Page 76 of Twisted Addiction
A gunshot cracked somewhere behind me; I flinched and that half-second cost everything.
A boot slammed into my face and the world inverted.
I hit the ground, mud and rain in my mouth.
Ten shadows closed around me, teeth and boots and hands that moved like a single animal.
They didn’t ask questions. They answered with fists.
A kick to the ribs folded me; another to the groin took the breath from me and left me raw and howling.
They kept coming—pummeling jaw, stomach, legs—each strike a punctuation to the single, burning image in my head: her, in someone else’s arms.
“Penelope knows me,” I coughed through blood, tasting metal. “Ask her—she—”
They spat at me and kept moving.
Two grabbed my arms like I was nothing and dragged me across the manicured lawn. The cold pooled under my back as they dumped me by the estate gates. One of them leaned down, sneered in my face so I could see the wet glint in his teeth.
“You’re alive only because the Romanos don’t want a war with the Volkovs,” he said. “Step foot here again and we’ll kill you.”
A final boot slammed my ribs; knives of pain lanced through my side.
Then they left me there, rain washing new blood into the earth.
I lay under the downpour and counted my wounds: ribs that burned with each breath, a nose that would be a crooked ruin, skin torn raw where stone had met bone.
Pain mapped my body—bruises, cuts, every inch a ledger of brutality.
I dragged myself up, fingers slipping on wet stone, hands trembling.
I didn’t know if the letter would ever reach her hands. Maybe she’d ball it up and throw it away. Maybe it would burn unread in some drawer. None of that mattered now the way it used to.
The pain of being left, of being seen as nothing more than a secret—those were the things that would shape me.
I tasted rain and copper and a promise I could not take back.
The rain-soaked earth clung to me, cold and heavy, like the world itself was trying to pull me under.
Every breath was a knife between my ribs; every heartbeat, a reminder that I was still alive when I didn’t want to be.
Blood ran in ribbons down my face, warm against the freezing rain, my clothes torn to ribbons by the estate’s jagged stones.
Penelope’s betrayal burned hotter than any wound.
The image of her in another man’s arms replayed behind my eyes, cruel and endless.
I’d risked everything—my life, my sanity—to bring her that letter, to make her see what she’d done to me. Now I was nothing but wreckage, a boy stripped bare by love and violence, clingingto the faint, trembling thread of hope that my mother was still waiting for me.
I couldn’t die here. Not like this.
Not in front of the house of the girl who had destroyed me.
I tried to walk.
Pain flared through my left leg—white-hot, grinding bone on bone—and I almost screamed.
My right leg held, barely, just enough to drag me forward.
