Ruthless Addiction: Prologue

The cemetery in Lake Como was a somber expanse of ancient stone and whispering cypress trees. Mist drifted low across the ground, curling around marble angels eroded by centuries of sorrow.

Tens of men stood encircling the grave—elders of the four families, their sons, capos, and soldiers. All dressed in immaculate black, their faces carved in stoic reverence, the weight of old codes pressing on their shoulders.

They came not out of love, but allegiance. Out of duty. Out of fear.

Their presence blurred at the edges of my vision.

My world had narrowed to a patch of fresh soil and the coffin beneath it—the place where my heart now lay buried.

Penelope.

My Milaya.

The only woman I had ever loved, and the one I could never save.

She had died in my arms, her father’s bullet tearing through her chest before it could reach mine. I still felt the heat of her blood on my hands—still saw her lips trembling into that final, impossible smile. It was not forgiveness she’d given me in that look. It was goodbye.

I stood motionless, my black coat heavy with rain and grief, my eyes burning from the effort of not weeping before these men. The pain inside me was vast, bottomless—an ocean I could drown in but never escape.

Her absence was a physical wound.

Her voice—soft, defiant, endlessly alive—echoed in the hollow corridors of my mind.

PENELOPE VOLKOV.

The name was carved in white marble, cruelly binding her to the family that had destroyed us both. To me. To blood and betrayal.

My knees threatened to give way, but I refused them that weakness. My fists clenched, nails cutting into my palms until blood welled and dripped to the earth.

I wanted to claw through the dirt, rip the coffin open, pull her back to me. Just once more. To feel her warmth, her fire, her stubborn heart still beating beside mine.

But the ground remained mercilessly still.

The woman who’d been my light at fifteen, my obsession at twenty-five, my salvation and my torment. I’d failed her—failed to protect her, failed to save her from her father’s betrayal, from the bullet meant for me.

“Dmitri.”

The voice came from beside me—low, steady, iron in its restraint.

Ruslan Baranov stood at my shoulder, a towering figure of grief and composure.

His hair, streaked with silver, caught the gray light like steel. At his side, his young son clung to his leg—a pale, silent boy of four whose eyes said what neither of us could: the world takes, and takes, and never gives back.

Ruslan’s wife had been buried just a week before, oceans away in Athens. Yet he had come here—come for me, for her. For Penelope. His presence was a quiet vow between us.

Two men bound not by business, but by loss.

He looked down at the grave, his jaw hard. “She didn’t deserve this.”

“No one ever does,” I said, though my voice was a hollow thing. “But she chose me. And for that, she paid.”

Ruslan’s eyes flicked to mine. “Then make them pay for her.”

The words landed like a spark in dry grass. The first whisper of rage beneath the grief.

But vengeance, even then, felt meaningless. What was retribution to a man who had already lost everything that made life worth the living?

My thoughts, unbidden, drifted to another grave—not one of stone or earth, but of memory.

I was nineteen when I left my mother in that squalid hotel room, clutching a letter meant for Penelope.

When I returned, the room was empty.

No sign of my mother but the chaos left behind—torn sheets, shattered glass, the metallic scent of blood heavy in the air. Her scarf lay crumpled near the bed, stained and torn. The silence was unbearable, as though the walls themselves had witnessed and could no longer speak of what they’d seen.

She was gone.

Taken.

And the proof of what they’d done to her lingered in every corner, in every breath I drew.

I had tracked the address the receptionist gave me, my heart pounding with desperate hope.

The rain that night fell in thin, slanted lines, slicing through the city’s glow, soaking my clothes until they clung like regret. New York’s streets reeked of gasoline and fear, the kind that lingered in every alley, every flickering streetlamp.

I drove fast, reckless, my hands white-knuckled on the wheel, headlights cutting through the storm. Each turn of the tires felt like a countdown—to finding her, to saving her, to undoing whatever nightmare had begun.

When I reached the place—the hill just outside the Bronx, where the streetlights died and the city’s hum faded into silence—I knew, even before I saw her, that something had gone terribly wrong.

The wind carried the smell of rain and rust, the kind that clung to old fences and forgotten places. My heart hammered in my chest as I climbed the slope, my shoes slipping on the wet grass.

And then I saw her.

My mother lay there, beneath the dim glow of a flickering streetlamp—her body broken, her once-bright dress torn and stained, her skin bruised with the violence of what they’d done to her. Her hair fanned across the earth like spilled ink, her eyes open to the sky, glassy and still.

