Chapter 178: ~ Fathers

{Daisy's POV}

Run.

That was the entire plan my brain managed to produce, standing there staring at the exact man we'd spent all night trying to avoid. Turn around, run, put doors and hallways and as much distance as physically possible between us and this room.

Then the second half of that plan arrived, considerably less encouraging: my mother could not run. Not fast. Not far. Not after everything tonight had already put her through. Running meant a chase, and a chase meant losing, and losing meant something I refused to let myself finish picturing.

So I stood there instead, dread pooling somewhere behind my ribs, waiting for someone else's brain to produce a better plan than mine had.

I turned to my mother, half expecting to find my own panic mirrored back at me.

I didn't.

She wasn't scared. Not even slightly. She was staring directly at Volkov, unblinking, and he was staring right back at her with the exact same intensity, like the two of them had picked up a conversation that had simply been paused for twenty-odd years.

The room around them looked less like a criminal's office and more like something out of an old European drama — dark wood shelving, a heavy leather chair angled beside a low table, a drink cart lined with cut crystal decanters that probably cost more than my entire apartment. Somewhere behind us, muffled through stone walls, gunfire still cracked on, completely irrelevant to whatever was happening in this room.

Volkov rose from his chair, unhurried, and crossed to the cart to pour himself a drink like we'd simply interrupted a quiet evening rather than an active war.

"It looks like you all couldn't wait for the scheduled reunion," he said, calm as ever. "I'm flattered you're so eager to be in my presence."

He turned toward my mother.

"And I'm even more flattered that you came here yourself, my love."

My love.

Confusion crashed through me so hard I nearly missed my mother's response entirely.

"Don't call me that."

He didn't so much as flinch at the warning. If anything, his expression stayed exactly, infuriatingly the same.

"It's been ages," he said. "So long since I've seen you. But that's the thing about you. Your beauty never fades."

"Let us out of here." My mother's voice came out sharp, furious. "We don't want anything to do with you. You freak."

"I wasn't the one who captured you," Volkov said, unbothered. "According to your daughter, she's the one who brought you here. That problem is between the two of you."

"Elena, Elena."

A different voice, from the side.

I turned to find a man who could have almost passed as Volkov's twin — same build, same height, close enough in the face that for one disorienting second I genuinely couldn't tell them apart. Almost. Because Volkov, standing right beside him, radiated something colder. More dangerous. Without even trying.

"It's been so long," the man continued, "and you're still this hot-tempered toward my brother."

"You keep your mouth out of this, Alexandro," my mother snapped.

"He's right, though." Volkov's voice slid back in smoothly. "You never did give me a break. Always so hot-tempered." He tilted his glass slightly toward Daisy. "Though it seems life repaid you with some irony. Married to a daughter who turned out quite the opposite."

His eyes landed on me.

"She looks like a calmer version of you," he said, studying me the way you'd study a piece in a shop window. "One that doesn't seem nearly as dangerous. And one I'm not entirely sure is all that smart."

"Don't talk about my daughter like that," my mother said, sharp enough to cut glass.

Volkov's mouth curved, faint and terrible.

"You mean our daughter."

The room went quiet around those two words, and I stood there feeling my own heartbeat everywhere at once — throat, ears, fingertips, like my whole body had decided this was the moment to remind me it was still running.

I'd heard versions of this before. Whispered ones, half-formed ones, the kind I'd let myself dismiss every single time because dismissing them was easier than holding them. But there was no dismissing this one. Not standing here, watching it land in real time.

"Mom." My voice came out small. "What is he saying?"

My mother sighed. "Daisy, just—"

"I'm saying," Volkov cut in smoothly, "that your mother and I were in love. The best of couples, once. Then she decided to tear herself away from my life and go into hiding the moment she found out she was carrying you, because she'd decided my occupation made me too dangerous. Too bad an influence."

He swirled the drink in his hand.

"I'd like to tell her today she was wrong. Look at me. I'm the father of entire supply chains. Of ambition, of purpose, of thousands of lives that answer to what I build and fuel every single day." He spread one hand slightly. "Tell me. What better figure could a father possibly be?"

I barely registered most of that.

