Page 73 of Twisted Addiction

And then, with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking, I began to write.

PENELOPE,

You were the only good thing I ever believed in.

When I told you I loved you, it wasn’t teenage nonsense. It was the only truth I had. You were the pulse that kept me from ending it all on the nights my foster family decided I wasn’t worth feeding. You were my reason to crawl out of basements and blood. You were my proof that something gentle could survive inside me.

And you destroyed it.

I’ve tried to tell myself it was a mistake, that maybe I didn’t see what I saw — but the mind is cruel, Penelope. It replays things in perfect detail when you most want to forget. The shape of your body under his arm.

I can’t unsee it. I can’t unhear it.

You taught me love could hurt more than fists.

You taught me that light can lie.

Still, even now, I wish I could hate you the way I should.

You used me, played me for a fool, your promises as empty as the wind.

Every letter we hid under that loose brick, every whispered vow, was a lie. You were my light, my only refuge, and you extinguished it without a care.

You promised me, at twenty-five, you’d be my bride, your words a melody that soothed my battered soul. I believed you, Penelope, with every fiber of my being.

But you were a mirage, a cruel illusion cloaked in love’s guise.

While I risked everything—sneaking past my aunt’s iron grip, enduring her vile punishments to steal moments with you—you gave your heart, your body, to another.

At fifteen, you lay with him, your skin pressed to his in a betrayal that sears my memory.

I wish your name didn’t taste like prayer when I whisper it. I wish your memory didn’t feel like home. But I’ll carry you with me, even when I try to bury what’s left of that boy you once loved.

You’ll remember me one day — not as the broken foster boy who worshiped you, but as the man your betrayal created.

I leave for Russia now, to reclaim a life stolen from me, but know this: I will return. Someday, when the world has reshaped me, I will make you feel the weight of this betrayal. You will pay, Penelope, for the heart you shattered, for the love you defiled. Until then, I carry the wreckage of us, a wound that will never heal.

Dmitri.

The words didn’t come out neat. They came in bursts—jagged, uneven, like a confession carved from flesh.

Ink bled across the page, mixing with the rain that still clung to my sleeves, each line a wound I couldn’t close.

I didn’t write to be forgiven. I wrote because silence was killing me faster than any bullet could. Because she had to know what she’d done to me—how loving her had both saved and destroyed me.

By the time I stopped, the clock glowed 4:02 a.m. My hand throbbed, the paper marred with smears of blood and tears.

The hotel room felt too small, too quiet, the kind of silence that mocked grief.

My mother slept only a few feet away, her breathing steady, unaware that the son she’d just found was already slipping away again.

I folded the letter, my fingers trembling as if they knew this was a goodbye.

My chest burned, not with anger anymore, but with something colder—grief calcified into resolve.

The reunion with my mother had stirred something fragile, almost human, but Penelope’s betrayal still burned beneath it, a fire that refused to die.

I couldn’t leave without facing her.