The man who’d poisoned my earliest memories with control disguised as love.
Who had orchestrated my teenage heartbreak with Dmitri like a chess move, nudging two damaged souls together for his own gain.
Who had wiped chunks of my memory when I was still young enough to believe forgetting meant healing—so I wouldn’t remember the worst of what he’d forced me to endure.
The man who’d later tried to steal my newborn son because I was, in his words, unworthy of carrying the family legacy.
And the man whose bullet I had taken for Dmitri.
Because even after everything—after the cruelty, the manipulation, the erasure—I had still loved the monster my father helped create.
I took the phone with numb fingers and pressed it to my ear, deliberately switching the speaker on. Loud. Unavoidable. Let Seraphina hear every syllable. Let her know exactly who was calling and why.
“Penelope,” Marco’s voice came through smooth and paternal, wrapped in the same false warmth he’d always used before the knife came out. “I believe you’ve finally learned that family is everything.”
I didn’t respond.
I stared at the glowing screen, at his name spelled out in neat black letters, as if it weren’t attached to a lifetime of damage.
“I knew the Albanians had you,” he continued, unbothered by my silence. “I knew where you were the moment you disappeared. Their reputation isn’t exactly subtle.”
My fingers curled tighter around the phone.
“I could have bought your freedom months ago,” Marco went on, voice almost indulgent. “But some lessons have to be learned the hard way, don’t they? Independence. Defiance. Running off without protection. You needed to be reminded what the world does to women like you.”
There it was.
The justification.
The cruelty framed as discipline.
“Why are you calling now, Marco?” I asked. My voice sounded flat, distant, like it belonged to someone else.
“Because it’s time to put the past behind us, child,” he said smoothly. “Come home. You’ve suffered enough.”
Home.
The word tasted bitter.
“Dmitri thinks you’re dead,” Marco continued, and I felt Seraphina’s attention sharpen instantly. “To him, you’re just a used-up Albanian slave he pitied enough to keep breathing under his roof. That mercy can expire at any moment. He could tire of you tomorrow and send you right back.”
A calculated pause.
“But I won’t.”
I clenched my free hand until my nails bit into my palm, grounding myself in pain. He knew. He knew exactly how close the Albanians were to tracing me.
How precarious my position here was. He was leveraging that fear like a blade at my throat.
“If you come to the States,” he said, voice lowering into something coaxing, “I can guarantee your safety. Real safety. Federal borders. Actual laws. No contracts that sell women like cattle. No councils deciding who lives and who disappears. A fresh start. Protection. A life without chains.”
I swallowed.
The United States meant courts. Paper trails. Police who answered to judges, not patriarchs. It meant no public executions for breaking unwritten codes. No legal slavery disguised as business agreements.
It was tempting.
Painfully so.