I would not leave without my son.
Not this time.
Not ever again.
Chapter 5
PENELOPE
Four days had crawled by in a haze of silence and shadow.
Not the peaceful kind—the kind that pressed in on your chest until breathing felt optional.
I moved through the mansion like something already half-dead, gliding from room to room in borrowed skin.
Giovanni had replaced the black silk pajamas with simple gray dresses and soft-soled slippers, left neatly folded on the bed each morning. He never spoke when he delivered them. Never lingered. Just a quiet nod and gone. Practical. Efficient. Kind in the way men learned to be when kindness was the only rebellion left to them.
The dresses felt like a uniform. Neutral. Unmemorable. Designed to erase me.
Dmitri hadn’t summoned me once.
No late-night knock. No cold order barked down a corridor. No deliberate cruelty wrapped in control.
Nothing.
That was almost worse.
The words ‘sex slave’ still hovered between us, unspoken but thick as smoke, and yet he hadn’t lit the match.
I didn’t know whether that meant he’d forgotten me entirely—or whether he was watching, waiting, deciding how best to break me.
I lived in the in-between.
I avoided Vanya with a precision that bordered on self-harm.
Every time his laughter echoed down a hallway, bright and unguarded, I turned the other way.
Every glimpse of dark curls vanishing around a corner or the flash of small sneakers pounding over marble sent a sharp, involuntary pain through my chest. It wasn’t just emotional—it was physical. A tightness beneath my ribs. A tremor in my hands.
I wanted—no, needed—to run to him. To drop to my knees and crush him against me, breathe him in, whisper the truth into his hair until something in him remembered. Until he looked at me with recognition instead of polite curiosity. Until he said Mama again.
But I knew the rules.
One wrong word. One lingering look. One slip.
And Seraphina would have me handed back to the Albanians before Dmitri finished his morning coffee.
So I stayed invisible.
I ate alone in the small staff kitchen, sitting at the far end of the table with my back to the door. I moved only when necessary. I learned the rhythm of the house—when Seraphina took Vanya to school, when Dmitri left for meetings, when the halls emptied and the walls breathed.
I waited.
The letter to Ruslan Baranov had been written on the second night.
Three pages. No embellishment. No begging. Just facts and truth and the kind of desperation that didn’t need dramatics. I folded it into an unmarked envelope and sealed it with hands that shook despite my resolve.
Giovanni had taken it without meeting my eyes.