For Marco—the man who’d later tried to shoot me in the hospital, only for Penelope to take the bullet meant for me—I felt no mercy.
“Hold him down,” I said.
They pinned him as I took my knife and severed his left ear in one clean motion.
His screams ripped through the basement, raw and animal. I tossed the ear onto the floor, where flies immediately swarmed.
“That’s for starters,” I said quietly. “You’ll rot here until I decide what comes next.”
Isabella sobbed hysterically as I grabbed the clippers.
“You enabled him,” I said flatly. “You orchestrated everything.”
I shaved her head bald, hair falling like confetti of humiliation, then shoved a cracked mirror into her hands.
“Look at yourself,” I said. “This is what you made.”
I didn’t kill them.
Not yet.
They were Penelope’s parents—no matter how vile. Their fate wasn’t mine alone to decide.
I left them locked in that forgotten hellhole, guarded, alive, afraid.
Exhausted. Hollowed out.
I caught the next flight out—east again, toward Greece.
The engines lifted us into the sky, and I closed my eyes, replaying every moment I’d wronged her.
I would make this right.
Or I would die trying.
I ARRIVED AT RUSLANBaranov’s empire on the Greek coast.
The Mediterranean sun bore down without mercy, bright and indifferent, the kind of beauty that mocked men who came here carrying sins.
I stepped out of the car with nothing but a single duffel bag slung over my shoulder.
No entourage. No armored convoy. No visible reminder of who I was beyond my own body.
At the gates, my men were turned away without ceremony.
Ruslan’s guards took over immediately—efficient, cold, reverent.
They patted me down with thorough, professional indifference, hands lingering just long enough to make the point clear: here, I was not Dmitri Volkov, ruler of anything. I was tolerated. Allowed. Watched.
Their loyalty to Ruslan wasn’t transactional. It was absolute. Fanatical.
I’d seen it before—men who would walk into fire smiling if he asked.
Even with him gone—off hunting the bastards who had dared kidnap his son—the estate ran like a machine that didn’t require its master’s presence to crush intruders.
High stone walls crowned with razor wire enclosed the grounds. Armed patrols moved in silent rotations, rifles cradled like extensions of their bodies.
Surveillance cameras blinked from hidden corners, and somewhere above, drones hummed softly, circling like patient predators.