Page 94 of Maddening Fixation

Two vicious gashes had permanently distorted the corner of his mouth, leaving it curled into what looked like a perpetual sneer.

Then I saw his eyes.

His right eye was an unnerving shade of vivid green.

His left...

A pale, clouded blue, the unmistakable mark of an eye that had been irreparably damaged.

The scars should have disfigured him. They should have diminished him.

Instead, they only made him more terrifying.

Like a man who had survived hell and brought a piece of it back with him.

My breath caught.

Recognition struck with breathtaking force.

Romeo Flynn.

The realization crashed into me all at once.

I should have known.

The voice. The unmistakable Irish lilt. The effortless authority in the way he spoke.

Every clue had been there from the beginning.

Only the scars had concealed him.

They had transformed the handsome young man I had once pulled from the lake into someone darker, making it impossible to reconcile him with the boy who had lived in my memories for the past ten years.

He looked at me without recognition, his expression clouded by blood loss.

Panic surged through me.

It was the same instinct that had taken hold of me ten years ago by the lake—the overwhelming need to keep him alive.

“You’re losing too much blood,” I said, fighting to keep my voice steady despite the chaos inside me. “I swear, if you don’t let me help you, you’ll lose consciousness within seconds.”

I took a cautious step closer.

“Please.”

The plea slipped out before I could stop it.

Surely, he wouldn’t question why a complete stranger cared this much... or why, against all reason, I couldn’t bear the thought of losing him a second time.

For several long seconds, he simply watched me.

His gaze searched my face with the wariness of a man who had survived by trusting no one.

As though every helping hand he’d ever reached for had ended with a knife buried in his back.

As though he was trying to decide whether I was here to save him...

...or finish what someone else had started.