Page 84 of Twisted Addiction

Feral. Desperate. The taste of blood and salt and rage mingled between us.

His grip trembled; his breath was uneven, shuddering like a man standing on the edge of a cliff. For a moment, I felt it—the crack in his armor, the pain bleeding through the hate.

“I ha...” His voice broke, a single word strangled before it could live.

And then he shoved me away.

Chapter 20

PENELOPE

The sudden absence of his touch was almost worse than the violence.

He turned, shoulders heaving, fury radiating off him in waves. In a single sweeping motion, he sent everything on the counter crashing to the floor.

Glass exploded, scattering across the tile like shards of frozen light.

He punched the wall—once. Twice. Three times. The plaster splintered under his fist, the sound echoing through the house like gunfire. Blood smeared the white paint.

He turned back to me, his face raw, unmasked, eyes fever-bright with a kind of love that wasn’t love at all—it was hunger, obsession, grief twisted beyond repair.

“Do you know what terrifies me most?” he said, his voice shaking despite the steel in it, “It’s the thought of you dying and leaving me behind.”

He took a step closer, chest rising and falling in uneven bursts.

His lips curled into something that might have been a smile if it weren’t so broken. “I can’t breathe in a world where you don’t exist. So I’ll keep you alive in the only way I know—by tearing you apart piece by piece, until every part of you remembers me.”

Something inside me broke—not from fear, but sorrow.

Because I saw it then. Beneath the monster he’d become was still the boy who used to whisper my name under summer rain.

The boy who’d been beaten, betrayed, and rebuilt into this creature of vengeance.

He didn’t hate me; he hated himself. And every wound he inflicted on me was another attempt to silence the screaming inside him.

My heart cracked.

And then his next words turned that sorrow into cold horror.

“And that child will never be born,” he murmured, deliberate and slow. “So you may live, Penelope... to grow old at my side, drowning in our shared ruin, our endless suffering.

My breath caught, the meaning sinking in, terror spiking through my veins. But I forced myself to meet his gaze.

To lie.

“I already ended it,” I said, clinging to Giovanni’s lie like a shield.

My voice came out steady, even as fear clawed its way up my throat. “Giovanni gave me misoprostol. I took it on the drive here. He knew I was terrified of injections.”

Dmitri’s eyes narrowed, a flicker of suspicion sharpening his blue gaze.

He studied me as if he could read the truth beneath my words, as if my body would betray me sooner or later.

Then, almost imperceptibly, relief crossed his face—brief, fleeting, but there.

His shoulders eased slightly, the tight line of his jaw softening ever so little, though the storm in his eyes didn’t fade entirely.

“Good,” he said finally, the word clipped, decisive.