Page 30 of Ruthless Addiction

Wallpaper: Me.

Not the woman I was now—older, harder, carved by grief and survival.

But her.

The girl I used to be.

Asleep beneath the old oak tree at the Brooklyn estate, sunlight filtering through the leaves in warm gold patches across my skin. Hair spread like a dark halo over the grass. One bare shoulder exposed from the loose white summer dress he loved. My lips parted in that soft, unguarded way he used to kiss me awake.

Fifteen.

Fifteen years old.

Long before the blood. Before betrayals. Before the grave he dug in his heart and lowered my memory into.

The world tilted like it was trying to shake me out of myself.

He had kept it. He had kept me.

Not tucked away in some forgotten gallery, not sealed in a dead phone or an encrypted archive—

But here.

Front and center. As his lock screen. As his home screen.

Every day. Every morning. For half a decade.

A relic of a girl he once loved more than oxygen—preserved in pixels, protected by titanium, carried into every room, every meeting, every battlefield of his life.

I felt something inside me crack. Not break—crack, like a vault door forced open by something too heavy to ignore.

Vanya watched me, chest rising and falling with anxious curiosity, but I couldn’t look away from the screen.

I finally shoved the phone into my pocket, swallowed the sob clawing at my throat, and forced my face into a mask of stern control.

“You,” I said, pointing at him with a trembling finger, “have gotten us into so much trouble, Vanya.”

Vanya blinked up at me, confused. “...Why?”

I took a shuddering breath, voice tight with equal parts fear and fury. “I know you’re desperate to see your dad. It hurts me—God, it hurts me too—that you don’t have him in your life. But you can’t go around acting reckless. Do you understand? Reckless.”

His brow furrowed.

“First,” I continued, pacing a little, “you march up to a mafia boss at his own wedding, in front of hundreds of people, and—what?—call him ‘Papa’ as if he’d magically know who you are. He doesn’t know he has a son. Anywhere. I’ve told you that already!” My voice rose, cracking at the edges. “Then you make me expose myself in front of all those people, having to fight just to keep you safe. Do you know how close I was to fainting when that guard blew smoke into my face? That was it, I was done!”

I pressed my hands to my temples, trying to will down the adrenaline still hammering through my chest. “And now—you picked his pocket. How... how did you even do that? This was supposed to be a quiet visit. Not... not a catastrophe waiting to happen! Do you know what kind of trouble we could be in?”

Vanya’s eyes widened. His lower lip began to tremble, guilt flickering across his small face.

Then, almost imperceptibly, he climbed onto the bed, crawled into my lap, and wrapped his tiny arms around me, burying his face against my chest.

“I just wanted my dad to see me,” he whispered, his voice muffled but carrying every ounce of longing and innocence that made my heart splinter all over again.

I froze, one arm instinctively tightening around him, my other hand pressed to my lips as tears burned behind my eyes. The weight of it—his longing, his trust, his small, defiant love—nearly broke me.

“I know, baby,” I murmured, stroking the back of his curls, “I know. But we have to be smart. We have to do this... carefully.”

He sniffled, still clinging. And my heart broke for the second time that day.