Page 4 of Ruthless Addiction

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.