the Romanos’ neat, smiling faces that hid knives.
Penelope’s family had a ledger written in blood and I had been balancing it my whole life.
Giovanni moved his weight from one foot to the other, trying to look like a man whose patience had a limit. “She bled out after the procedure,” he said, quieter. “She’s weak. Starving her won’t prove anything but an ugly corpse.”
I surged forward, every step a wire pulled taut.
Anger was a living thing inside my ribs, coiling and ready to strike.
I closed the distance until Giovanni’s shadow fell over the papers on my desk.
“What changed, Giovanni?” I snapped, voice raw with fury. “You think because I took a bullet, I’ve gone soft? That’s why you defy me now?”
My hand slammed the desk, the sound ricocheting through the study. “You lied to her, took her to a damn street race in the gutters of my city, risked her life—and mine. And now—” I jabbed a finger toward his chest, “—you play doctor behind my back, handing her pills as if you’re her savior?”
Giovanni’s face didn’t blanch—he never did—but there was a tremor in his jaw.
I leaned in close enough for him to feel my breath.
“Tell me, Giovanni,” I hissed, “is it loyalty you’ve lost—or do you think you can take what’s mine?”
Giovanni’s throat bobbed as he forced himself to hold my gaze.
“I don’t want what’s yours,” he said, steady but low. “I just don’t want her blood on my hands when this is over.”
He kept his voice even because he’d learned how to survive me.
“Your wife is fragile,” he went on, quieter but resolute. “She knew the abortion was inevitable—either by your order or by force. She only begged me for one thing—that it wouldn’t be painful. So I told one of the men to get Misoprostol, and I gave it to her.”
He paused, gauging my reaction, but I said nothing.
“I would’ve told you, boss,” Giovanni continued, his jaw tight, “but she begged me not to. Said she’d explain it herself.
It’s not the abortion she feared—it’s the injection.
She said she’d rather swallow a thousand pills than let a needle near her again.
” He looked away briefly, his voice dipping lower.
“She wants to live, boss. I know she does. That abortion wasn’t defiance—it was survival. ”
The words hit like glass shards.
My voice came out quieter than I expected—deadly, controlled.
“You made the call,” I said slowly. “To one of our men.”
Giovanni froze.
“You made a decision that might have killed her — and you did it without asking me.”
I stepped forward, each word harder than the last.
“What if the drug had harmed her, Giovanni? What if she’d died choking on your good intentions? What is betrayal—if not this?”
He took one step closer—not in challenge, but in conviction.
“You think I want to betray you?” he asked, his tone steady, his breath tight. “You think I like lying just to keep the pieces of your damn board from falling apart? Every lie I tell her is to protect you, boss. To keep you from doing something you can’t come back from.”
He exhaled, voice low, controlled.
“The drug is safe. I checked the dosage twice. I wouldn’t do anything that’d hurt your wife—no matter how much you try to convince yourself she’s the enemy.”
I stared at him, the air thick with silence.
The nerve in his jaw twitched; his defiance lingered like smoke. For a man who feared nothing, he was dangerously close to forgetting who he worked for.
I reached for the dagger on the desk with a motion so quick it hardly registered; the blade left the cradle like a blink and sailed past him.
He stepped aside, practice born of too many close calls, and the metal stuck in the wall with an ugly thud. “You test me.”
“Misoprostol—at four months—can be used. I—” He stopped, and I could see the calculation there: medical risk versus survival. “But it causes heavy bleeding. She’s probably still bleeding, boss. That’s how it works—it empties everything.”
“Let her out, boss,” he said, harder now. “She can’t handle that bleeding alone in that dark hole.”
I stared at him, expression empty, the words sinking in without moving me.
Giovanni’s voice lowered until it was almost a rasp.
He didn’t posture now — the man who’d stood beside me for years was small with pleading.
“You don’t want her dead, boss,” he said, each word like it cost him.
“I’m begging you. She’s weak. She bled after the pills.
If she’s left in that dark she’ll die slow and pointless.
Let her out — for God’s sake, let her out so this doesn’t end with her on some slab. ”
I felt the room tilt with his desperation.
He crawled the last inch toward me on his knees, hands splayed on the floor as if to anchor himself. “I’d keep my head in your debt for it,” he whispered. “I’ll take the blame, I’ll take whatever you want. Just—don’t bury her alive.”
Anger flared like hot iron, but beneath it something sharper tightened my throat. “So she can slip away?” I said, voice low. “So she can keep meeting my brothers, her ex, plotting to run?” I growled, the fury in my chest coiling like a spring.
My hands trembled despite my effort to control them.
“Now I see it,” Giovanni said, steady as a blade. “You didn’t lock her up only because she shot you. You locked her because you’re terrified she’ll slip from your fingers. What then—lock her forever?”
“You’re too concerned for my wife,” I said, voice cold as wire. “Is there something between you two, Giovanni? Answer me.”
His face didn’t betray him. He met my stare and spat, “Don’t insult me, boss. I’d sooner cut my own throat than touch what’s yours — not even in thought.”
His words landed like a fist. I hated the heat that rose in my neck, the way his defiance felt personal. “Bold,” I said. “Too bold.”
“I’m not bold,” he snapped. “But I’m not blind. I know what you are when you love — and when you break. I’m asking you not to bury her to prove a point.”
Silence stretched.
The chandelier ticked in the hush.
For the first time in a long while, the throne of control wobbled under me.