Twisted Addiction: Chapter 27

My spoon clattered against the plate, the sharp sound slicing through the cozy quiet. “And… talking about Dmitri and me being lovers as teenagers,” I said, voice trembling with a mix of curiosity and dread, “you and Dad knew about it, didn’t you? All those nights we sneaked out to see each other when I was fifteen… you never said a word. You just pretended not to know.”

Isabella’s lips curved into a faint, practiced smile.

Her dark eyes softened, but a guardedness lingered beneath, unshakable. “You were fifteen, Penelope. Too young, too innocent to understand the danger. But yes… we monitored you both, as any good parents would. We knew where you went, who you were with, every night you slipped past the guards to meet him under that oak tree.”

“Monitored?” I said sharply, the memory of Dmitri’s words cutting through me, the blanks in my past suddenly feeling deliberate.

I leaned forward, hands gripping the edge of the table. “Is it true I have… a condition? Something like dissociative amnesia?”

Isabella didn’t flinch.

Her composure was unnerving, calm as if delivering fact, not revelation. “Not exactly a condition,” she said, measured and steady. “We had the ability—through doctors and psychologists—to suppress certain traumatic memories. It was… controlled, Penelope, to protect you from what you couldn’t bear at the time.”

I folded my arms, anger sparking like dry lightning. “Protect me? By erasing pieces of my life without my consent? How… how is that even possible?”

Her tone softened slightly, almost condescending, as if explaining a simple truth. “Anything is possible, sweetheart. Our family—your family—has no male heir. You’re our only child. You were never meant to live an ordinary life. We’ve been preparing you to inherit the Romano empire since the day you were born.”

“Preparing me?” I scoffed, my heart pounding in my ears. “Don’t dress it up, Mother. You mean groomed. I was raised like any normal girl. I went to school, had friends, lived like a civilian—not trained and molded like the heirs of a mafia empire.”

Her eyes hardened, the warmth fading into steel resolve. “No, Penelope,” she said evenly. “That’s just the part you remember.”

Her words struck like a slap.

For a heartbeat, the air left my lungs.

Then—a flash. The weight of a gun. My finger tightening on the trigger with terrifying ease. The recoil. Dmitri’s blood splattering across my hands in the cathedral. The eerie calm that followed.

I’d shot him—clean, precise—like someone who’d done it before.

My breath turned shallow, uneven. “Am I…” I swallowed hard, the question clawing its way out. “Am I some kind of experiment to you? Someone whose memories you can erase whenever it suits you? Because I’m losing my mind knowing there are parts of my life I can’t even remember—the dangerous parts.”

Isabella’s eyes flickered—not with guilt, but with pride. “You’re legacy, cara mia. You are the heir we built. That’s all you need to know.”

My mind spiraled.

My chest tightened, and the room seemed to tilt. Dmitri had been right all along. Every accusation, every story I couldn’t recall… it wasn’t fiction. It was real. My parents had been shaping me, breaking me, using me like a weapon.

She paused, letting the silence stretch like a blade across my heart. “You’ve heard about your uncles, haven’t you? Dmitri… he killed them.”

I swallowed hard, trying to shove away the crushing weight of this revelation.

My hands trembled in my lap. Even in my parents’ arms, I’d been nothing but a pawn. “Yeah,” I whispered, my voice tight and brittle. “Why?”

Her face darkened, the warmth leaving her voice. “They… took advantage of you when you were young. Dmitri found out—and he hunted them down.”

The words hit me like a physical blow.

My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. “Took advantage of me?” My voice cracked, the fear and revulsion spilling out. “You’re saying… they… raped me?”

She didn’t flinch, didn’t look away. The weight of her gaze was worse than any words. Regret, yes—but also pride, cold and suffocating.

I shook my head, panic clawing at me. “I… I was a virgin when I met Dmitri again. I know I was.”

Her lips pressed into a thin line.

Then she said it, soft but lethal, slicing through every fragment of my certainty: “You were never a virgin.”

My stomach knotted.

My hands clenched into fists, trembling, as nausea and disbelief churned through me.

My entire life—every memory I thought I owned—was a lie.

I wanted to scream. To collapse. To throw something. But I could do none of it.

All I could do was stare at her, my mind screaming with the horror of betrayal, my heart breaking in silent shards.

Tears burned my eyes before I found the words.

