I hated her.
I told myself I hated her with every breath I dragged into my lungs.
Hated the way she wore Penelope’s face but with new edges—cheekbones honed by hardship, eyes stripped of innocence, a mouth that had learned how to lie without flinching. Hated that her body was fuller now, curved in ways that made my blood heat and my hands ache with remembered hunger.
Hated that she hid things from me with the precision of someone trained to survive monsters.
Hated that I wanted her anyway.
Wanted her with a violence that made even me uneasy.
Five years.
Five years since I buried Penelope.
Five years since I’d held her in my arms while her blood soaked into my clothes, her breath shallow, her fingers clutching my jacket like she could anchor herself to life through me. Five years since she’d whispered my name the way she always had—soft, intimate, devastating.
Mitya...
That sound haunted my sleep.
Five years of guilt that gnawed at me like a disease.
I had let vengeance rot my judgment. I had punished her for crimes she never committed. I had shamed her, abandoned her, ordered the death of the child she carried with a voice so calm it still made me sick to remember.
I had failed her in every way a man can fail the woman he loves.
And now fate had delivered me this woman—same fire, same defiance, same chin tilted in challenge. The same infuriating ability to look at me like I was both shelter and executioner.
The Orlovs had crossed a line tonight.
They’d ambushed Giovanni on the return route.
Shot him through the shoulder like an animal.
Taken the boy.
An act of war.
One they would repay in blood, bone, and screams that would echo for generations.
I had been too quiet these past five years.
After burying Penelope, I’d withdrawn. Let my capos run the empire while I rotted in smoke and silence. I’d takenup cigarettes again—the ones I’d quit cold the day Penelope’s asthma attack landed her in my arms, gasping, terrified. I used to crush them without lighting them if she was in the room.
Now I smoked like oxygen depended on it.
Women disgusted me.
Not just Seraphina—all women.
The thought of another body in my bed, another scent on my sheets, turned my stomach. No one had lasted a full night. No one had been allowed close enough to try.
Until now.
Until Pen sat downstairs, waiting for her son, wrapped in nerves and rage and restrained terror.
Fifteen minutes had passed since the call.
