Owned By The Psychotic Billionaire (Mafia BL)

ADRIEN’S POV

SEVEN YEARS AGO...

Before we left our cabin this morning, I made a firm, desperate decision regarding the clear glass vial.

I resolved to leave it hidden at the very bottom of my heavy luggage, buried deep underneath three layers of thick folded sweaters. I could not bear to carry it around in my trouser pockets for another second.

Every single time my fingers brushed against that smooth glass, my stomach churned, and a wave of intense self-consciousness washed over me.

Carrying that poison around felt like holding a bad omen in my palm, a ticking bomb waiting to tear my fragile life apart. Leaving it locked in the cabin felt like the only way I could draw a clean breath of air.

Once riding practice ends, all the second-year students gather inside the grand resort building for lunch.

As I take my seat at one of the long wooden tables, a brief thought crosses my mind. I wonder why Leon is even at this resort in the first place, considering this entire outing is strictly reserved for second-year students, and he is only a first-year.

But I quickly brush the thought aside with a faint, tired shrug. He is a Vassilis. The rules of the academy don’t apply to people like him, and he probably just showed up to cause trouble and stalk Orion or something of the sort.

We finish our meal under the loud, carefree chatter of our classmates. As soon as lunch is over, I stand up and begin making my way toward the exit, intending to head back to my cabin for a quiet nap to escape the headaches pounding behind my eyes.

I push open the heavy glass doors of the resort lobby and step out onto the quiet stone terrace. Before I can even take three steps down the stairs, a heavy hand grabs my upper arm with iron force.

I’m pulled back hard into the building, dragged violently up a private spiral staircase before I even have the chance to open my mouth and shout for help.

The world blurs around me in a chaotic swirl of carpet and wood until I’m shoved forcefully inside a hotel room, the thick oak door slamming shut behind us with a loud, final thud that echoes like a gunshot.

I stumble forward, spinning around on my heels to face my captor.

It’s Orion.

The resort layout is brutally clear to everyone. The true Elites, the seventeen-year-old heirs of the most powerful, dangerous families in the city, are given private VIP bedroom suites on the upper floors of the main hotel building.

Meanwhile, the rest of us—the students whose families have no real influence, or people like Timothy whose families are barely scraping by—are shoved into crowded wooden cabins down in the valley.

They’re luxurious enough, but the difference is clear for everyone to see.

I’m currently standing right in the middle of Orion’s massive, luxurious hotel room, surrounded by velvet curtains, high ceilings, and polished furniture that smells of expensive leather.

”What the hell is wrong with you?” I scream, my chest heaving violently as I glare up at him, my knuckles white. ”Let me out of here!”

Orion steps forward, his dark eyes wide and wild, filled with an intense energy that makes my pulse spike with terror.

He looks towering, unpredictable, and completely consumed by whatever storm is raging inside his mind. Like always.

”What are you hiding from me, Adrien?” Orion demands, his voice dropping into a low, dangerous tone as he looms over me. ”Tell me what you are hiding.”

”I’m not hiding anything!” I lie loudly, my voice cracking as I back away until my calves hit the edge of a small mahogany center table. ”You are completely insane! Just let me go back to my room! Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

”Because you look at me like you want to rip my throat out, and then you run away!” Orion yells back, taking another aggressive step into my space. ”You look at me like you hate my very existence, Adrien, but when I touched you in that closet, you didn’t pull away! So tell me what is going on in that head of yours before I tear this whole place apart!”

”Nothing is going on!” I scream, tears of frustration and terror stinging the corners of my eyes. ”We are seventeen! I don’t want to play these sick mind games with you, Orion! I don’t want to be your toy, I don’t want to be your rival, and I don’t want you touching me! Just let me leave!”

”You’re lying!” he snaps, his face twisting with a tragic, desperate anger that makes him look less like a monster and more like a terrified boy who doesn’t know how to ask for what he wants.

”You’ve been lying to me since the day you looked at me! You look at everyone else like they’re human, but you look at me like I’m a demon waiting to drag you under!”

”Because you are!” I sob out, the only defensive wall I have crumbling. ”You destroy everything you touch! You destroyed Timothy’s sister! You let Louise ruin people’s lives! Why would I ever look at you like you’re human?”

We argue about everything and nothing all at once, throwing venomous words back and forth through the quiet room like jagged glass.

Orion demands answers to questions I’m too terrified to answer, and I yell at him to let me go, my voice rising higher and higher as sheer panic begins to consume my entire body.

I can’t do this anymore. I can’t stand in this luxurious room and breathe the same suffocating air as him while my life falls apart around my ears.

I’m just a boy. I just want to go home, even if my home is a nightmare.

I turn around and make a desperate, clumsy dash for the door, trying to push past his shoulder.

Orion reacts instantly on raw instinct. His large hand shoots out, grabbing my wrist and jerking me backward with violent force to stop me from running.

My foot catches on the heavy rug. For one horrifying, sickening second, my traumatized brain convinces me that he is about to hit me—just like my father does when I try to run.

I react on pure, instinctual fear. I flinch hard, pulling my shoulders up, tucking my head down, and raising my arms frantically to protect my face from the blow.

My flinch is so violent, so full of terror, that my balance snaps entirely. The back of my head smacks hard against the solid stone wall behind me with a loud, sickening thud.

Pain explodes behind my eyes, blinding white for a fraction of a second.

Everything in the room grinds to a sudden, total stop.

Orion instantly drops his hand. He jerks his arm back as if my skin had burned his palm, his face draining of all color.

He takes a fast, shaky, unsteady step backward, his eyes wide with an expression I have never once seen on his face in all the years I have known him.

I let out a small, trembling breath, my whole body shaking uncontrollably as I take a shaky step back as well, pressing my spine flat against the cold stone wall for support.

We stand there in the large, silent suite—two seventeen-year-old boys staring at each other in total, paralyzed silence.

We are trapped in an atmosphere filled with feelings far larger, far more complicated, and far more tragic than either of us can understand.

The air between us feels thick, heavy with an agonizing weight that neither of our young minds knows how to carry.

I look at his face, and my heart shudders violently in my chest.

For the first time since I met him, the perpetual, evil madness that hangs around him like a dark, suffocating shadow seems to have completely fled.

The unhinged, violent lunatic is gone. Standing in his place is someone entirely new—someone I have never met before, someone who looks at me with a pale, hollow, heartbroken shock. He looks scared.

He looks like a boy who just realized that the person he wants most in the world is terrified of his very touch. It creeps me out far more than his usual cruel, arrogant smiles ever could.

It makes my stomach ache with a strange, sad grief.

Without saying a single word, I turn around, pull open the door, and run out of the room.

I bolt down the grand carpeted hallway, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. As my shoes slam wildly against the floorboards, a quiet, traitorous thought begins to root itself deep inside my trembling chest.

Was running away really the right thing to do?

Could I not just stop? Could I not just turn around, walk back into that room, and tell him the truth? Could I not just tell him what my father and Alice forced me to do?

I could tell him about the liquid, about the suffocating pressure at home, and about the weird, terrifying, tragic feeling that has been growing between us since that day in the janitor’s locker.