He Didn’t Kidnap Me. Not Exactly novel Chapter 321

Chapter 321

Taisy’s POV)

We stayed on the ground for a while, all three of us, the tension in the room dropping just enough to breathe in without it hurting.

Roman Volkov lay a few feet away. Still. Not breathing. Dead.

I still couldn’t fully process that. My brain kept circling back to it like it needed the repetition to make the fact stick – dead, actually dead – because thirty seconds ago he’d been standing there in total, absolute control of everything in this room, and now he was just a shage on the floor.

Aria knelt nearby, crying. Bitter, quiet tears, shoulders shaking. It would have been easier to make sense of if she weren’t his daughter. She was. And the man she’d just shot twice, killed with her own hands, was lying exactly where he’d fallen.

I blinked several times, half expecting the scene to rearrange itself into something less impossible.

It didn’t.

Alexandro sat slumped against the far wall, coughing, choking wetly around the wound in his side, still fighting to stay conscious. Bad. Genuinely bad. But better, somehow, than the man who wasn’t moving at all.

Movement pulled my attention sideways.

My mother rose to her feet.

I watched her, confused, still holding onto DeLuca, as she crossed the room slowly and crouched in front of Volkov’s body. Gentle. Calm, in a way that made absolutely no sense given everything I knew about the last several hours.

She reached out and cupped his cheek.

I didn’t understand it, not fully, but something in the gesture read as a goodbye. Her expression carried no anger. No hatred. No fear, no disgust. Just a strange, quiet stillness, something underneath it I couldn’t name.

Then she reached into her dress, drew out a small purse, and pulled something free from inside it.

A ring.

She opened his hand and placed it in his palm.

I stopped breathing for a second.

Because that ring looked exactly like what it was. A wedding ring. And seeing my mother place it there, gently, like a final closing of something, removed every last shred of room I’d left myself for doubt.

Roman Volkov was my father.

I ran through it all in my head, fast, methodical, the way you check a math problem you already know the answer to but need to prove anyway. The comments Volkov had made, over and over, each one I’d tried to dismiss. The Kinlock reading my own palm without hesitation, the door swinging open under my hand like it had been waiting for me my whole life. Every half–formed theory I’d refused to finish thinking.

<

1.2

15:03 Fri, Sep 4

Chapter 321

None of it left room for doubt anymore. This did it completely.

didn’t feel a void. I want to be honest about that, because I kept waiting for one, some aching absence where a father should have lived, and it never showed up. I never knew him. My mother had told me he left when I was young, and that had been a lie, but even learning the truth now didn’t create a hole shaped like him. Whatever he was – and I’d watched exactly what he was, tonight, in person – I hadn’t missed it. I couldn’t miss something that evil

and call it loss.

Still, the weight of it sat there. Real. Heavy. Something I’d need more than the next five minutes to actually finish carrying.

My mother rose again, stepping back from his body.

Beside me, DeLuca groaned, and I turned my focus back to him, helping him rise as my mother moved to his other side to steady him too. He picked up the gun from the floor as he climbed to his feet, unsteady, breathing hard through the effort.

All of us standing now. Except Aria. Except Alexandro.

Tension coiled tight in the room again, because DeLuca had a gun in his hand and I genuinely didn’t know what he intended to do with it. Alexandro, I understood. That felt almost inevitable. Aria, though – Aria had just saved us. If she hadn’t come through that door when she had, DeLuca would already be dead. But she’d also spent months tearing down every ounce of trust I’d ever given her, and rebuilding it just enough to tear it down again. I didn’t know what she deserved. I genuinely didn’t.

I didn’t get long to figure it out.

DeLuca raised the gun.

“No, please, no-

He fired before I finished the sentence.

Alexandro’s body dropped, limp, and DeLuca’s hand shook slightly from the effort, weakened, still bleeding under my palm where I’d been pressing against

the wound.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify