“Seraphina.”
A cold smirk.
“Graceful. Slim. Desired. Everything you’ll never be.”
The cruelty wasn’t accidental. It was deliberate—a warning wrapped in venom.
A reminder that I was trapped now, legally, physically, emotionally—branded as Mrs. Volkov, whether I wanted it or not.
And that the boy I loved at fifteen...had died long before I ever walked into that cathedral.
From that moment on, our marriage became a slow, waking nightmare.
Every word from him was a cut—cruel, calculated, demeaning—carved into me like a blade meant to shape me into someone I could never be.
He mocked my body constantly, sneering at my softness as if it were a crime. Too soft. Too big. Too slow. Too unlike her.
He made a ritual of it, a daily liturgy of humiliation.
Each comparison was deliberate, each insult placed with surgical precision, designed to remind me I was an inconvenience draped in a crown meant for another woman. A placeholder. A stand-in. A wife he never wanted.
He hated my father, hated the marriage, hated me—and I tried anyway. God help me, I tried.
I cooked his favorite borscht with trembling hands.
I wore the dresses he admired on other women.
I whispered love into the dark, hoping he might whisper something—anything—back.
But nothing melted him. Not tenderness. Not vulnerability. Not even my desperation.
And when I finally let him into my bed, hoping it might bridge the chasm between us, he took what I offered and disappeared into the night like a ghost.
I was left alone in that mansion of marble and shadows, clutching the sheets he’d abandoned, unaware that another life had already sparked inside me.
If my evil ex, Antonio, hadn’t kidnapped me on the day I thought I’d miscarried—hadn’t dragged me to his father’s house in Rome with my grief bleeding through every breath—Dmitri might never have returned home.
He might never have learned I was pregnant.
And when he did find out, when the truth finally reached him, any naïve part of me that hoped for joy... died.
One would think a man might soften at the knowledge of a child, of a legacy, of a tiny heartbeat made from his own blood. But Dmitri did not.
His face hardened. His hands curled into fists.
His voice—cold, precise—repeated the same demand every day: abort it. As if my baby was nothing more than an inconvenience in his perfectly controlled world.
If not for Giovanni—the only man in that house who saw me as human—I wouldn’t have my child today.
Giovanni hid me when Dmitri’s rage became unbearable.
When Dmitri ordered that I be locked in a windowless basement for two days as punishment, Giovanni was the one who smuggled food to me in the dark.
I remember the cold first. Not the shivering kind—no, this was the kind that sank into the bone, settling in my spine like ice.
No light. No warmth. Just cement beneath me and the thud of my heart echoing in the darkness.
Every hour that passed, the fear grew sharper.
