Why would they?
Penelope Volkov had been lowered into the ground in a mahogany coffin, four mafia families in attendance. They’d watched the dirt cover the lid. They’d heard Dmitri Volkov’s roar split the sky as he screamed her name until his voice shredded to ash.
The dead did not return to weddings.
My palms were damp. My heart beat so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
My eyes never left the empty altar.
That cruel, blinding stage of gold and candlelight. Waiting. Waiting for a groom who had once been my nightmare, my husband, my captor—and a bride whose name had been the weapon he used to carve me open every day of our marriage.
They told us the couple was still in the sacristy, preparing.
The knot in my stomach had only tightened since last night.
And tightened again.
And now it sat like iron lodged beneath my ribs.
He forgot me so quickly.
The thought was poisonous. It burned going in, burned sitting there, burned every time it circled back around.
I didn’t know if he had—or if he ever would—forgive a “betrayal” I had no memory of committing.
A sin I never recalled.
A wound I didn’t cause.
Yet it was the backbone of his hatred. The reason he looked at me with loathing in the early mornings, the reason his voice cut me to ribbons at night. The poison running through every day of our marriage.
He clung to that phantom betrayal with a zeal that bordered on devotion, as if hating me kept him alive. As if resenting me was easier than facing the truth of what had really broken him.
He could not forget—could not forgive—the rape and torture my father’s men inflicted on his mother, violence meant to keep her from fleeing with him to Russia. And in his grief-soaked rage, he convinced himself I was there on that hill, watching, approving, supervising their brutality.
He held that old tragedy between us like a blade, pressed to my throat every day of our marriage.
He swore he hated me.
Spat it.
Swore it again.
Yet every time he kissed me, it felt like a man drowning, gasping, clawing for breath—like I was the only thing in the world keeping him from slipping under.
Every time he touched me, it was desperation, violence, need—all tangled so tightly he couldn’t tell them apart.
He once severed a man’s hand for daring to slap my backside.
Anyone else would have mistaken it for love—some brutal form of protection.
But it was only possession, wearing devotion like a borrowed coat.
But I had finally accepted the truth in the quiet, bleeding parts of myself:
Dmitri Volkov was too shattered to love.
And far, far too broken to ever be loved in return.
