And he believed it.
Then, at the height of his cruelty, he sent me to New York, insisting I spend time with my parents.
Later, through overheard whispers and careful listening, I uncovered the truth.
He wanted me out of the way so he could marry Seraphina—sleek, composed, dangerous in her own way. A woman who fit perfectly into his world. A woman who never resisted.
Seraphina.
The name still burned like acid in my veins.
Dmitri had wielded it with surgical precision throughout our marriage, carving it into me whenever he sensed weakness.
He never shouted when he compared us. His voice was always calm, almost bored—like a man stating facts.
“Look at Seraphina,” he’d said once, circling me slowly, eyes cold. “Slim. Composed. Elegant. A woman who understands discipline.”
“And you,” he continued softly, “are indulgent. Fat in the wrong places. Uncontrolled.”
He never called me beautiful. Not once.
A few months after he sent me away, I gave birth in a small, quiet hospital in New Jersey—far from New York’s scrutiny, and far from Dmitri.
I had left New York, leaving my parents behind, and with them, the fragile sense of safety I once knew.
The truth about my parents had finally surfaced in fragments. They had shaped me like a project, not a daughter.
‘Treatments.’ Carefully curated gaps in my memory, all disguised as concern.
“We’re preparing you,” my mother had said, “You’ll inherit everything one day, Penelope.”
What they’d really done was erase me.
They had manipulated events from my youth, ensuring that Dmitri would believe I was a cheat, a betrayer, a killer complicit in his mother’s death. They were the architects of his hatred.
Isolation had always been their goal: control their daughter, control the empire.
After everything Dmitri had done to me—the cruelty, the manipulation, the way he had hollowed me out piece by piece—I still took a bullet for him, just after giving birth in that quiet hospital. I should have stepped aside and let fate finish what it had started.
I should have let the bullet take him.
That was the truth I never spoke aloud.
But truth was rarely clean where Dmitri Volkov was concerned.
I had fallen in love with him at fifteen, hopelessly and completely, and that kind of love did not obey logic or morality.
It lodged itself deep, feral and stubborn, refusing to die even when starved.
Even through the years of resentment, the nights I cried myself to sleep in silk sheets that felt like restraints, my heart betrayed me again and again.
Dmitri was a monster—but he was my monster.
He had never betrayed me with other women while I was his wife. Never allowed another man to touch me. Never let me lack for anything tangible. Jewels, security, protection—those he provided with ruthless efficiency.
His loyalty, twisted as it was, remained absolute.
Emotionally, though, he was a wasteland.