Venom and Velvet

CH— 1 Broken past

Fifteen years ago.

Damian Volkov was fourteen the night his mother disappeared.

Yelena Volkov had been the only warmth in a house built out of marble, secrets, and men who spoke in code. She used to sneak into his room past midnight with hot chocolate his father would've called "weakness," humming old Russian lullabies while Katya, barely six, curled up between them.

Damian remembered every detail of that night the storm outside, the way his mother had kissed his forehead and told him she'd be back before breakfast. She was meeting someone. A business associate of his father's, she'd said. Nothing to worry about.

She never came back.

For three days, Sergei Volkov tore the city apart looking for her or at least, that's what he told his sons. Damian later learned the truth in fragments, the way children learn everything that matters: by not being told, and finding out anyway.

His mother hadn't just disappeared.

She'd been sold out.

A shipment gone wrong. A deal his father had made with a man named Antonio Rossi Rossi Shipping, respectable on paper, ruthless underneath, just like everyone else in their world. Something had gone sideways in that deal, some betrayal neither side would fully own, and Yelena Volkov had been the collateral damage used as leverage, then discarded when the leverage stopped being useful.

They found her body two weeks later.

Sergei never spoke of it again. He buried his wife, buried his grief somewhere no one could ever find it, and became someone colder, harder, someone who taught his son that love was a liability and trust was how you ended up in a shallow grave.

The Rossi name became a wound Damian carried for years not loud, not obvious, just there, humming under everything.

He never confirmed how deep Antonio Rossi's hand had been in his mother's death; the details were murky, buried under years of both families protecting their own. But it didn't matter. The name alone was enough. Rossi meant loss. Rossi meant the moment his childhood ended.

His father, meanwhile, became a stranger wearing a familiar face present at galas, absent everywhere that mattered. Damian and Katya raised each other in all the ways that counted.

Sergei taught him the business, the violence, the empire-building but it was Katya who taught him how to still be human underneath it, in the small hours when no one else was watching.

He stopped trusting women somewhere in the space between his mother's funeral and his sixteenth birthday.

It solidified permanently at twenty-four, when a woman named Elise the first person he'd let close since his mother sold his location to a rival family for a payout. He'd walked into that ambush with three bullet wounds and a lesson carved deeper than any scar: people who get close to you are just waiting for the right price.

Katya was the only exception. Katya, who'd cried into his shoulder the night their mother's funeral ended and never once asked him to be anything other than what he was. Katya, who fought her own battles in this world and still made time to mock his taste in ties. Katya his only proof that softness could survive in a family built on blood.

Everyone else was a variable to be

controlled.....

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