Page 53 of Ruthless Addiction

Five years ago, I had felt her last heartbeat stutter and die against my palm.

Five years ago, her father stole her body—stole my unborn son—and vanished into the night.

I buried an empty coffin.

I stood in the rain while dirt thudded against a casket that held nothing but a dress and a ring.

I spent years tearing the world apart looking for her father.

Not searching. Hunting.

New York learned my name in screams.

Every shadow in Little Italy whispered Volkov with terror.

Anyone carrying the Romano name learned to sleep with one eye open.

Those who refused to talk vanished into the Atlantic.

Those who lied watched their empires burn to ash.

I followed her ghost across continents—from the docks of Naples to the back alleys of Marrakesh, from abandoned monasteries in Prague to safe houses buried in the Swiss Alps.

Every rumor of her—every whisper of a woman with her eyes—I chased until my knuckles bled and my patience frayed into madness.

They said I was grieving.

They said I was obsessed.

They said I had lost my mind.

Maybe I had.

Because I wasn’t just looking for Penelope’s body.

I was looking for my son—the child stolen from me as surely as she was.

The last piece of her that still breathed.

And I swore to the night itself: I would raze the earth until I had them back.

Dead or alive—they were mine.

I hunted Marco Romano like the devil hunts souls.

Still—nothing.

He was smoke. He was absence. He was the ghost I could never catch.

And now fate—cruel, mocking, merciless—had placed in my house a woman who wore my dead wife’s face and a boy who looked exactly like me at age five.

Same eyes.

Same jaw.

Same stubborn, infuriating defiance.

My vision blurred around the edges. Because I wasn’t just losing control. I wasn’t just imagining possibilities. I was losing my mind.