Extras Ch 1: Dante - A Weapon in the Making
Dante was nine years old when Viktor Volkov brought him to the mansion.
He sat in the back seat of the car with his hands folded in his lap and his face arranged into an expression of quiet gratitude. He had practiced this expression in the reflection of shop windows. It was useful. It made adults want to protect him.
Viktor watched him in the rearview mirror. "You're very calm," he observed.
Dante met his eyes in the glass. "Should I not be?"
"Most kids your age would be nervous."
"I've been to new places before." A pause. "I'm different."
Viktor's mouth curved with a glint of satisfaction. "Yes. You are."
The mansion emerged from the coastal mist. Stone walls. Tall windows. Ivy climbing the eastern face in careful, cultivated patterns. A woman stood at the top of the stone steps, her honey-colored hair swept back from a face that had known very little hardship. She smiled as Viktor emerged from the car.
And then her eyes found Dante.
He let a beat pass—just long enough to assess this woman and choose the version of himself she needed to see. His shoulders curled inward, his eyes went wide, and his small frame seemed to shrink further into the too-thin coat. He made sure she saw every bit of it.
Nadia’s expression immediately softened into maternal warmth. She descended the steps and knelt before him, her expensive emerald dress pooling on the damp stone.
"What's your name?"
"Dante." His voice was deliberately small.
Her hand rose to touch his cheek. Dante flinched as if one cue.
"Dante. Oh, you poor thing," she breathed. "You're safe now. No one will hurt you here."
He looked up at her through his lashes. "Really? You won’t kick me away?"
"No." She took his hand. "You have us. We’re your new family."
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
During the first week, Dante learned that Nadia wanted to love him. Or rather, she wanted to perform the act of loving him. Every small vulnerability he showed—a flinch at a sudden noise, a nightmare that left him shaking—deepened her investment in the story. She brought him books. Taught him to read. Sat with him in the garden and pointed out flowers.
"The roses were my mother's," she told him one afternoon, brushing her fingers over a white bloom. "She planted them the year she married my father. I brought them when I married Viktor. They've survived everything. Frost. Drought. Neglect." She looked at Dante with warm eyes. "Some things endure, no matter what the world throws at them."
Dante nodded, his face solemn. "I want to be like the roses."
Nadia's eyes glistened. She pulled him into a hug, holding him tight against the soft wool of her sweater.
Dante let himself be held.
He saw her clearly, even then. She had married a man who built an empire on blood and leverage, yet she moved through the mansion as if it were a country estate in a gentler century. She filled the rooms with fresh flowers and classical music. She spoke of art, literature, and the beauty of the human spirit. She never asked Viktor about his work, and Viktor never told her. It was an arrangement that suited them both.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
Viktor, however, was not looking for a son. He was looking for a tool.
Dante understood this early on. Viktor had plucked him from the streets because he saw a diamond in the rough. Dante’s father had been a banker, and numbers were as natural to Dante as breathing. Viktor had watched him for weeks before the car ever pulled up to the curb, observing the way the boy counted, calculated, and survived when others didn't.
The test came a month after Dante's arrival.
He lingered in the doorway while Viktor reviewed ledgers.
"You're hovering," Viktor said without looking up. He let the silence stretch a moment, then added: "Tell me what you see."
"Your pen. You're pressing too hard. The ink is bleeding through."
Viktor set down the pen, leaning back in his chair. "What else?"
Dante moved closer, his eyes flicking between the columns.
"Small, steady differences like that don’t happen by accident. They’re intentional. Someone’s skimming, but they’re smart about it—keeping the amounts low so it blends in with normal fluctuation." He tapped the edge of the ledger, but his gaze was already drifting to Viktor. "Whoever’s doing it knows your habits."
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Viktor was very still. The silence stretched, heavy and sharp. Then he nodded, a single, slow dip of the chin.
"Sit," he said, gesturing to the chair across from his desk.
For the next hour, Viktor walked Dante through the ledgers. He explained the Volkov businesses—the legitimate fronts, the illegal operations, the way money moved from one to the other and back again. Dante absorbed it all. He asked sharp questions and made connections that even made Viktor pause.
"You have a gift," Viktor said finally, a flicker of genuine approval in his grey eyes. "Most people see the pieces. You see the board.”
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
Over the next few years, Dante learned everything Viktor could teach him. Finance. Strategy. The subtle machinery of power. He accompanied Viktor to meetings, standing quietly in the corner, observing. He memorized names, faces, and weaknesses. He became indispensable. Viktor treated him not as a son but as a protégé—a sharp instrument being honed for a specific purpose.
