As he left, the room felt colder.
Marco—Penelope’s father—made an attempt on Penelope’s life in a desperate bid to kidnap our newborn. Did he really think I would never find him, even if it took ten decades?
Well. Here I come, Marco.
Chapter 12
DMITRI VOLKOV
THE NEXT DAY, I BOARDEDmy private jet to New York.
The engines roared, and Lake Como vanished beneath clouds.
The flight was a blur of turbulence and ghosts.
Penelope at fifteen—knees scraped, hair pulled into a careless ponytail, laughing like the world couldn’t touch her.
Me at nineteen—angry, hungry, convinced love was the one thing no one could take from me.
Our first kiss behind that Brooklyn deli, mouths clumsy, desperate, swearing forever like idiots who didn’t understand how vicious adults could be.
I slept maybe twenty minutes. When I woke, my chest felt bruised from memories pressing outward, demanding to be acknowledged. Every mile east dragged me closer to the truth I’d spent years refusing to see.
We landed after midnight.
New York greeted me the way it always had—cold, indifferent, humming with violence beneath neon lights.
I didn’t linger. A convoy met me on the tarmac and drove straight to a derelict warehouse on the outskirts of Brooklyn, a place that smelled of oil, rust, and old crimes.
My local crew waited inside.
“They’re secured,” one of them said. “Picked up clean. No witnesses.”
I didn’t ask where.
In the back of a black van, hog-tied and blindfolded, sat Marco and Isabella. My chest tightened at the sight of them—older now, softer, dressed in money and lies.
They’d aged, but the rot was the same.
“Drive,” I said.
We left the city behind, headlights cutting through darkness as we headed north.
The road narrowed. Civilization thinned. Eventually, we reached an abandoned farmhouse—boards warped with age, windows blackened, fields choked with weeds and buzzing flies.
The kind of place the world forgot because it wanted to.
Perfect.
They were dragged into the basement—concrete walls sweating damp, a single bulb swinging overhead. Chairs bolted to the floor. The smell of mold and fear.
I removed Marco’s blindfold first.
His eyes widened.
Recognition slammed into him like a fist. “Volkov?” His voice cracked. “What the hell is this? You can’t—”
I backhanded him hard enough to snap his head sideways.