Would the stress make me lose the tiny life inside me?
Would Dmitri even care if I did?
I curled my hands around my belly, whispering to the baby—pleas, prayers, promises—while tears slipped down my faceunchecked. The hunger gnawed at me, but the terror of losing my child gnawed harder.
Giovanni would slip in like a ghost—soft knocks, whispered warnings, a small flashlight cupped in his palm, a piece of bread, a bottle of water.
“You have to eat, Penelope,” he’d murmur, eyes frantic. “For the baby. For yourself. I won’t let him break you.”
But Dmitri’s punishment did break something.
By the time Dmitri dragged me out, my legs were numb, my vision fading, my mind slipping into blackness.
The coma took me for three days. Three long, silent days where the world moved on without me, where my baby’s heartbeat was the only thing tethering me to life.
And still... Dmitri didn’t apologize. Didn’t ask. Didn’t care. Or so I believed then.
If not for Giovanni, who risked everything by hiring Russian doctors behind Dmitri’s back to check on my pregnancy, my son wouldn’t be alive today.
My sweet little boy. My whole heart.
My reason for breathing.
My son, Vanya saved me in ways he will never fully understand. His first cry cracked open the darkness that had been swallowing me for months. His tiny fingers, curling around mine, stitched pieces of me back together that I thought were gone forever.
Every laugh he’s ever given me has been a healing salve. Every time he calls “Mom,” my world straightens, my heart steadies, my lungs remember how to breathe.
He is the one bright thing I claimed from that hell—my miracle born in chains.
And I would walk through fire before letting anyone take him from me.
But then again... Dmitri Volkov had his good side—buried deep beneath the cruelty, the walls, the coldness he wore like armor.
While I spent those first four months of pregnancy alone in his empty mansion, believing he was out drinking, cheating, or simply avoiding me, he was actually hunting my rapists—my uncles. Tracking them across borders, tearing apart every safe house and every man who sheltered them.
I hadn’t known.
Not then.Not when the loneliness felt like a noose.
Not when I slept alone, holding my stomach and whispering to the baby I hoped would survive.
Not when I begged myself to stop hoping he’d walk through the door.
It never occurred to me that the silence, the distance, the absence that hollowed me out... was him trying, in his own broken, violent way, to protect me.
But he didn’t tell me..
He just carried it like another secret—another truth he thought I didn’t deserve.
Because to Dmitri, I wasn’t a partner.
I wasn’t someone he could confide in, lean on, or trust with the truth.
I was a burden. An obligation he wore like shackles.
And even his acts of protection—acts any woman might cherish in another man—became twisted in the shadows between us, because he refused to let me see them.
He fought for me in silence...while I suffered in silence.
