Page 15 of Sinful Obsession

At the entrance, a sign in bold, rusted letters made one thing brutally clear:

“Speak without permission and die first.”

No one dared break the silence.

The air was thick with tension—fear, maybe—but I wasn’t scared. Not in the way they wanted. Beneath the adrenaline, something fiercer pulsed through me.

Readiness.

And a hunger—to understand this underworld, to conquer it, to carve my place into its bones.

I’d chosen this over marrying a Moretti.

And I’d be damned if I let it break me.

I stood in my column, my bruised nose throbbing faintly, my boyish disguise feeling flimsier by the second.

The walls hummed with an eerie kind of discipline. This wasn’t a school. This was a battlefield before the first shot, a coliseum waiting for the lions to feast.

And then—light.

A spotlight blinked to life, illuminating the raised platform before us. Three shadows emerged from the edges of the hall, walking with the casual dominance of men who had no need to run. Each one took a position on the stage—left, right, center.

The first, on the left, was unmistakable: Dmitri.

He was monstrous in size, his sheer mass matched by a brutish elegance. Sharp-jawed, barrel-chested, his suit strained across shoulders that looked carved from granite. His stare was calm, cold, used to death. He didn’t walk like a man. He moved like a tank.

From the right stepped a man I didn’t recognize, but his aura was no less commanding.

He was leaner than Dmitri, with a wiry strength that suggested speed as much as power. His black suit was tailored to perfection, accentuating a frame that moved with lethal grace. His face was angular, almost gaunt, with piercing blue eyes that seemed to dissect everything they touched.

He carried himself like a blade, sharp and ready to cut.

But it was the man at the center who stole the air from the room, who made the hall itself seem to bow.

Dressed in a pristine white suit, he stood in stark contrast to the others, a figure of almost divine menace. His build a perfect balance of strength and elegance.

His face was a study in cold beauty. His jet-black hair fell in loose waves, framing a face that was both angelic and demonic, a devil incarnate who exuded an aura so potent it seemed to pulse in the air around him.

And when I really looked at him, my mind faltered.

A fog rolled through my thoughts, disorienting, as if I knew him. But how could I? This was my first day in this underworld, my first glimpse of its rulers.

And yet...

The sight of him stirred something dark. A sliver of memory—or maybe a nightmare. A fragment torn from those missing three years.

A flash:me in a wedding gown.

A voice like iron, promising pain.

Chains.

And then nothing.

My gaze dropped before the memory could fully form, heart pounding with a fear I couldn’t name.

Then Dmitri’s voice echoed through the silence, hard as the steel beneath our boots.