“Maybe,” I said evenly. “But I’d rather regret staying than regret walking away.”
There was a pause—sharp, stunned. He hadn’t expected defiance. Not from me. Not after everything.
“Penelope.”
Marco’s voice crackled through the speaker again, smooth and paternal in that way that had once fooled me. Now it only made my skin crawl.
“I’ll ask you one last time—and think very carefully before you answer, because I can send a single message to the Albanians with your exact location within the next sixty seconds. Will you come home, or not?”
The room felt too small, the air too thin.
Vanya’s face flashed behind my eyes.
Here, in this gilded prison overlooking Lake Como, I was still close enough to him to matter.
Close enough to hear his laughter echo down the halls.
Close enough to catch stolen glimpses of him racing through the gardens, cheeks flushed, curls bouncing.
Close enough to memorize the way his hair curled at the nape of his neck when he bent over a book.
Painful? Yes.
Torturous? Every second.
But it was proximity. It was something.
If I left, that fragile thread snapped. I’d be an ocean away—powerless—while Seraphina tightened her grip on my son’s heart and Dmitri, memory-wiped and distant, let it happen. Let her happen.
The silence stretched, thick and suffocating.
Seraphina stood two steps above me, arms folded, her posture relaxed but alert.
She watched my face with the patience of a predator who already believed the outcome was inevitable.
“Fine,” I said at last.
The word tasted like defeat.
Marco exhaled on the other end—a satisfied sound, the kind he made when a deal closed in his favor.
“Good girl. Your mother and I can’t wait to reunite with you. Extraction is set for 2:00 a.m. Someone will meet you at the service gate behind the east wing. They’ll guide you to the private jet waiting on the airstrip ten kilometers north. Pack light. You won’t need much.”
The call ended with a soft click.
I stared at the darkened screen long after the call ended, my throat tight as if invisible fingers were wrapped around it.
Anger burned low and steady in my chest. Not just at Marco for his threats, his smug certainty that he still owned my fate—but at myself.
Helpless.
Again.
After everything—the tunnel slick with blood, the gunfire, the escape that had cost more than I wanted to remember—I was still being maneuvered like a pawn, nudged across someone else’s board by men who spoke softly and destroyed efficiently.
I hadn’t escaped them.
I’d just changed cages.