For a heartbeat, the world stopped. Then a sound ripped out of me—something between a sob and a scream, too raw to be human.

“Mama!”

I fell to my knees beside her, mud soaking through my jeans, my hands trembling as I touched her face, her throat, her chest. Nothing. No breath, no pulse, no warmth.

“Mama, wake up!” I begged, my voice breaking apart, tears blinding me as I shook her limp shoulders. “Please—please wake up. Please, Mama.”

But the night gave me nothing. Only silence.

Only the whisper of the wind through the grass, as if the earth itself was mourning her.

I pulled her into my arms, cradling her like a child, pressing my forehead to hers. Her skin was cold—too cold—and she smelled faintly of rose soap, blood, and rain. The scent I would never forget. The scent that would haunt every breath I took after that night.

Something inside me shattered—quietly, completely.

I didn’t hear the footsteps until they were close. Didn’t register the crunch of gravel or the faint rustle of a coat until a shadow fell across us.

When I finally looked up, a man stood there—tall, broad, a dark coat clinging to him in the drizzle. His face was carved with the calm of someone who’d seen too much.

Ruslan Baranov.

“Come with me,” he said. His voice was low, steady—an offer and an order at once.

The world I’d known had died on that hill—under the dim streetlight, beneath the cold breath of the city wind.

Everything that tethered me to life had been torn away, leaving nothing but the hollow echo of her name in my chest.

There was nothing left to question.

Nothing left to lose.

Ruslan Baranov took me from that hill in New York that night—away from my aunt’s cold control, from the Volkovs and their poisoned bloodline, from the ashes of everything I had once loved.

The car waited at the foot of the hill, its black frame gleaming under the drizzle. I remember the sound of the door shutting behind me, the scent of leather and smoke, the city lights blurring into gold streaks as we drove through the night.

I didn’t ask where we were going. I didn’t care.

All I knew was that I was leaving behind the boy I had been—and whatever innocence had still survived in me.

Ruslan brought me into his empire in Greece—a world unto itself.

Ruslan’s estate rose like a fortress above the Aegean, marble gleaming under endless sun, its walls guarded by men who killed without hesitation.

He gave me quarters in the servants’ wing—a bare room with white walls and a single window overlooking the sea. It should’ve felt like a prison, but to me, it was sanctuary.

His men trained me.

Taught me to fight, to shoot, to negotiate, to kill.

Extortion. Arms trafficking. Money laundering. Assassination. Political bribery.

The curriculum of survival.

From nineteen to twenty-five, I was forged in blood and fire. I rose from a nameless boy to a soldier, then to a capo—a man others obeyed, feared, followed.

Ruslan was a ghost even in his own empire.

He appeared rarely, his visits whispered about like omens. When he did appear, the halls stilled, and the air itself seemed to hold its breath.

Ruslan Baranov had taken me from that hill of blood and rain, and turned me into something else. Something dangerous.

He never asked for repayment. Never demanded allegiance. Not once did he speak of that night, or why he’d come for me when no one else had.

I asked him, once.

He only looked at me with those pale, unreadable eyes and said nothing. The silence was heavier than any truth.

I know he had his reasons—for finding me there, for bringing me to Greece, for shaping me in his own ruthless image. But he kept them buried, and the not knowing festered.

That question haunted me more than any nightmare.

When I turned twenty-five, Ruslan called me into his study—a dark chamber lined with books and silence.

“It is time.” He pushed a leather folder toward me.

When I opened it, the pages were a map of ruin—names, bank accounts, safehouses, a step-by-step route to claim the Volkov empire. All that was left was the one instruction he hadn’t written: finish them.

He didn’t need to tell me what to do.

That night, I returned to Lake Como.

I killed them all—my foster parents who’d ordered my father’s death, the guards who looked the other way.

I watched their mansion burn, fed by the records and ledgers I’d uncovered; their empire went up in smoke.

I took everything they’d built on other people’s suffering—fortune, name, power—and wore it like a wound.

I thought vengeance would cleanse me.

It didn’t.

All it did was make me the very thing I’d once sworn to destroy.

As I stood at Penelope’s grave I thought of how quickly the world had made me. In a few brutal years I’d gone from nothing to being called the most feared capo in Italy. Power between Ruslan and me was a quiet division of empires: he kept his marble throne in Greece; I kept the streets of Lake Como under my boot.

The priest was calling me now, his thin hands raised in benediction, the Latin words drifting like ash through the rain. But I could not move.

