My fingers spasmed around the letter, nails biting into paper as the memories clawed up my throat.
After surviving a boy who grew into a monster, a husband whose cruelty hollowed me out until I couldn’t recognize my own reflection—Ruslan wanted me to return. Wanted me toconfront the wedding of Seraphina, the woman whose name Dmitri used like a knife against me, slicing me apart with every comparison.
He expected me to go back to the man who broke me so deeply the fractures still ached five years later.
The letter slipped from my grasp and fluttered to the floor like a fallen verdict.
I pressed a trembling hand to my chest.
“God,” I whispered, the word cracking. “He’s getting married... tomorrow.”
A dizziness swept through me, hot and cold at once.
Was this fate tugging me back? Or another trap disguised as destiny?
My heartbeat thundered—because I already knew the answer I didn’t want to admit.
I wasn’t trembling because Dmitri was marrying Seraphina.
I was trembling because a part of me—small, wounded, shamefully alive—still loved him.
Still foolishly loved a man who had exiled me from Lake Como five years ago, as if I were nothing more than a broken ornament, neatly discarded. No argument. No explanation. Just a private jet ticket and whispers of cold bureaucracy: that he would send the divorce papers for me to sign.
Dmitri was moving forward.
With her.
Seraphina—the “slim and graceful one,” the woman he’d once held up like a mirror of everything I wasn’t. He carved those words into me so often they felt tattooed under my skin.
For four agonizing months after he cast me out, I hovered in purgatory, checking my phone for messages that would never come, waking from dreams where he stood in the doorway asking me to come home. The absence of divorce papers felt like a tiny candle in a vast, wind-swept void.
Maybe he’d changed his mind.
Maybe he’d realized he loved me.
Maybe the marriage still meant something.
But love—real love—doesn’t vanish into silence.
Love doesn’t abandon.
Love doesn’t walk away and leave you without a word.
The only time he resurfaced was after my accidental call—my trembling voice begging the hospital receptionist for extensions on Vanya’s medical bill. I hadn’t meant to reach him. My phone simply connected to the last number dialed.
And he’d come running—not for me, but because of obligation, responsibility... guilt. If that call hadn’t slipped through the cracks of fate, Dmitri Volkov would have let me fade out of existence without a backward glance.
Five years in Greece had been a resurrection, a sharp, glittering contrast to the suffocating isolation of Lake Como. Dmitri had kept me hidden there—no friends, no outings, no social ties.
“Wives attract problems,” he’d say.
But really, he feared losing control.
Here in Ruslan’s enclave, life bloomed in colors I never knew existed.
The villas in this quiet district perched like jewels along the hillside, home to men and women whose shadows stretched across continents.
Mafia captains, political puppeteers, exiles who carried danger with the same ease as luxury. And yet—they laughed with me. They invited me into their homes. They toasted with me late into the night, glasses of ouzo catching the moonlight as we swapped stories of Athens’ hidden tavernas and the illicit fight clubs beneath the old city.