Pain lanced through my chest like wildfire — not only the ache of betrayal now, but the deeper stab of having pieces of my life taken from me.

“Did you know?” I demanded, voice cracking. “Did you know they… my uncles were raping me?”

Isabella’s knife-thin smile fell away.

For a heartbeat she was only the mother I’d loved; then the mask slipped and the Mafia queen surfaced, cool and dangerous.

“How could we?” she said, sharp and defensive. “Do you think we would have let that happen? If we’d known, we’d have had them killed ourselves. Power be damned.”

Her eyes flashed, not with apology but with the bright white heat of someone describing logistics. “They were your father’s brothers — dangerous men, but not untouchable.”

The admission landed like a blow.

I stifled a sob and ground my teeth until my jaw hurt.

“Dmitri found out,” Isabella went on, and her voice softened just enough to be venomous. “He hunted them for four months. Followed leads, burned connections, risked everything to make them pay. He wasn’t protecting you for pity, Penelope. He was making their blood answer for what they took.”

I pictured Dmitri’s face — the flat, unreadable mask that melted into a storm behind his eyes.

He tore the world apart for me—and then locked me in darkness. He hunted down the man who stole my innocence, yet still planned to send me away so he could marry someone else.

The contradictions shredded something in me. “All he feels is hate,” I said, trying to believe it myself. “He killed to feed his ego, not to save me.”

Isabella’s head tilted with a patience that made my skin crawl. “Whatever you want to name it — obsession, vengeance — it changed him. He paid a price to bring you back to New York. He told us he’d let you come home for a spell. That’s how we knew your flight details.”

“‘A spell’?” I laughed, a short, bitter sound. “I’m never going back. If he tries to force me, he’ll have to kill me first.”

She watched me with that dangerous stillness, then dropped the bomb as if it were the least of her concerns. “You’re carrying his child, Penelope. That binds you to him in a way divorce papers never could.”

I flinched back, as if she’d struck me. “Don’t say that,” I hissed. “He’s sending divorce papers. He’s marrying someone else.”

Isabella’s surprise was genuine for a beat.

Then her composure reclosed like a vault. “Impossible,” she whispered, disbelief and calculation warring in her face. “Dmitri… he’s obsessive to a fault. But politics… politics can bend even the strongest hearts. If he believes this marriage no longer serves his empire, that Lake Como doesn’t hinge on it… then I suppose he could set aside his obsessions. Pathetic. Truly pathetic, to see a man of his power surrender so easily to pragmatism.”

The words landed like ice in my veins.

“Pragmatism?” I spat, each word trembling with rage. “You mean he’s willing to erase everything—me, our child, everything we lived through—because it doesn’t suit him politically? Because some power game says so?”

Isabella didn’t flinch. “Let’s not romanticize what never existed,” she said coolly. “There was no love in that marriage, only control. And he doesn’t even know about the child—his child—you’re carrying. Perhaps that ignorance shaped his choice.”

My blood turned to ice.

A tremor ran through my hands as I clenched them against the table until my knuckles blanched white.

“Mom, enough,” I said, voice cracking under the weight of everything unsaid. “Enough about Dmitri. Start telling me what I don’t remember—all of it. Or tell me how to bring it back.”

I swallowed hard, my throat burning. “You took pieces of me I can’t get back. And I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive you for that.”

She dabbed at her lips with a napkin, the motion almost ritualistic. “I can’t help you there,” she said softly. “Neither can your father.”

Rage flooded my veins, scorching and metallic. “Why?” I snapped, voice trembling with fury. “Why won’t you help me?”

“Because you’re better off not remembering,” she said simply, each word dropping like a stone.

The meaning hit me like a punch. “If you relive certain things, Penelope… you won’t be whole enough to run this family. You won’t be the Romano heir we’ve shaped you to be.”

I stared at her, disbelief curdling into fury. “And you decided this for me? That I don’t get my own past?”

Her calm was surgical. “We didn’t decide. We acted. Anything too traumatic, we erase. The narrative is ours to control—for your survival… and ours.”

Heat coursed through me, a wild, animal anger I couldn’t tame. “Who are you, Mom?” I whispered, voice barely contained. “Because the woman in front of me… I don’t even know her.”

Her eyes flickered, just for a heartbeat.