I saw Penelope everywhere—in the wind through the cypress trees, in the flicker of the candles, in the hollow ache of my chest.

Her laughter under the oak tree.

Her defiance.

Her blood on my hands as she whispered my name one last time.

I would never recover from her.

She had taken my heart, my life, my soul—and buried them with her beneath the cold, unyielding earth.

I eventually bent when the priest gestured again, my body moving of its own accord.

My hand trembled as I scooped a handful of the grave’s fresh earth—cool, damp sand sifting through my fingers like time losing its hold.

In our tradition it was a final benediction, the living returning the body to the soil.

I let the grains fall, watched them scatter across Penelope’s coffin, each fleck feeling like a sliver of me crumbling with her.

The priest’s hymn rose then, low and ancient, a dragnet of sound that pulled at the ribs of the world. Voices joined—men who had come out of duty reciting words they did not always feel—until the melody filled the air and made my chest ache.

I stared at the tombstone as if, by will alone, I could make the cold stone split wide and let me into the dark where she lay.

The rites continued, each small ceremonial gesture a new notch in the wound.

Elder men placed white lilies atop the coffin; their petals shone like small traitorous moons against the dark soil—purity where none remained.

One of my soldiers uncorked a bottle of aged grappa and poured a measured stream over the earth, the spirit’s sharp heat rising and mingling with the cold, loamy scent.

It was an old offering—fire to guide the dead.

The priest sprinkled holy water, bright beads that caught the dying light, and intoned prayers in Italian that blurred in my ears into the same rough sound: loss.

I held myself upright as long as I could.

I honored her the way she deserved—eyes dry, back straight—because the men around me expected strength from the Don. But strength in me now was a paper thing: easily folded and set aflame.

When forced smiles and coined condolences slid across my path—“Our deepest sympathies, Don Volkov”—they tasted of tin and bile. Men who had once smiled at our table and cut deals over wine now gave me the politest of bows and the coldest of hands.

When the crowd thinned and the engines of black cars rumbled away, only four of us remained: Giovanni—the quiet iron that had always steadied me; Ruslan Baranov—immovable, patient as a mountain; Ruslan’s small silent son, who clung to his father’s coat as if the fabric alone might hold him to the world; and me, a hollow shell leaning on the edge of all I had left.

Penelope’s face returned to my mind—the way she’d argued with me over the smallest things, the way she’d folded herself around my faults until I believed I could be better. Her last question in the hospital—“Do you ever love me?”—had been a small, fragile thing. My answer—“Eternally”—had been a vow I had not kept safe enough.

I let myself kneel at the edge of the grave, palms pressing into wet earth, feeling the grit catch under my fingernails.

I pressed my fingertips into the soil where her name was carved, as if I could anchor myself to something that had not betrayed me.

Giovanni lingered near the edge of the plot, a hulking outline against the gray sky. His face, usually a fortress, was undone.

The scar that cut across his cheek caught the dying light, a pale, crooked reminder of every battle we’d fought together.

But this—this loss—had gutted him.

His shoulders bowed beneath a grief that wasn’t his to bear.

I couldn’t look at him for long.

The guilt was too sharp, twisting in my chest until it felt like punishment.

She had died shielding me.

Ruslan Baranov approached then, his presence cutting through the stillness like the edge of a blade. The dying sun caught in the silver of his hair, turning him almost spectral—part man, part legend.

His mute son trailed behind, a small, silent shadow of sorrow.

“I’m heading back to Greece, Dmitri,” Ruslan said, his deep voice steady, threaded with that rough Greek accent that always made every word sound like an order.

He looked at me for a long moment. “Give yourself time,” he said finally. “Bleed if you have to. But when you rise—make it count.”

He clasped my shoulder—firm, grounding.

The touch steadied me more than I wanted to admit.

We were born the same year, but Ruslan carried the weight of decades: harder, colder, forged in darker fires. Had he not pulled me out, the Volkovs or my aunt would have crushed me.

“Appreciate you coming, Ruslan,” I said after a long pause. “I should’ve been there when you buried your wife.”

He didn’t answer, just studied me with that calm that made men nervous.

“Tell me,” I asked finally, “does it ever stop hurting?”

A faint smirk touched his mouth—thin, aristocratic, and cold.

“There’s nothing to heal from,” he said evenly. “She was a deal, not a wound.”

The simplicity of it hit harder than any confession.

