Page 100 of Twisted Addiction

The world was an abyss—a suffocating void that pressed in on me like a living thing.

I had begged, screamed, my throat raw from pleading to be freed from that dark prison, but no one came.

At times, I thought I felt arms around me, a voice calling my name—but it was always swallowed by the dark, fading like a dream I wasn’t meant to wake from.

My body no longer belonged to me.

It was distant, dissolving, as though my limbs had turned to smoke.

I was trapped in the deep, drifting somewhere between life and death, my mind untethered, adrift in a sea of nothingness.

Time bled together—minutes, hours, days, maybe weeks.

My chest burned with the ghost of my asthma, the crushing weight of attacks that came and went like invisible hands squeezing my lungs.

I’d surface, gasp, then sink again. Over and over.

Then—pain.

A needle pricking my hand. A tether pulling me back into flesh I’d forgotten I had.

Tubes snaked across my skin, cold and foreign, their weight a cruel reminder that I was still here.

Oxygen hissed through a nasal cannula, each breath a borrowed one.

Electrodes clung to my chest, sticky against my clammy skin, their wires humming faintly with the rhythm of a machine that had replaced my strength.

An IV line dripped steadily into my veins, its chill crawling up my arm—life in its most clinical form.

Each sensation was faint, distant, but real.

The darkness still wanted me—but now, for the first time, something stronger tugged back.

Muffled voices drifted through the haze—soft at first, distant, like echoes bleeding through a wall. Then one cut through, low and commanding.

“Penelope.”

Dmitri.

The sound of his voice sliced through the fog like a blade.

Memories surged up—the gunshot that started it all, his hand gripping my jaw, the click of a lock, the suffocating dark.

My body flinched before my mind could catch up.

My eyes fluttered open and were met with blinding white—light so sharp it stabbed. I squeezed them shut again, breath hitching as the sterile scent of the hospital hit me: alcohol, latex, and the faint iron tang of blood—mine.

When I forced them open once more, the world dissolved into fragments: white walls, a window leaking pale daylight, the steady beep of a monitor marking the proof of my survival. And him.

Dmitri stood at the foot of my bed—tall, composed, but his eyes betrayed him.

Stormy blue, rimmed with exhaustion, they locked onto mine as if afraid I might vanish.

Those eyes had once burned with hate when he condemned me to that dark cell, vowing to crush me until nothing was left. Now they watched me with something that looked dangerously like tenderness.

My fingers twitched, curling into weak fists.

Rage, grief, and something darker warred in my chest.