What I couldn't let go of was the rest of it — in love, carrying you — the shock of it pressing down on my chest like something physical, overwhelming and dreadful in equal measure. Some small, stubborn corner of doubt tried to survive in me anyway.

My mother killed it completely.

"Your father nonsense," she said, voice shaking with fury, "is exactly why you would have never been a good father to her. Not then. Not now. Not ever. She doesn't need you. Neither do I."

Volkov's expression cooled instantly.

"Relax, Elena." His voice dropped, stern and even. "You know there's a limit to how far your temper can push before my patience runs out. None of us want to find out what happens after that. It tends to end badly."

The warning sat heavy in the air, and I felt the tension climb another full notch, because I believed every word of it.

Then another voice cut through the room entirely.

"The only one who's going to get things bad," DeLuca said, "is you."

Every eye in the room shifted toward him at once.

But Volkov turned toward DeLuca, entirely unbothered by the threat, like it had barely registered as sound.

"Adrian DeLuca," he said. "Heir to the DeLuca empire. And one of tonight's prizes."

He crossed back to the drink cart, poured himself another, unhurried, like the room wasn't currently full of people who might kill each other in the next thirty seconds.

"For the longest time," he continued, "my brother and I tried very hard to have you killed. You had the kind of potential that worried me — the sort that might have actually taken your father's empire somewhere new. A problem, until I realized a friend of yours could simply inherit it instead, and render you irrelevant without my having to lift a finger."

He turned an antique object over in his hand and set it aside, casual, dismissive.

"That part, I understand completely. What I've never fully understood is why you've spent all this time hunting me personally, instead of doing it properly, under your father's banner, empire against empire." He tilted his head slightly. "It's bold. I'll admit I admire that in you. But I have to ask." A faint, cold smile. "Is it hunger? Or just plain foolishness?"

I saw DeLuca's fists clench at his sides, and my stomach dropped with dread.

He didn't lash out.

"You already know the answer," DeLuca said, voice low and controlled. "But I won't leave it to your aging memory to fill in the blanks. I'll say it plainly."

A pause. When he continued, his voice had gone tighter, sharper at the edges.

"I've hunted you so I could avenge my mother. Tear your soul out of your body. Ruin what's left of you in a way even your own soul would pity. And then, finally, rest."

The room went completely still.

Nobody spoke. The air itself seemed to hold its breath, waiting.

Then Volkov broke the silence.

"You think I killed your mother?"

Something about the way he said it didn't sit right with me, and before I could figure out why, he laughed. Genuinely. Wholeheartedly, the kind of laugh that comes from somewhere real rather than performed for an audience.

"You think I was the one who slaughtered your mother?" He shook his head, still laughing, delight written plainly across his face. "I wish. I truly wish that credit belonged to me."

He turned to his generals, to Alexandro, something almost giddy in his voice now.

"All this time," he said, "this boy has been hunting me blindly."

Laughter rippled through the room, low murmurs of amusement passing between the men surrounding him.

I stared between all of them, confusion and dread tangling together, because none of this made sense unless he was lying, and he did not look like a man who was lying. I'd watched liars all night. I knew exactly what performance looked like by now, and this wasn't it. His laughter came too easily, too genuinely absorbed in its own surprise, to be anything but real.

I glanced at DeLuca and caught something I'd never once seen on his face before.

Confusion. Small, barely there, but unmistakably present.

The laughter finally settled, and Volkov turned back to him, wiping the last of it from his expression.

"DeLuca DeLuca." His voice cooled into something almost gentle, almost pitying. "It turns out you've been played. By your own father."

The words landed like a physical blow.

"Salvatore DeLuca," Volkov continued, "killed his own wife. Your mother. And pointed the blame directly at me, so he could turn his own son into a weapon. His personal kill engine, built to finish the work of destroying me that he never had the stomach to do himself."

A pause, deliberate, cruel in its patience.

"I may have tasted your mother once, a lifetime ago. But I didn't kill her." His eyes stayed fixed on DeLuca. "Your loving father did. And he used you to do the rest."

I turned to DeLuca, my own shock mirrored back at me in his face, raw and unguarded in a way I had never once seen from him before…