And Nadia continued her rituals. French lessons. Art appreciation. The tea he never drank.
For a long time, Dante let her. But as he grew older, as Viktor's respect deepened, Nadia's role in his life shifted from useful anchor to grating irritation. Viktor saw the sharpness of his mind and valued it. Nadia only saw the boy she had rescued to prove her own goodness. And the longer Dante spent in Viktor's world, learning the truth of how power worked, the more Nadia's delusions felt like an insult.
He was not that boy. He had never been that boy. And by seventeen, Dante was done pretending otherwise.
One afternoon, Dante walked beside Viktor along the gravel path that wound through Nadia's roses. Viktor had been troubled all week—a rival family had pressed into Volkov’s territory. The usual strategies to contain them yielded no meaningful results.
"We need leverage," Viktor said, his voice tight. "Something we can use to make him back down."
Dante jumped in on cue. "He has a daughter. She’s fourteen. Boarding school in Lausanne. She's the only person he cares about."
Viktor stopped walking. "How do you know that?"
"I put two men on him three weeks ago. Every weekend, he checks in under an alias near the airport. No entourage, no security detail, no business stops." Dante glanced at Viktor. "From there, it's a forty-minute drive to Lausanne. And the only thing in Lausanne he'd visit that often is the girl. St. Émilie School. Our people confirmed it yesterday."
Viktor was quiet, but there was a flicker of approval in his eyes. "You're suggesting we threaten his daughter."
"I'm suggesting we make him believe we would threaten his daughter. The belief is enough. He'll back down. We never have to touch the girl."
"And if he doesn't back down?"
Dante met Viktor's eyes. "Then we revisit the question."
Viktor studied him for a long moment, then he smiled. "You think like a man twice your age."
"You taught me to think."
"I taught you strategy. I didn't teach you this."
Dante smiled. "Some things can't be taught."
Viktor was pleased; Dante could feel it radiating off him. This was the validation he craved, the sharp, clear approval of a predator recognizing its own.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
That evening, Nadia asked Dante to join her in the sitting room.
He expected the usual ritual: warmth, tea, a discussion of the book she had lent him. Instead, he found her standing by the window with her back facing him.
"Nadia?" His voice pitched with concern. The act was automatic.
She turned. Her face was pale, her eyes red-rimmed. But it was her expression that made him pause. There was no sadness or anger, only fear.
"I heard you," she said, her voice trembling. "In the garden. With Viktor."
Dante's mind raced, but his face remained smooth. "I'm not sure what you mean."
"You talked about threatening a child like it was nothing." Nadia's voice cracked. "She’s a person, Dante."
Silence fell between them.
Dante considered his options. He could play the wounded boy, apologize, and manipulate her back into her comfortable, deluded state. It would be easy. He had done it a thousand times.
But he didn’t want to.
He was tired. Tired of the tea and the books and the soft, expectant eyes. Tired of being her project, her proof, her beautiful broken thing made whole. He had Viktor's recognition now. He had power of his own. Why should he soothe her?
No, he didn't want to soothe her. He wanted to shatter the glass she lived behind.
"I was trying to help Viktor," Dante said, his voice cold.
"By threatening a little girl?"
"By solving a problem," Dante corrected. "The same way Viktor solves problems. The way he's solved them for twenty years while you sat in this room and arranged flowers."
“Dante!” Nadia flinched as if he'd struck her. "Don’t talk like that! Viktor is a businessman. He's harsh, but he's not..."
"He's not what?" Dante stepped closer, causing her to back away. "He's not a monster? Look at this house. Look at these roses. They're watered with blood, Nadia."
She stared at him, her mouth open, her delusion crumbling in real-time. The fear in her eyes was sharp now. Her pupils dilated wide.
"Dante, I loved you," she whispered. "I loved you like a son."
"You loved the idea of me." Dante snapped. "The grateful orphan. The proof that your kindness could transform anyone. But I was never broken, Nadia. I was surviving, and now I'm thriving. That should make you proud.” He smiled, but the warmth didn't reach his eyes. "After all, you're the one who taught me that some things endure, no matter what the world throws at them. I'm exactly who you made me."
Without waiting for her to respond, Dante left her standing by the window, her hand clutching the back of a chair for support.
After that night, Nadia stopped bringing him tea or looking at him with warmth.
And Dante found that the silence suited him far better than the noise of her pretend love. He didn't miss the performance at all.