Page 68 of Twisted Addiction

Now she was curled against another man.

His arm draped over her bare waist, his fingers splayed where mine used to rest. Her hair spilled across his chest, her lips parted slightly in sleep, their bodies tangled in the soft sheets like something holy and obscene all at once.

My body went cold. Not just from the rain—but from the realization that every reason I’d kept living had just turned to ash.

The world blurred.

My vision tunneled until there was only that bed, that skin, that betrayal. I pressed a hand to the windowsill to steady myself, the wood cutting into my palm.

I didn’t feel it. Couldn’t.

I wanted to scream. To shatter the glass, to drag her awake, to demand an explanation that could never exist. But no sound came. Only the storm outside, howling on my behalf.

A tremor ran through me—rage, heartbreak, disbelief all twisted together until I couldn’t tell one from the other.

I stumbled back, nearly slipping off the ledge.

Rage boiled under my skin until I could taste iron.

My fists clenched so hard my nails bit into my palms and the pain sang me back from the edge of something monstrous. Every sane, civilized muscle in me wanted to snap — to drag that man off the bed and smash his skull against the wall until the room was cleaned of him and the image with it. I wanted him to stop existing.

But I didn’t move. I forced myself to breathe, to hold back the animal that wanted immediate blood.

Restraint felt weaker and meaner than mercy: proof that she’d been right to laugh at me as a secret, a foolish boyfriend with no future. She’d chosen him. She’d betrayed me.

The thought coiled through me, cold and bright — not an accident, not a mistake, but a decision.

That knowledge burned hotter than any blow.

I stared one last time, forcing the image into memory, into something that would haunt me long after the rain stopped.

Then I climbed down, one hand slick with blood from a torn palm, the other clutching the trellis as if it were the only thing keeping me alive.

By the time my boots hit the ground, I wasn’t the same person who had climbed that wall.

Something had broken—quietly, completely—and there would be no fixing it.

Rain sluiced the glass in long, furious lines.

My chest split open and I could feel the pieces cutting into my ribs. I pinched my arm until the pain was sharp enough to prove I wasn’t dreaming. It wasn’t a dream. Her shape on that bed was obscene in its calmness—Penelope, vulnerable and alive and folded into another man’s arms.

Anger detonated inside me. I slammed my fist into the window; the sound of cracking glass was like a gunshot. It spiderwebbed across the pane.

Blood slicked my knuckles, hot and real.

She was fifteen—too young for this, or so I thought—and there she was, every memory of secret letters and stolen nights collapsing into one filthy, intimate heap.

We’d never spoken of sex, our love pure, built on dreams of a future together, whispered promises of marriage and children under that oak tree.

We had promised each other a thousand small things beneath that oak tree; we had sworn we were each other’s only.

I’d sacrificed everything to see her, defying my aunt’s cruelty, sneaking out despite the risk of her wrath. And this was my reward? Her, in another’s arms, willingly curled against him, no sign of coercion in the way she nestled into him.

The betrayal was a knife, twisting deeper with every breath.

I had believed in her like a prayer.

Now the prayer was profane.