The speed climbed—eighty... ninety... a hundred—on winding coastal roads carved into cliffs that plunged straight into the lake.
“I’m not ready to die yet,” I said sharply. “Slow down.”
He glanced at me, his storm-grey eyes blackened, edged with something feral.
Then—without warning—he slammed on the brakes.
The seatbelt jerked across my chest. My head snapped forward, heart hammering. Dust and pebbles danced in the air as the car skidded onto the shoulder, tires shrieking against asphalt.
Dmitri killed the engine.
Silence fell like concrete.
He turned toward me. Cold, deadly, unwavering.
“I think you know something about Penelope,” he said, voice smooth, and lethal.
Every word hit like ice.
My blood froze in my veins. I swallowed hard, forcing confusion into my tone. “Your late wife?”
His eyes narrowed, scanning my face like a man dissecting prey. A flicker of something—rage, disbelief, obsession—passed through him, but the control remained.
He leaned in.
Close enough that I could see the silver threading through his stubble.
His presence filled the car, heavy, suffocating, intimate in the most dangerous way.
“Don’t play games with me,” he said quietly.
Not a shout. Not a threat.
Worse.
“You wear her face,” he continued, his voice controlled, taut with barely contained violence. “You have her fire. And your son... he looks exactly like I did at that age. The same age as the son I lost—taken from me by my treacherous father-in-law.”
His gaze seared into mine. “I tried—tried so hard—to believe your presence here in Lake Como was a coincidence. But everything points otherwise. The way you stood at that altar... it was the same way my Penelope stood before me when I forced her to marry me six years ago.”
Each sentence landed like a nail driven deeper.
He searched my eyes as if he could excavate the truth with sheer will, peel me open and drag Penelope’s ghost out of my ribs.
“Tell me the truth,” he said. “Who the hell are you?”
The silence stretched.
Not empty—loaded.
I looked at the man who had broken me.
The man who had buried me.
The man who had just locked me back into his world—sealed with a ring, bound by a contract, convinced he still owned me.
And I was torn—between revealing the truth and keeping him in the dark.
Chapter 7
