Page 66 of Twisted Addiction
My pulse jumped, but I couldn’t speak.
The question hung there, poisonous, a promise of something I wasn’t ready to hear.
He leaned in, his voice soft and trembling with barely-contained fury. “No, you don’t. Because your family made sure you never would. But I’ll tell you, Penelope. You’re going to hear everything they did—and everything you let happen.”
The silence that followed was unbearable.
The hum of the refrigerator, the ticking of the wall clock—it all felt too loud, too real. The sterile light seemed to expose every wound, every lie, every secret I didn’t even know I’d buried.
Chapter 17
DMITRI VOLKOV, 19 Years Old
The night was a shroud of misery, wrapping around me like wet cloth as I stumbled through the rain-soaked streets of Brooklyn.
My body ached with every movement, each step a dull echo of the torment I’d endured at my foster aunt’s hands—her punishments laced with sedatives that blurred the edges of my mind, that left me floating between pain and paralysis.
She’d locked me in her basement earlier that night, her touch a desecration I could never cleanse, her drugs a leash meant to keep me docile.
But she underestimated the one thing she could never drug out of me—my will to reach Penelope.
I’d broken free while she slept, slipping through a cracked window, barefoot and half-dazed, rain biting into my skin like penance.
The city stretched before me, endless and uncaring, but somewhere beyond the darkness, she waited—my only light, my reason for breathing.
Every Friday at 9:00 p.m., we met beneath the gnarled oak tree in the forgotten corner of her father’s estate, the one patch of earth untouched by his guards.
The tree’s twisted branches were our roof, its roots our altar. It was where her laughter softened the noise in my head, where her hands steadied the trembling that no one else could see.
Tonight, though, the rain came down in sheets, the wind howling like some vengeful spirit.
My thin jacket clung to me, heavy and useless, the cold biting straight through to bone.
The drugs still clawed at my system—making my vision tilt, my legs betray me—but I kept moving. I had to. I needed to see her. To remind myself that something in this world still felt like mercy.
When I finally reached the oak, its bark slick beneath my palms, I pressed my forehead against it, panting, half-delirious.
Rain trickled through the canopy, soaking my hair, my face, my clothes, until I couldn’t tell where the storm ended and I began.
Ten minutes passed.
Then twenty.
Then thirty.
Penelope was never late. She’d always come running—hair unbound, eyes bright, her laughter breaking through my darkness like light through a cracked door.
But tonight... nothing.
An hour dragged by, each second a knife.
The cold gnawed at my bruises until I could feel the shape of every blow my aunt had left on me. My fingers went numb. My body shook. Still—no sign of her.
That was when the thought slipped in, sharp and poisonous.
Maybe she wasn’t coming.
Maybe she’d finally realized what I was—broken, tainted, unworthy of her world.
