Page 123 of Twisted Addiction

The floor seemed to vanish beneath me. “What...?” I breathed.

Her hands rested folded in her lap. “His biological parents came from Russia,” she began, voice precise, “desperate, hunted for years after he was taken from them by an anonymous gang. They caught a lead—he was being raised by the Volkovs, one of the four most dangerous mafia families in Lake Como, the heart of the mafia world. They knew they could never go against them alone.”

She leaned back slightly, eyes unyielding. “So they came to us—the largest mafia clan in New York at the time—begging to have him back. Promising anything, offering everything. Your father and I promised to help... at first. Until we saw the opportunity: a seat at the Volkov table. Ambition, Penelope, is never pretty.”

Her voice hardened, sharper than steel. “And when the Volkovs refused a peaceful resolution, when they ordered us to eliminate his parents because they would not stop searching, we did what any clan in power would do. We carried out the task. We killed them. His father first—as a warning. When the mother refused to relent, we eliminated her as well.”

I could feel the room narrow to a pinprick. My voice was barely more than a rasp. “You... killed them. For power.”

She nodded, expression glazed in the calcified certainty of someone who’d justified murder in boardroom terms. “We made a ruthless calculation. We did what empires do.”

I tasted bile.

My hands trembled. “My God... I can’t believe... I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”

“We are not sentimental, Penelope,” Isabella said. “We are stewards. We choose the family’s survival over personal feelings. You are the heir. You are why we did what we did.”

My hands twisted in my lap until the nails bit into the meat. “No,” I said, the single word a knife. “You did it because you’re heartless. Selfish. You killed a man and a woman—parents—who were begging for their stolen son. You could’ve refused to help. You could’ve walked away. Instead you murdered them for a seat at a table.”

Isabella’s face hardened, but I kept going, words spilling like acid. “You speak of murder like a contract clause. No wonder Dmitri looks at me as if I’m poison. He told me he wanted to love me — that he loved me — but you and Father poisoned that possibility. You made him into what he is. You turned him into a monster. You ruined him.”

His hatred, his vengeance, the storm behind his dark eyes—all of it made sense now.

Every calculated move, every icy touch, every moment of cruelty, and every glimpse of protective rage—pieces snapping together into a jagged puzzle I wasn’t sure I wanted completed.

The conversation should have ended then — with me storming from the table — but Isabella’s voice dropped again, threaded with something like regret and iron.

“That is politics, Penelope. That is what keeps our children alive. Understand that we did what we must to keep our line.”

I stared at her, seeing not my mother, but a stranger—a predator cloaked in the skin of the woman I once loved.

All at once the house around me felt foreign, the chandeliers and the food suddenly stage props in a play I hadn’t auditioned for.

The lasagna on the table grew cold, its aroma fading into the background, drowned out by the weight of her confession. Dmitri’s parents—murdered. By my family. At the Volkovs’ bidding.

I pushed my chair back so hard the legs scraped the floor.

She rose, voice cool and absolute. “You will not act in haste, Penelope. We walk this road carefully. You will learn everything... in time.”

The words fell somewhere between a warning and a threat — and it broke something in me to hear that voice come from the mother who used to braid my hair and hum lullabies.

“I... I need to be alone,” I whispered, the tremor in my voice betraying the storm inside me.

Without waiting for her reply, I turned and walked away — because if I stayed another second, I wasn’t sure whether I’d scream or shatter.

The hallway felt narrow, suffocating, every step a reminder of how fragile I’d become.

I stumbled into my bedroom and collapsed onto the edge of the bed, the air thick with disbelief.

Everything I’d just heard pressed against my chest until I could barely breathe.

I couldn’t stay here. Not another minute. Not in this house. Not with them.

My mother—my own mother—had rewritten me like a story she didn’t like the ending of.

She’d erased my memories, murdered Dmitri’s parents, and turned me into something I didn’t even recognize.

Every thread of my life had been pulled and rewoven until nothing felt like mine anymore.