Page 102 of Twisted Addiction

His hand lowered, skimming my arm, my wrist—where a faint mark of restraint lingered.

“Dmitri,” I said sharply, pulling back, but he didn’t stop.

“Hold still,” he said quietly, the command soft but absolute.

His hand brushed the side of my waist, then stopped.

For a long moment, he said nothing—just watched my chest rise and fall, his breathing syncing with mine as if reassuring himself I was truly alive.

Finally, he exhaled, the sound heavy with something that wasn’t quite relief. “Good,” he said under his breath. “You’re healing.”

He sank into the chair beside the bed, his elbows resting on his knees, staring at the floor for a moment before lifting his gaze to me.

“While you were under,” he began, voice tightening with something darker, “I checked the landline in our room—the one you used to text me after I disappeared that night. After our first time.”

My head snapped toward him, confusion cutting through the fog. “And?”

“The replies you got,” he said, his jaw ticking once. “They weren’t mine. Someone else was pretending to be me.”

I frowned, searching his face. “That’s not possible. They sounded exactly like you.”

His gaze flicked to the floor, then back to me, colder now.

“There’s a leak here in Lake Como,” he murmured, pacing once. “A spy. Someone feeding him everything about us.” Dmitri said, his tone unsteady but lethal.

“But what makes my skin crawl is how close that person must be to you. How else could he know the rhythm of this marriage?”

He took a breath, gaze locked on mine.

“The texts sounded like me because he knows how I talk to you. How I make you bend without touching you.”

He looked away, then back, colder than before. “It’s your father, Penelope.”

The words hit me like a slap.

I froze, pulse spiking. “My father?” The words scraped out of me, disbelief splintering into dread. “You’re saying he—what—pretended to be you? That he had access to your private line?”

“No,” Dmitri said, too softly. “Your father didn’t need access to my phone. He hacked the entire Lake Como network.”

He exhaled slowly, his eyes glinting with fury he barely contained. “He’s been watching from the inside for weeks. I confirmed it yesterday.”

The room tilted.

I stared at him, voice breaking between disbelief and fury. “You’re telling me I almost died, and your first instinct was to investigate a hack?”

His gaze locked onto mine, unflinching. “No,” he said quietly. “My first instinct was to keep you alive. The second was to find who keeps trying to take you away from me.”

My breath caught, disbelief warring with dread.

My father—Papa, who’d cradled me after nightmares, who’d sworn he’d die before letting anyone hurt me—hacking Dmitri’s servers? Mimicking his voice with such precision that even I, the one who knew every shade of Dmitri’s cruelty, couldn’t tell the difference?

How could he know the venom, the twisted devotion, the secret rot inside our marriage?

Unless someone’s feeding him—someone who’s seen too much, someone who watches when I think I’m alone.

But who? I don’t keep company here. No friends, no staff I trust. So who’s close enough to betray me?

I’m surrounded by people, yet utterly isolated.