Page 167 of Maddening Fixation

Just like that, he turned and walked away.

No backward glance.

No sign that my tears, my trembling hands, or the devastation written across my face meant anything to him.

I stood frozen as his broad shoulders disappeared into the darkness.

The car door opened and he climbed inside.

The engine roared to life. And seconds later, the supercar disappeared into the night, its taillights shrinking until even they were swallowed by the darkness.

I remained where I was.

Alone.

My fingers curled into fists at my sides, but they had no strength left in them.

The tears I’d fought so desperately to hold back finally spilled over.

One.

Then another.

Until I could no longer see clearly.

A broken sound escaped my throat, and I pressed a trembling hand against my mouth to silence it.

It didn’t work.

My chest hurt.

Not the sharp pain of a wound.

Something deeper. Something that seemed to tear through every place inside me that had once believed I mattered to him.

I had saved his life three times.

Three times, I had chosen him over my own safety.

And I had been there for him during the darkest years of his life—the years he spent behind prison walls.

Not Yarina. Never Yarina.

I was the one who had stood beside him when his world collapsed, from the day he was accused of throwing his sister from the top floor of the Flynn mansion to the years he spent behind prison walls.

I was the one who remained when there was nothing to gain from staying, the one who answered every letter he sent from prison—the letters addressed to Yarina, letters she never even bothered to open, let alone answer.

And yet, somehow, in Romeo’s eyes, I was still the one who had never been there for him.

He didn’t see the woman who had saved him.

He didn’t see the woman who had stood by him when no one else did.

All he saw was the woman he hated.

And now, standing alone in the darkness he had left me in, I finally understood that the pain and suffering I would endure at the hands of this man had only just begun.

Chapter 8