Page 211 of Reckless Obsession

His eyes go wide. The color instantly drains from his face.

“Maksim,” Lucas gasps, his voice trembling with real, unadulterated panic. “Look at the group chat.”

He shoves the glowing screen in my face.

OMG THERE’S SOMEONE IN A FUCKING SCREAM MASK FOLLOWING ME!!

I’M NOT JOKING, GUYS. COME SAVE ME RIGHT NOW. HE’S HUGE AND FAST

Lucas looks toward the door, panic already rising in his face.

“Oh god! We have to go him.”

I casually catch Lucas’s wrist and press it down, a wide, slow, unapologetic smirk spreading across my face.

“Lucas. Relax.”

“Relax? Tyler is being stalked by a psycho in the woods!”

“Lucas,” I say, holding his frantic gaze with pure amusement. “It’s Viktor.”

Lucas freezes.

He blinks once. Twice. The sheer absurdity of the sentence processes through his brain, piece by piece.

“Oh,” Lucas breathes out, the panic evaporating instantly. Then a slow, devilish, deeply impressed grin curls the corners of Lucas’s lips as he tilts his head at me. “You told him, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did.” I beam proudly, twirling my ping-pong paddle like a trophy.

Lucas laughs, shaking his head as he picks up his paddle again.

“You are going to hell.”

“Probably,” I say. “But I will have a Bugatti.”

❧

It is two in the morning when I stop outside the apartment door.

I don’t remember deciding to come here.

One minute, I am at the party with bass pounding through the mansion and too many people laughing under colored lights. Lucas is being collected by Alex. Tyler is somewhere getting railed to stupor by a man wearing a ghost mask. Everyone is orbiting someone. Looking at someone. Leaving with someone.

And then here is me.

Nightwing in an expensive hallway, holding my helmet under one arm and pretending I don’t feel the sudden, brutal weight of being alone.

Not loneliness; loneliness is manageable.

This is want.

And not just want—a raw, hollow, agonizing yearning that vibrates straight down to my bones.

Yearning.

The kind that settles beneath my ribs and makes my whole body ache for a person I have spent months trying to erase. The kind that makes every room full of happy people feel like evidence of something I do not get to have.

Tristan.