Page 46 of Blind Devotion (Letters of Ruin #1)

I caught myself against the cabinet as I slumped into a mental collapse. I remembered everything. Beginning to end, no details spared.

Slowly, I straightened and made my way out of his office and down the hall, clinging to the walls for support.

So this was what Adrien hid from me. He abandoned me.

He chose to protect the memory of his brother, who attacked me, over visiting me in the hospital.

Not once did he come back, and I never saw him again after that.

He let his father null the contract without a word of protest. He took my calls less and less, even as my father’s punishments for ruining a profitable business venture for him grew worse and worse.

He stopped responding to my texts, then my emails, before blocking those entirely.

He missed my sixteenth birthday, didn’t even remember it until three days later.

By then, my heart was already in shreds.

During the few calls we exchanged, he was harsh and to the point, borderline cruel, almost as if I were wasting his time.

It felt like he was beating me up on the inside.

I felt that way right now, just remembering our last conversation over the phone a few months before I turned seventeen.

“Then get it through your head. The contract is void.”

“No.”

“You and I are done.”

“Stop saying that.”

“And after this, I never want to hear from you again.”

“Shut up!”

“There’s the immature teenager I know.”

“Adrien, you’re being an asshole.”

“Maybe I should have shown you this side of me sooner. Then you’d understand.”

“What?” My voice cracked.

“How meaningless you were to me.”

“I’m not. I know I’m not. I’m your butterfly. You’re…you’re my—”

“I’m your nothing. I never was. They were words, and you ate them up.”

“No.” Tears ran down my face.

“Words I said to keep the compliance of a stupid little girl in over her head. I’m my brother’s brother after all.”

“You and Yannick were nothing alike.”

“You don’t know who the fuck I really am.”

“I do. We tell each other everything.”

“I lied. I despised my visits to see you. I hated spending my time with a kid when I could be out partying with people my own age.”

“You hate partying.”

“That what I told you?”

“But you…you smiled with me. You laughed with me. You talked to me. You…you let me hug you.”

“You think that makes you special? I always knew exactly what to say, and it was so easy. For the sake of my family, I’d do anything.”

“Why are you being this way?”

“Get it through your head! The ‘me’ you knew was a figment of your imagination.”

“Adrien, don’t do this. I love you.”

He barked out laughter. “You’re a child. You don’t know what the hell love is.”

“No. You’re wrong,” I whispered.

“We were nothing more than a contract! We don’t even have that anymore. You built what we were in your head. In what demented reality did you really believe I wanted to be shackled to you?”

I bit my lips and gazed out over the pond, wiping my eyes with my sleeve.

My phone stuck to my clammy hands. I wanted to scream.

I wanted to fall to pieces. I wanted him to pick them up and glue them back together, but I wasn’t delusional.

Nothing I said was going to stop his hateful words. Not today, at least.

“What? No fit?” he sneered.

God, he was breaking my heart. “I’m not an idiot.

I know what I feel, and I know you were at least my friend.

But if you need this right now. If this is how you have to deal with your brother’s death, then okay.

I’ll take it, because I love you. I do. You don’t get to tell me I don’t.

But you listen. You can be an asshole all you want, Adrien De Villier, but when I’m eighteen, I’ll walk down that aisle, and you’ll be the one at the end of it.

We’ll say our ‘I do’s’, and this, whatever this is, will be just a bad dream. ”

He snorted. “You just don’t get it. Good luck, Persy. You’re going to need it.”

“We’re meant to be. Us against the world, remember? It was always us.”

“There never was an us. Stop calling. I’ve already agreed to a new contract with someone else.”

For some foolish teenage reason, I still believed in us, even after that.

I sent him letter after letter for weeks, hoping he’d respond.

I sent him recordings of symphonies that I thought expressed my feelings better than words.

I’d been a girl in love, desperately vying for the attention of a man who wanted nothing to do with me.

What a twisted fate that I was in love with the same man again.

It took me landing in the hospital with a broken wrist a couple of months later for me to give up on him entirely.

I wrote with my left hand to him, begging him for help against my babbo.

I told him everything he’d done to Mammina and me whenever Renzo was on one of his trips to Italy or another state.

The writing was sloppy and all over the place.

I waited for his response for weeks before I realized he never really cared if he could abandon me this way.

My heart was breaking all over again as I remembered writing my goodbye to him, stuffing the lion origami he made for me years before in an envelope, and shipping them. I never heard from him again.

I never let another man take advantage of my heart again either. After that, I closed myself off to the idea of a relationship. Not even seventeen, and I had already become completely jaded.

Only to land back on his radar three years, two months, and six days after his final phone call. To add insult to injury, he didn’t even recognize me. What did that say about who we’d been to each other?

Now, I’d known him again for fifty-one days.

This new him was different. He was colder, stronger, more driven.

Things were different between us than they were before.

They felt good, real, and heartfelt. But we’d known each other for nine years back then, before he dropped me like a dead fish.

Where did that leave me now? He broke me once. I wasn’t going to let him do it again.

I ambled through the house in a daze. When I reached my room, I froze.

It smelled like him. It wasn’t my room. It was ours.

His, technically. His house. Where he threatened murder.

Where he healed me. Where he took care of me.

Where he kissed me and made love to me. Where he helped erase my trauma.

Where he refused to bring up what happened between us for fear I’d leave him.

Maybe I should. Maybe it was what he deserved for the way he treated me. Or maybe I needed to let him explain and find a way past it. He was my Adrien. My first love, my only love.

I sighed, my body dragged down with exhaustion. Sleep was the only thing I cared about right then. Everything else would wait. Adrien would come back from wherever he was brooding, and we would talk like adults, get everything out in the open, and move forward. We had to.

I collapsed on the bed and pressed his pillow against my body, burying my nose into his lingering scent.

It felt so right yet so wrong at the same time.

My heart didn’t know which way to lean. At least if he tried to take his pillow from me to sleep, then I’d wake up and force him to talk this out with me.

One way or another, we were ironing this out as quickly as possible.