Kindle Notes & Highlights
My throat tightened. Every bruise, every cut, every mark on her was mine. My doing. My sin.
For the first time in years, I didn’t feel like a man of power or a husband or a king. I felt like a murderer waiting for his sentence.
My chest tightened, my fingers twitching, because just watching her like this was breaking me.
“I went too far,” I whispered, barely audible. “I pushed you into the dark... I let my hatred blind me. I—” My voice cracked, and I forced it back into a growl. “I will fix this. I swear to you, Penelope, I will fix this.”
“Don’t you dare leave me,”
She was mine—my obsession, my undoing, my only salvation—and I’d nearly killed the very thing that kept me alive. Her stillness gutted me.
I wasn’t a husband anymore; I was the beast that had built her cage and then begged her not to die inside it.
“I’m here,” I murmured, pressing my forehead to the mattress beside her hand. “I won’t lock you away again. Ever. You hear me?”
“You’re mine. You stay. You breathe. You live.”
Those eyes had once burned with hate when he condemned me to that dark cell, vowing to crush me until nothing was left. Now they watched me with something that looked dangerously like tenderness.
“You think you own me,” I went on, my breath trembling, “but one day you’ll wake up and find nothing left of me. Not my scent on your sheets. Not my voice in these halls. Just silence—and you’ll realize that’s the only thing I ever owed you.” “I’ll never forgive you,” I whispered, tears sliding down my cheeks, “and I hope one day you understand what it’s like to beg for air in the dark, praying for someone who never comes.”
“Don’t make me watch you die again,” he said finally, his control fraying, eyes burning with something rawer than anger. “Not like that. Not by your own damn hands.”
“Three days of watching you slip between life and death. Three days of praying you’d open your eyes and look at me.”
“My first instinct was to keep you alive. The second was to find who keeps trying to take you away from me.”
“Once I leave Lake Como, I’m done. I’m never coming back to this place—or to you.”
“I don’t want you here. And I’m not staying in this sterile box like some invalid. I’m leaving.”
“His ex-fiancée—Seraphina—is back,”
“He’s letting you go so he can marry her. If he doesn’t, he risks losing everything—his empire, Lake Como’s support, his power.”
You’re the sin he has to erase to save his crown.”
Every promise Dmitri had made, every vow of obsession, every declaration that his heart belonged solely to me... all lies. Twisted, meticulous lies.
He had taken his revenge, buried me in that darkness, and now stood before me—unrepentant, unbroken—a living echo of every nightmare he’d forced me to survive.
“I missed you.”
“Not the woman sitting beside me,” he continued, his voice rough, scraping the edges of confession, “but the girl you used to be.”
“That innocent little girl I thought you were,” he went on, eyes distant, voice softer now, almost trembling. “The one who looked at me like I wasn’t a monster. You made me forget what my world was—a nightmare. You stopped me from putting a blade to my wrists when my aunt’s hands...”
“We’d talk all night under that oak tree behind your father’s estate,” he said finally, eyes flicking back to me. “You’d laugh, and for a few hours, the noise in my head would stop. You were my quiet, Penelope. My only quiet.”
“Do you remember your fifteenth birthday? That silver locket?”
“Waited in the alley until the shopkeeper left. Broke the glass, sliced my hand open. There was blood everywhere, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to see you smile. I still remember the look on your face when you did.”
That night had felt like forever—the first time I’d believed love could be a rebellion.
But every time I thought about giving up, I’d think of you. That little girl with sunlight in her eyes, waiting under the oak tree. You were my reason to stay alive, Penelope.”
“I tried to believe you didn’t betray me,” he said. “That someone used you. Manipulated you.” His voice cracked, then steadied, colder. “But then you shot me. You didn’t even hesitate. Tell me, how does an innocent woman know how to
chamber a round, aim for the heart, and pull the trigger without flinching?”
“I came back to New York to marry you,” he said quietly. “To love you again. I wanted to believe the girl under that oak tree still existed. But every time I close my eyes, I see my mother’s body instead. The way she screamed. The way they left her.” His jaw clenched. “You—your father’s men—did that to her. Tell me, Penelope, how does a man forgive that? How does he forget?”
I wanted to scream, to tell him I was still that girl—the one who’d risked everything to meet him, who’d waited in the rain, who’d never stopped loving him even when he disappeared without a word.
“You’ve forgotten how to want me,” I said, my voice steadier than I felt, “You don’t even think about fucking me, do you?”
“Think about it?” he rasped. “I dream about it. Every night. Every damn second. But this marriage—your silence, your rejection—made it impossible. And of all the things I am, forcing myself on you isn’t one.”
“I want my last night with you to mean something,”
“This won’t be your last night with me.”
“Milaya...” His tone was low, a growl barely restrained. “No matter what’s happened, no matter what you’ve done... you are still the only woman who holds me, who owns me. And you are beautiful. Always.”
“no matter what you’ve turned me into, I’m still your wife.”
“I want you—every second of every damn day. I dream of you under me, gasping, clawing, mine. But not like this. Not when everything between us is poison.” “Poison?” I bit out, my anger flaring. “You can’t touch me because of guilt. Because deep down, you know you’ve gone too far.”
My mind churned—Seraphina, his plan to marry her, to divorce me once I was gone.
This would be our last time, and I wanted it seared into my memory, a final act before I learned to forget him.
He was sending me away for another woman, planning to divorce me, while I carried his child, a secret that burned in my silence.
“Tell me what’s hurting before I lose my fucking mind.”
He was seriously asking? After everything—his lies, Seraphina, the dark room that had nearly killed me?
I tried to wiggle free, but his arms tightened, his voice a plea. “Please... Just... stay. Sleep here, in my arms. Tonight, that’s all I’m asking.”
As I lay there, wrapped in his arms, I mourned the love we’d lost, the future we’d never have, and
the child he’d never know—a secret that would follow me to New York, where I’d learn to heal, to forget, even as my heart broke for the man I couldn’t stop loving.
And yet, this was the man who had humiliated me, who had tried to end my pregnancy, who had locked me away, and ultimately cast me aside for his ex-fiancée.
Whatever Dmitri planned—Seraphina, divorce, the ruin of my name—it didn’t matter. He’d taken my freedom once. He wouldn’t take my will again.
