Page 140 of Maddening Fixation

His lip curled back, exposing the savage disgust twisting his features. “Only to discover the truth—the filthy, stinking truth—that it was your father who shoved her off.”

His eyes, black with murderous fury, locked onto mine.

He looked as though he wanted to wrap his hands around my throat and squeeze until the blood stopped flowing through my veins.

“Your father murdered my sister.” The words dripped with venom, each syllable laced with ten years of festering hatred.

He spat the word father like it was filth in his mouth, and I felt it land on my skin like acid.

I stared at him, lungs seized, heart hammering against my ribs.

His gaze was pure violence—predatory, unhinged, as if he were already imagining the ways he could make me suffer for the sins running through my veins.

I could see it in the way his jaw clenched, the way his fingers flexed like they itched to crush something. Me.

“That spineless bastard didn’t vanish because his dogs failed to put a bullet in me three days ago.”

A harsh, contemptuous laugh scraped out of him.

“That spineless fuck ran like the coward he is the moment he knew I’d dug up every filthy secret he buried. He didn’t just kill my sister—he framed me for it. Ten goddamn years in Ravenhill because that worthless sack of shit made me carry his crime while he hid like the rat he is.”

His stare bored into me with such raw, unrelenting hatred that I shrank back instinctively, a cold spike of terror lodging in my chest.

I wanted to scream that my father would never do something so monstrous, that he couldn’t have thrown a seventeen-year-old girl to her death—but the words died in my throat.

The man before me—my so-called husband—had already slaughtered his own bloodline, wiping out generations of his family in a single merciless night.

Death was meaningless to him.

If he could murder his own father and relatives without hesitation, I was nothing. Less than nothing. One wrong breath from me and I would be next.

Panic surged through me, my heart hammering so violently I thought it would explode.

“And you...” His voice rose, thick with loathing, as he stepped closer, towering over me like a storm about to break. “You carry that monster’s filthy blood in your veins. While he’s still out there breathing, I’m going to break you. I’ll ruin you so completely that nothing of you remains. I’ll make you wish you’d never been born with his cursed name.”

My chest rose and fell violently as I fought for shallow, panicked breaths.

The room felt smaller, the air thicker with his hatred.

I could practically taste his disgust—cold, merciless, and aimed straight at my soul.

“Your only salvation,” he growled, the promise in his eyes darker than death itself, “is if that bastard crawls out of whatever hole he’s hiding in so I can rip his throat out with my bare hands. Until then... you’re mine to destroy, piece by fucking piece.”

Romeo had to be mistaken.

His investigation had to be wrong.

But even if my father was guilty...

Why should I be the one to pay for his crimes?

Yarina was as much his child as I was.

Romeo turned his back on me and returned to his armchair without a hint of urgency, as if I were beneath his notice.

He sat, crossed one leg over the other, and leaned back with deliberate calm, every movement radiating the quiet, ruthless authority of a man who ruled through fear.

As though he had read the terror twisting inside me, he said coldly, “Yarina was adopted. She doesn’t carry your father’s tainted blood.”