Owned By The Psychotic Billionaire (Mafia BL)

ADRIEN’S POV

”It was seven years ago. You were a kid playing in a world that was far too violent for you. You were terrified, so you did what you thought you had to do to survive me.”

”No, Orion, listen to me,” I insist, my voice rising a fraction as panic flares in my chest. ”I need you to listen. I didn’t give him anything. I remember running back to your room. I had the glass in my hand. I was coming to find you.”

Orion lets out a soft, low breath, his chest rising and falling easily. He lifts his hand from mine only to reach over and gently slide his fingers through the hair at the back of my neck, his thumb lightly stroking behind my ear.

The touch is so tender it makes my stomach turn into knots.

”Adrien,” he says softly, his voice dripping with absolute certainty. ”I saw Timothy standing there with the open vial. I saw the poison already poured into the glass of water on my table. He didn’t see me because he didn’t know I was even in the room, and when I confronted him before his unfortunate demise, he told me where it came from. He told me you handed it to him and told him to finish it.”

My blood turns to ice. The fuck did he just say?

”He... he lied,” I stammer, my mind reeling, smashing against a wall I didn’t even know existed in my mind. ”He must have lied! Why would I—”

”It doesn’t matter anymore, duckling,” Orion cuts in gently, tapping his thumb against my jawline before returning his hand to the steering wheel. ”I forgave you for it a long time ago. I understood why you did it. You wanted to be free of me.”

”You were scared of the leash I was pulling around your neck, so you handed the blade to someone else. I hated you for it for a few years, I won’t lie to you. But sitting here today, holding your hand, having you back where you belong... none of that old blood matters. The past is dead.”

He says it with such quiet, unshakeable conviction that I feel like I am suffocating.

He truly believes it. He isn’t lying to manipulate me. In Orion’s mind, the narrative is completely written, locked in stone, and filed away. Timothy was the pawn, I was the traitor, and Orion was the victim who finally reclaimed his runaway spouse seven years later.

So what the hell actually happened to me that night?

I pull my hands into my lap, pressing my back deeper into the leather seat. My eyes fix blindly on the passing trees as my brain furiously tries to reconstruct a night that is suddenly disintegrating into dust.

If I cannot remember something as monumental as this... if I am completely wrong about holding that vial... what else do I not remember? What else is missing from my life?

My mind frantically digs through the fog, reaching past the memory of the blood on Orion’s floor, past the ringing in my skull, reaching for the moment I fled the resort.

My resort was situated not too far from the sea. I remember that part clearly. The salt air had been heavy that night.

I remember sprinting out of the side gates, my lungs burning, my chest heaving with sheer terror. I reached the main road and flagged down a yellow taxi cab.

I remember sitting in the back of that dirty, smelly cab, my hands shaking so violently I couldn’t even pull out my wallet. I had no money. Not a single cent.

When the cab pulled up near the commercial docks, I scrambled out of the rear door, stammering out a quiet, terrified apology to the driver because I couldn’t pay the fare.

The driver had slammed his hands on his steering wheel, leaning out the window and screaming after me, calling me a good-for-nothing student, a worthless thief, but I was already running into the shadows of the harbor.

I had sprinted down the wooden docks until I found a massive steel cargo ship with its lower hatch left open. I snuck inside the dark, tight cargo section, crawling behind heavy wooden crates, hiding beneath a filthy, oil-stained tarp.

Luckily for me, it was only a single day’s journey to the lower district piers. If it had been any longer than that, I would have died in that dark steel box without water or food.

Because halfway through the trip, the heavy ship tilted sharply against a rough ocean wave.

The memory hits me like a physical punch to the gut.

I remember losing my footing in the pitch blackness of the room. I remember slipping on the damp metal floor, falling backward, and smacking the side of my head against the sharp iron edge of the ship’s hull.

I remember the sickening sound of my skull hitting metal. I remember the immediate, blinding burst of white light behind my eyes, followed instantly by darkness.

Everything had gone black after that.

When I finally opened my eyes, I wasn’t on the boat anymore. I was lying in a narrow, squeaky bed inside a small, sterile medical clinic in the heart of the lower districts.

A kind, weathered shipwright— a middle-aged man with oil-stained hands and a graying beard— was sitting in a plastic chair by my side. He told me he found me unconscious under the tarp when his crew started unloading the cargo at the piers.

I had been covered in dried blood from a deep gash near the crown of my scalp. He had laughed softly, telling me it wasn’t his first time finding a runaway stowaway hiding in their cargo section, and he had paid out of his own pocket to have a local street doctor stitch my head back together.

I completely forgot about that head injury.

I had buried it so deep under seven years of daily survival, seven years of selling my body, seven years of starving and running and hiding, that the memory of that blow to the head had simply vanished.

A cold sweat breaks out across the back of my neck.

Is that why my memories of that night are so fractured? Did that violent hit on the iron hull ruin my own mind? Did it shatter my brain, scrambling the sequence of events before I even hit the lower district streets?

What else is wrong with my head? Was Leon even standing in that hallway seven years ago urging me to run away, or did I construct that comforting memory out of thin air to survive the horror of Timothy’s death?