Page 91 of Darkest Oblivion
Chapter 24
DMITRI VOLKOV
The message lit up my screen like a spark in a gas chamber:
‘Your filthy fat slut of a wife is finally where she’s always belonged. With me. On my bed. Carrying your child. You want to talk? Call me.’
My eyes narrowed, the muscles in my jaw flexing as rage coiled in my chest. The words didn’t even make sense—Penelope, in another man’s bed? Pregnant? Whoever had the audacity to send this message wasn’t just reckless; he was dancing on the edge of a blade that would cut him to ribbons.
I opened the live feed of the villa.
The house was too silent. Wrong. My Penelope wasn’t in the main bedroom where she often lingered—writing in her little journals, rereading the same books as though repetition could give her comfort, sometimes just staring from the balcony into the lake as if it could answer her loneliness.
I switched to the living room. Empty. No trace of her curled on the couch, eyes shining with false escape as she watched that pathetic soap opera she clung to, the only color in her isolation.
The kitchen was deserted too. No soft clatter of her making honey cake she baked when her silence grew unbearable. No scent of her chamomile tea—the only thing that calmed her nerves when I wasn’t there to do it myself.
Nowhere. She was nowhere.
I dialed Giovanni. He should have answered on the first ring. He always did. My second heartbeat, my shadow. But this time, the line rang and rang. No response. My restlessness surged, a violent tide that threatened to shatter its banks.
I scrolled the feeds again, slower, sharper—and froze. The study. Blood. Streaks of it across the floor.
My chest dropped. I rewound the footage. There she was—my wife. My Penelope. Blood running down her thighs, her body shuddering, clutching her stomach, eyes wide and frantic as she screamed into the phone. Not mine—she didn’t even have my direct line—but Giovanni’s.
What in the world had happened to my wife?
The walls of my control cracked. Hate burned through every vein, colliding with the sick, endless obsession that had made me chain her life to mine in the first place. She was my milaya. My wife. Mine. Even if she hated me, even if the world collapsed, she would never belong to anyone else. Not while I still breathed.
I turned, my gaze locking on the two men chained like cattle before me—her uncles, Rocco and Carlo. Their faces already bruised, their fear already ripe. I had dragged them out of New York like vermin, hunted them down despite the Romano’s protection. Hard to find, but nothing stays hidden from me.
After the night Penelope gave herself to me, I had discovered the truth that shattered bone and marrow—that she had not been untouched, as she believed. My training in medicine told me instantly. She had been taken. Defiled. And my hunt had uncovered the filth: her own uncles, twice, when she was still a child. They buried it so deep she couldn’t even remember.
I had not left her. I had left Lake Como because I couldn’t breathe while her violators still walked free. My obsession wouldn’t allow it.
But Giovanni not answering my call? Impossible. Giovanni was worth ten bodyguards. If he wasn’t responding, then something catastrophic had already happened.
And if Penelope had been harmed—if even a single drop of her blood was spilled—the world would pay in screams and fire. I would drown Italy and New York alike. I would burn the continents if I had to.
I dialed the number from the message. With my other hand, I reached for the instruments of pain laid out before me: the branding iron, the pliers, the bone saw. My fingers closed around a dagger, sharp enough to split tendons. I dragged the blade across the necks of her uncles, relishing the way terror bloomed in their eyes.
The call clicked alive. A mocking voice slithered through.
“Dmitri,” the voice drawled, thick with smugness. “I almost thought you’d be too proud to call.”
My grip on the dagger tightened until the hilt creaked. “Name yourself.”
A low laugh slithered through the line. “The great Antonio Bellanti. The man whose wedding you ruined. The man you should have finished when you had the chance. I put your loyal dog, Giovanni down, and I took back what was always mine. Penelope is in my father’s house now.”
My chest constricted, a cold, lethal calm flooding me.
My enemies had tried for years to break me, to breach my walls. None had succeeded. And yet this Bellanti—this mongrel from a small clan—had slipped past every defense in Lake Como and laid his hands on my wife.
The audacity. The insult.
But the storm inside me would not show. My training held me steady—never give your enemy leverage, not even a flicker of fear.
“What do you want?” I asked, my voice dead, though in my mind I saw only her: Penelope’s trembling hands, her pale face contorted with pain, her blood on the floor.
