Page 64 of Reckless Obsession

Now, I’m not supposed to kill him. That’s what Caleb told me earlier while I was wrapping my hands in the changing room, going on about control and rules and consequences as if any of that actually matters in a place like this. Which, honestly, is bullshit, because this section of the fight is literally called fight or be killed, so I don’t really understand where the confusion is coming from. Either way, I nodded like I cared, because it’s easier than arguing, but we both know how this usually ends.

I’ve been coming to this place since I was fifteen, back when I wasn’t allowed anywhere near the cage and had to stay back and watch like a spectator while my brother Alex and my cousin Viktor fought like animals whenever they felt like letting whatever was wrong with them breathe for a bit. Some people call it “letting their demons out,” but it never looked that poetic to me. It just looked like violence, raw, ugly and addictive.

They stopped coming here for a while. They probably grew out of it, got busy, or used whatever excuse people make when they pretend they’ve outgrown something that’s still very much a part of them. But sometime last year, Alex came back and beat up one of the strongest fighters here so badly that the man didn’t make it out, all because his boyfriend Lucas flinched away from him in fear. And Alex—well, Alex doesn’t take things like that well.

I wasn’t allowed to fight here until I turned eighteen, but watching men beat each other bloody shaped me anyway. It made me into something. Maybe not something good, but definitely something useful.

I wasn’t trained in the Bratva the way my brothers were, or my cousins, or any other male born into the Petrov family.

Every boy in the family is supposed to start training at ten. It’s Tradition, discipline and violence dressed up as legacy. When I turned ten, they sent me to Russia for mine, but then something happened to me.

Something bad enough that nobody talks about it. I still don’t remember any of it, which seems to bother everyone else a lot more than it bothers me. Personally, I don’t give a fuck. Whatever happened clearly left its mark, and that’s enough for me.

My mother cared, though.

Whatever it was, it was enough to pull me completely out of training, and my mother became protective towards me. Too protective. As if I were something fragile that needed to be kept away from anything that could break me, which is almost funny now, considering how that turned out.

Because I was treated like glass, I grew up not knowing how to defend myself, but I knew how to code and hack like crazy even at that young age.

But I still got bullied at school.

You’d think having a family like mine would mean something, especially in a place filled with kids whose parents were just as powerful. Politicians, businessmen, men with blood on their hands dressed up as respectable. But it didn’t. If anything, it made it worse. Weakness stands out more when you’re surrounded by people who were raised not to have any.

I could have told my parents. I could have run, crying, to my brothers, saying my classmates were hurting me. But what was the point? So that my mother could look at me with that soft, pitying horror I hated more than the bruises?

No, thanks.

I figured I’d fight back.

So I did.

And every time, I got beaten worse for it.

Then I turned thirteen and met Logan. He was a senior, stronger and worse than everyone else, the kind of person people avoid unless they have a death wish or a very specific kind of problem. I didn’t avoid him. I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. There was something about him I couldn’t quite understand at the time, something that pulled me in rather than pushing me away. I didn’t know why my body reacted the way it did whenever he hit me, why the pain made everything feel wrong yet right in a way I couldn’t explain, but Logan understood it long before I did. He noticed. Of course he did. And after that, things changed.

After that, I became his.

Or maybe not even that. I still can’t find the right word. His favorite victim, perhaps. Or his plaything? Secret? Or just a handy little fixation. Choose whichever seems most degrading, and it’ll likely be accurate.

I let him do whatever he wanted to me in his dorm room, and in exchange, nobody else touched or bullied me.

Logan fucked me up. Not in some tragic, poetic way people romanticize, but in the way that sticks under your skin and rewires things permanently. He was a sadist. A sexual sadist who took pleasure in pain. He knew exactly how to use it, exactly how to shape it, exactly how to make someone mistake suffering for intimacy.

And somehow, being the one person who could handle his twisted urges taught me something about myself far too early.

That I liked it.

Not all of it.

But enough.

Enough to let him turn something ugly inside me into a leash, making me realize how much of a batshit masochist I was even at that age.

I was fourteen when I killed him. Six months of being whatever he decided I was ended over something stupid. It always does.

What happened, you might ask? Well, I had smiled at one of his friends, and that was enough to set him off. He punched the hell out of me, then grabbed my face, his fingers digging in as if he had the right to touch me that way, and said, “You belong to me, Maksim, in case you forgot.”

Yeah. No.