Kindle Notes & Highlights
My body changed with each passing day, the secret of my pregnancy pulsing beneath my skin—a heartbeat known only to me. But the emptiness wasn’t what hurt most. It was her—Seraphina. The ghost he’d tried to hide, the woman who still owned pieces of his heart. He’d lied, denied her, and for that, I could never forgive him.
He wasn’t protecting you for pity, Penelope. He was making their blood answer for what they took.”
He tore the world apart for me—and then locked me in darkness. He hunted down the man who stole my innocence, yet still planned to send me away so he could marry someone else.
“All he feels is hate,”
“Pragmatism?” I spat, each word trembling with rage. “You mean he’s willing to erase everything—me, our child, everything we lived through—because it doesn’t suit him politically? Because some power game says so?”
“You speak of murder like a contract clause. No wonder Dmitri looks at me as if I’m poison. He told me he wanted to love me — that he loved me — but you and Father poisoned that possibility. You made him into what he is. You turned him into a monster. You ruined him.”
He was coming... for his child. Not for me. Not for the years of love and betrayal we’d shared.
“You’ll never take him,” I whispered through trembling lips. “Not while I’m still breathing.”
“No, no, no...” he murmured frantically, his voice trembling. “Stay with me. You’re not allowed to die on me.”
I could feel the panic in him—the man who’d ruled empires reduced to a desperate, trembling lover.
“How dare you take a bullet for me?” he whispered hoarsely, as if scolding me, as if the weight of it was too much. “You hear me, Penelop...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“Penelope,” he breathed, his voice barely human. “Please, don’t—” “Don’t let him take my child,” I whispered. “Swear it... swear he’ll never find him.”
“He won’t,” he swore, trembling. “As long as I live, he won’t.”
“I won’t let him touch our son,”
“You’re mine, Milaya. You’ve always been mine. Stay with me, damn it. Stay.”
The world tilted, and all I could see was him—Dmitri Volkov, the man who had broken me and saved me, now cradling me like something holy.
The mighty Volkov, the mafia king feared by nations, was now just a man begging the universe not to take me.
“Do you... ever... love me?” He froze.
“Eternally,” he said, the word like a vow carved in blood. “I’ve loved you since I was nineteen... under that oak tree at the estate, when you smiled at me like I wasn’t the monster everyone said I was. You were my light, Penelope. My reason to live. I loved you through every betrayal, every lie, every night I hated you for what I thought you’d done. My heart is yours—has always been yours.”
Does he still love her?
“You’re my obsession, my salvation, my everything. Don’t you dare leave me now. Not when I just found you again.”
She was gone for four months and he didn’t even check on her. Like she said, when she first left that he would come for her instead of the other way around
I wanted to tell him I loved him too, that despite everything—every wound, every nightmare—he was the only thing that still felt like home.
“Milaya...” he whispered, panic flooding his tone. “No. No, no, no—look at me. Open your eyes.” He shook me lightly, then harder, his voice rising, frantic. “You’re not allowed to die on me. You hear me? You don’t get to leave me like this.”
“I’ll kill him,” he growled, his voice breaking. “I’ll kill your father, I’ll kill anyone who touches you—just stay with me!”
“Mitya...” His childhood name. The one I used to whisper under the oak tree when he still smelled of summer and smoke, not gunpowder.
I forced a small, broken smile. “the... oak... tree...”