She leaned forward, the duality of mother and queen stark in the tilt of her chin. “You’re twenty-five, Penelope,” she said, voice precise. “There is no benefit to hiding the truth any longer. And to answer the question you’re too afraid to ask — yes. We had Dmitri’s parents killed.”

The floor seemed to vanish beneath me. “What…?” I breathed.

Her hands rested folded in her lap. “His biological parents came from Russia,” she began, voice precise, “desperate, hunted for years after he was taken from them by an anonymous gang. They caught a lead—he was being raised by the Volkovs, one of the four most dangerous mafia families in Lake Como, the heart of the mafia world. They knew they could never go against them alone.”

She leaned back slightly, eyes unyielding. “So they came to us—the largest mafia clan in New York at the time—begging to have him back. Promising anything, offering everything. Your father and I promised to help… at first. Until we saw the opportunity: a seat at the Volkov table. Ambition, Penelope, is never pretty.”

Her voice hardened, sharper than steel. “And when the Volkovs refused a peaceful resolution, when they ordered us to eliminate his parents because they would not stop searching, we did what any clan in power would do. We carried out the task. We killed them. His father first—as a warning. When the mother refused to relent, we eliminated her as well.”

I could feel the room narrow to a pinprick. My voice was barely more than a rasp. “You… killed them. For power.”

She nodded, expression glazed in the calcified certainty of someone who’d justified murder in boardroom terms. “We made a ruthless calculation. We did what empires do.”

I tasted bile.

My hands trembled. “My God… I can’t believe… I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”

“We are not sentimental, Penelope,” Isabella said. “We are stewards. We choose the family’s survival over personal feelings. You are the heir. You are why we did what we did.”

My hands twisted in my lap until the nails bit into the meat. “No,” I said, the single word a knife. “You did it because you’re heartless. Selfish. You killed a man and a woman—parents—who were begging for their stolen son. You could’ve refused to help. You could’ve walked away. Instead you murdered them for a seat at a table.”

Isabella’s face hardened, but I kept going, words spilling like acid. “You speak of murder like a contract clause. No wonder Dmitri looks at me as if I’m poison. He told me he wanted to love me — that he loved me — but you and Father poisoned that possibility. You made him into what he is. You turned him into a monster. You ruined him.”

His hatred, his vengeance, the storm behind his dark eyes—all of it made sense now.

Every calculated move, every icy touch, every moment of cruelty, and every glimpse of protective rage—pieces snapping together into a jagged puzzle I wasn’t sure I wanted completed.

The conversation should have ended then — with me storming from the table — but Isabella’s voice dropped again, threaded with something like regret and iron.

“That is politics, Penelope. That is what keeps our children alive. Understand that we did what we must to keep our line.”

I stared at her, seeing not my mother, but a stranger—a predator cloaked in the skin of the woman I once loved.

All at once the house around me felt foreign, the chandeliers and the food suddenly stage props in a play I hadn’t auditioned for.

The lasagna on the table grew cold, its aroma fading into the background, drowned out by the weight of her confession. Dmitri’s parents—murdered. By my family. At the Volkovs’ bidding.

I pushed my chair back so hard the legs scraped the floor.

She rose, voice cool and absolute. “You will not act in haste, Penelope. We walk this road carefully. You will learn everything… in time.”

The words fell somewhere between a warning and a threat — and it broke something in me to hear that voice come from the mother who used to braid my hair and hum lullabies.

“I… I need to be alone,” I whispered, the tremor in my voice betraying the storm inside me.

Without waiting for her reply, I turned and walked away — because if I stayed another second, I wasn’t sure whether I’d scream or shatter.

The hallway felt narrow, suffocating, every step a reminder of how fragile I’d become.

I stumbled into my bedroom and collapsed onto the edge of the bed, the air thick with disbelief.

Everything I’d just heard pressed against my chest until I could barely breathe.

I couldn’t stay here. Not another minute. Not in this house. Not with them.

My mother—my own mother—had rewritten me like a story she didn’t like the ending of.

She’d erased my memories, murdered Dmitri’s parents, and turned me into something I didn’t even recognize.

Every thread of my life had been pulled and rewoven until nothing felt like mine anymore.

My hand trembled as it drifted to my stomach.

The truth hit me in one clean, brutal wave: I was bound to Dmitri in ways no signature, no country, no distance could sever. The child in my womb. The love I could never kill. The memories stolen from me but still haunting my bones.

I closed my eyes, letting tears soak into the pillow.