I couldn’t help but follow his gaze, terrified of facing the truths it revealed.
“Send me to Greece,” Giovanni said, seizing the opening. “Let me sit across from Ruslan face-to-face. One conversation. I’ll know within five minutes whether this woman is lying—or whether your Penelope somehow climbed out of her grave with your son in her arms.”
My son.
The word hit deeper than any bullet.
Vanya’s face flashed through my mind—those dark, observant eyes, the stubborn tilt of his chin, the way he assessed a room before trusting it. The resemblance had been a knife in my gut from the moment I saw him.
“No,” I said sharply.
Giovanni stilled.
“You stay here,” I continued. “I want security doubled—no, tripled—around Pen and Vanya. Not just the perimeter. Inside the house. Cameras in every hallway. Guards on every floor. No blind spots.”
I leaned forward, voice dropping into something lethal.
“I don’t trust Seraphina one inch. If her family was willing to kidnap a five-year-old to force their way into my home, thensabotage is nothing. Poison is nothing. Psychological warfare is nothing.”
I paused, letting the implication hang.
“And if anything happens to them,” I said softly, “Lake Como will drown in Orlov blood.”
Giovanni inclined his head. “Understood.”
But he didn’t leave.
He shifted the iPad to his uninjured hand, fingers tightening around it. I knew that look. He was weighing whether loyalty meant obedience—or honesty.
I arched a brow. “If there’s more, say it. Nothing you tell me will be worse than losing Penelope once already.”
He took a step closer, lowering his voice as if the walls themselves might listen.
“There’s a simpler way,” he said. “A DNA sample. From the boy. Quiet. A cheek swab while he sleeps. Forty-eight hours, max. We’d know for certain if he’s yours.”
The room seemed to contract.
“And if he is,” Giovanni added carefully, “then there’s only one explanation left for the woman.”
The words struck like a blow to the sternum.
For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
Giovanni had laid out too many ways to confirm the truth: if Pen was my Penelope, if Vanya was my son, if the woman I had buried was not a memory—but flesh and blood, alive in my home.
Confirmation meant truth. Truth meant responsibility. It meant acknowledging that the child I had nearly erased was mine—and that the woman I’d brutalized, abandoned, and buried had survived me.
It meant the past wasn’t dead.
It was waiting.
“You will not touch that boy without his mother’s consent,” I said, my voice stripped of warmth, honed down to command and threat alike. “That’s an order, Giovanni. Non-negotiable.”
He held my gaze, searching my face the way only a man who had bled for me dared to. For a heartbeat, the room balanced on a knife’s edge.
Then he nodded once. “Understood.”
“I want it,” I continued, the steel giving way to something quieter—rawer. “More than you know. I want her to be Penelope. I want Vanya to be my son.” My jaw clenched. “God help me, I want it so badly it claws at me in the dark.”
