Page 247 of Reckless Obsession

We’ve been engaged for three months now, and I still catch myself staring at the ring when he isn’t looking.

I can still picture the proposal with terrifying clarity. It had happened right here, just a few feet below this terrace. The sun had already slipped beneath the water, the beach bathed in deep, bruised shades of purple, salt spray, and the roar of the tide filling my ears.

Tristan hadn’t done anything grand or performative for an audience. It was just the two of us, barefoot on the cold sand, the isolated villa looming behind us like a fortress. He had pulled the velvet box from his shorts, gone down on one knee without hesitation, and looked up at me with that quiet, unyielding gravity he reserved only for me—asking me to bind my life to his forever.

I hadn’t even let him finish the question before I said yes.

“Why are you staring at me?” he asks.

I blink, coming back to the present.

“I’m thinking.”

“That usually worries me.”

I smack his shoulder. “Rude.”

He catches my hand before I can hit him again and presses a kiss to my knuckles.

“What were you thinking about?”

“You,” I reply. “And how you still give me butterflies.”

His mouth curves into that small, smug smile I know far too well. “After two years?”

“Don’t ruin the moment.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” he replies, feigning innocence. “I’m glad I still have that effect on you.”

“God, you’re so annoying.”

He laughs.

I love that sound. I love how often I get to hear it now.

Sometimes I wonder what the person I was two years ago would make of this: the villa, the ring, and Tristan with his hands warm at my waist. I don’t think he’d believe I could sit still long enough to want any of it.

Being with Tristan hasn’t turned me into an angel. I’m still stubborn as hell. I still pick petty fights just to see the spark in his eyes, still trail a little havoc behind me wherever I step, and the craving for chaos still bares its teeth under my skin.

But I’m not reckless anymore. Not like I used to be.

I stopped stepping into the blood-soaked cage of the Elite Circuit. I no longer gamble my life in underground rings just to feel the high of nearly breaking. I show up for therapy every week—sitting on that couch, picking apart the tangled wiring in my head, even on the days I despise every second of it.

There are still days when my mind feels like a war I never asked to fight.

After that incident at Tristan’s family dinner, it took almost a year for all my memories to return, and I finally remembered everything that had happened to me in that dungeon when I was ten.

I used to be terrified of what would happen when I remembered it all. I thought my brain would drag me under the moment the last piece finally fell into place. I thought I would break. That all the things I’d spent years keeping buried would come rushing back at once and swallow me whole.

But they didn’t.

It’s almost like my brain had finally had enough.

Like it looked at everything else I was already carrying—the years of chaos, the things I’d done, the things that had been done to me, the battles inside my own head—and decided that this particular memory wasn’t worth dragging me under for.

And somehow, I survived knowing.

I didn’t become the ten-year-old boy trapped in that dungeon again.