Page 125 of Maddening Fixation

Every envelope bearing Romeo Flynn’s unmistakable handwriting had arrived at the estate only to be tossed onto Yarina’s dresser without so much as a glance, as though it were another useless bill demanding attention.

When the house fell asleep, I’d slip into her room.

My hands always trembled.

I’d steal another envelope, ease the seal open beneath the moonlight, and lose myself in the life he’d been forced to survive.

Nights spent sleeping in his coat because the blankets were too thin to keep the cold from settling into his bones.

Men sharpening stolen scraps of metal beneath their bunks, waiting for someone careless enough to turn his back.

A guard who locked him naked in an isolation cell for days with nothing but a bucket of freezing water, laughing each time he begged for another blanket.

The morning he wrapped a bedsheet around his neck...

...and stopped only because he refused to let Yarina spend the rest of her life believing he’d abandoned her.

“If I make it out,” he’d written once, “I’ll find you exactly where I left you.”

I cried over those words.

Not once.

Not twice.

Almost every night.

Because every page bled loneliness.

Because I could hear his voice in every sentence.

Because the woman he loved would never read a single word.

I couldn’t bear it.

So...

I answered.

As Yarina.

Every lie tasted like poison.

‘Stay alive for us.’

‘We’re counting the days until you come home.’

‘Don’t let those walls take you from me.’

I became the woman he believed he still had.

I filled page after page with stories from home—the changing seasons, harmless Bratva gossip, sunsets over the estate, anything that reminded him there was still a world waiting beyond those prison walls.

Anything to give him a reason to survive.

For two years, we wrote to each other.

Then...