Page 131 of Twisted Addiction

Dmitri’s.

My stomach lurched, every muscle taut, every emotion raw.

“Stay there. I’m coming right away,” he said, and the call ended abruptly.

My hands trembled as the receiver slipped from my grasp.

He was coming... for his child.

Not for me.

Not for the years of love and betrayal we’d shared.

I felt the weight of every choice, every lie, every betrayal crash down. Seraphina, my parents, the stolen pieces of my past. None of it mattered now.

Dmitri would come. I could feel it in my bones—the storm of his power, his obsession, his hunger to claim what he thought was his.

I gripped the edge of the hospital sheet until my knuckles went white.

“You’ll never take him,” I whispered through trembling lips. “Not while I’m still breathing.”

I lay back against the hospital bed, the sterile fluorescent lights glaring down like interrogators, my body throbbing from the cesarean, every stitch a reminder of what I’d endured.

Alone.

That word weighed heavier than the pain in my abdomen.

Alone, with my newborn son fighting for every breath in the NICU.

He was somewhere down the corridor now, tiny and fragile in an incubator, his chest fluttering like a trapped bird’s.

The NICU nurses had promised to call if anything changed, but silence felt like its own kind of torture.

Alone, yes. But a mother now, and that made me dangerous in ways they would never understand.

Chapter 30

PENELOPE

Still lying on the hospital bed, I felt the burner phone buzz weakly in my palm.

The cracked screen lit up, casting a faint glow across my trembling fingers.

My father’s number.

A name I hadn’t meant to see again.

My stomach clenched.

I had called it by mistake—my mind fogged by painkillers, exhaustion, and blood loss.

For a heartbeat, I just stared, torn between dread and desperate hope. Then, against my better judgment, I answered.

“Hello...” His voice filled the room—familiar, warm, threaded with that false paternal concern that once could’ve broken me.

“Penelope,” he said, my name rolling off his tongue like a benediction and a threat all at once. “Sweetheart... you left us. Where have you been?”

The false tenderness in his tone coiled around my chest, as if he were reaching through the phone to pull me back into his grasp.