A war raged in his small chest, and then—defeat.
With a sharp inhale, he marched to the bed, threw himself face-down onto the covers, and turned his back on the room with all the wounded dignity of a betrayed prince.
His small shoulders trembled, rigid with heartbreak and fury.
It gutted me.
But I stood and stepped out.
Giovanni closed the door behind us with a quiet, unmistakable click.
The hallway smelled of lemon polish and old carpet. Our footsteps echoed in the silence—mine uneven, his steady and certain.
Halfway down the corridor, his voice slipped out, low and almost... careful.
“How old is the boy?”
I kept walking. “Why do you care?”
He didn’t answer. Which meant he did care.
We stopped at the ornate double doors at the end of the hall. Old Italian wood. Heavy. Expensive.
Giovanni placed his hand on the brass knob.
Then he turned to me, eyes colder than the lake outside.
“One warning,” he said. “And I give it only because you look like her.”
My lungs squeezed tight.
“Dmitri hasn’t been sane since the day his late wife, Penelope, died. He kills faster now. Laughs less. Eats almost nothing.” Giovanni’s voice lowered to a gravelled whisper. “If you play games in there, he will end you.”
A beat.
“And your child becomes collateral damage.”
The air froze.
“Remember that.”
Then—he twisted the knob and pushed the door open.
The suite beyond was pure Volkov: dark walnut walls, black Italian leather, floor-to-ceiling windows framing Lake Como like a slab of obsidian.
Only one lamp burned in the corner, throwing long shadows across the room. And beneath it—
Smoke.
Thick, heavy, suffocating.
Like even the air had been grieving.
Dmitri sat on a low leather couch, back to us, elbows braced on his knees.
The charcoal shirt stretched across shoulders broader than I remembered, and the sleeves were rolled to the elbows, veins running like blue fire along his forearms.
Silver threaded through the black curls Vanya had inherited—streaks earned from sleepless nights, bloodshed, and the kind of mourning that never healed.