Ruslan’s gaze found mine again, sharp and appraising, as though weighing the worth of my heart. “Love,” he said, almost as a lesson, “is a frailty. It renders men feeble. You’ve already been through hell and survived. Don’t lose yourself now by obsessing over the dead or the past.”

He tilted his head, a faint glint of approval breaking through his detachment. “When you have taken a new bride, come to Greece. We’ll drink like men who outlasted the pain.”

My answer came without hesitation. “I’ll never remarry,” I said flatly. “She was all I ever wanted. All I ever will.”

His smirk deepened, almost indulgent. “That’s what we all say—until the next war, or the next woman.”

Then he turned toward his boy.

The child waited a few feet away, small hands clasped in front of him, the collar of his black coat too large for his thin neck.

Ruslan knelt, lifting him into his arms with a tenderness that seemed foreign to a man like him.

He brushed a strand of dark hair from the boy’s forehead and studied his face in silence—a look heavy with possession and something close to fear. Whatever humanity still lived in Ruslan Baranov, it was buried in that child.

He straightened, the boy now perched on his shoulders, small hands gripping his father’s silver hair. The soldiers waiting by the chopper stiffened to attention, their salutes sharp and wordless. The rotor blades began to turn, slicing through the evening quiet.

Ruslan paused before boarding, the wind from the helicopter whipping his long coat around his frame.

He turned once more, the dying light catching in his pale eyes.

“I’ve heard the stories,” Ruslan said, voice low, deliberate. “How you treated her. How she became the outlet for your rage.”

He paused, gaze steady. “And now she’s gone, you wish you’d loved her better. Now you tell the world she was everything.”

A faint smirk tugged at his mouth—dangerous, knowing. “Regret looks good on you, Dmitri. Almost makes you human.”

The words hung in the air, stark and heavy, before he climbed aboard.

I stood rooted to the ground, watching that towering figure—the man who’d once torn a world apart just to build his own from the ruins. Ruslan Baranov: the ghost king of Europe.

In his rare moments, he could seem almost kind, even fatherly. But beneath that veneer lay a man forged in violence and sharpened by empire.

His reach bled through continents. Governments bent under his influence. Interpol called him a myth. But I had seen the man himself—and the nightmare he ruled.

As his chopper rose into the twilight, I watched the man vanish into the darkening sky—cold, unshaken, untouched by the grief that devoured me. I envied him. His ability to cut emotion cleanly from his soul was something I could never master.

But his words lingered long after the chopper disappeared into the dusk. He spoke as if he knew things he shouldn’t have, as if he’d been inside the walls of my home, listening to the cracks in my marriage, watching the way Penelope’s smile dimmed

He lived continents away, running his empire from Greece. Yet something in his tone—too knowing—made my gut twist. Ruslan never spoke without reason.

The cemetery fell silent again.

Then came the crunch of footsteps behind me—heavy, familiar.

Giovanni.

He stopped beside me, his broad shoulders hunched, his eyes red-rimmed and swollen, as if he’d fought his grief until it broke him anyway.

His voice came out rough, gravel rubbing against stone.

“What’s next, boss?”

“To find her father,” I said, the words pulling me upright as if I’d been yanked by a rope.

Authority flared through the despair—precise, unrelenting. “I want everything on the Romanos. Their allies, their safehouses—every name, every route, every habit. Even the damned things they do at breakfast. Marco Romano has my son. I want him bleeding information before I put him in the ground.”

Giovanni blinked once, then nodded. “Understood. We’ll move quiet and hard.”

He hesitated, then dropped news like a stone. “The Orlovs demand a meeting tonight. They say—now that your wife is dead, it’s time to seal the alliance. They want you to finally honor that age-old promise and marry Seraphina, their eldest daughter.”

Rage snapped like a wire.

I felt it explode through me—pure, scalding. “My wife’s still warm in the ground, and they’re already planning my next wedding?” I roared.

My fists clenched until my knuckles bled white. “Tell them I’m not interested in their rings or their contracts. Tell them to take their alliance and shove it.”

I stalked to the grave’s edge, gravel crunching under my boots.

The stone stared back: PENELOPE VOLKOV. The letters were a verdict and a vow. I crouched, the wind tugging at my coat, and placed both hands on the cold marble as if I could anchor myself to her name.

“I’ll find our son, Milaya,” I whispered. The promise cracked my throat. “I swear it.”

My Penelope. I would miss her until my last breath.

Giovanni fell into step beside me, the cemetery emptying into twilight’s embrace.

The hunt began now—for my son, for vengeance, for the fragments of a life Penelope had given everything to protect.