Lahat ng Kabanata ng Taken by the Mafia King: Kabanata 331 - Kabanata 340

PaigeI pressed my lips to Tom’s with all the fire of the dream I’d just left. Want ached between my legs. After a moment, he began kissing me back, moving in time with my mouth, but his hands sat dead at his sides, where they’d been since I’d woken up. The part of me that had burned into desire wanted to lean back and scream at him. Why wouldn’t he touch me? Didn’t he want me? In the dream—dreams, if I was being honest—Tom wasn’t afraid as soon as I made it clear I wanted him. And I very, very much did.Against my hip, through the blankets, I felt him start to harden. He wanted me. I knew he wanted me.“You can touch me,” I whispered.I expected him to move like I’d flipped a switch, but slowly, gently, he ran one hand up my side. Over my sweatshirt. I closed my eyes and dropped my mouth back to his to try to kiss him into action.In the dark, his hand belonged to someone else. The room transformed. I was somewhere small, and dark, and strange, and my body ached.I blinked and pulled

PaigeA few hours into our flight, the sun had long since set, and stars shone off puffy clouds. I took a deep breath. I’d done it. I’d gone somewhere other than Tom’s house and therapy. I’d seen McKenna. Maybe we could be friends on the outside someday, when she stopped talking about everything like that, but for now, I knew we’d be a little distant. And I’d realized I loved Tom, told him at the top of the Eiffel Tower and everything. I hadn’t even been to therapy in three days, my longest break since my first session. Things were starting to feel…finished. “What will we do when we get home?” I asked quietly.Tom stirred from paging through a book while his eyelids drooped and yawned. “Unpack?”I laughed. “I mean, we got McKenna out. We made sure she’s actually okay and not some elaborate hologram that Edward concocted. What’s the next step in our long-term plan?”“We”s and “our”s had started building up in my sentences since I’d told Tom I loved him. Since he’d promised he wouldn’t

PaigeI added the third image to the shared folder Lyle sent me and stretched. The AI software was advanced, but it took a lot of human involvement to actually produce something that wouldn’t throw up every red flag in the book. In some ways, I appreciated that for the job security it leant me. In others…I generated a new face—dark haired, this time, and dark-eyed—and the woman in the picture stared back at me placidly. Just the same as the first three. Too healthy. Not scared enough. I opened up my photo editor and exported the image. I looked away to grab my stylus, and when I looked back, Katie’s dark eyes loomed out of the page.Okay. I could start with the cheeks. I zoomed in on a patch of strangely lighted skin and began editing. When I blinked, the skin became mine, gaunt and pallid. I stared at the curl of dark hair at the edge of the frame until the certainty I would see my own face when I zoomed out melted away. These were fictional pictures, fictional women.I thinned out

PaigeI folded my legs underneath me on Lauren’s bright blue couch and scratched Francis’s head. It felt like I hadn’t been here in a month, but I’d only missed one session.“So, London?” Lauren said.“And Paris,” I replied. “For a night.”She hummed. “How was it?”“It was—” The answer caught in my throat, too bulky to possibly escape. One word, a sentence, a whole therapy session couldn’t sum up how it had been. It had been everything and nothing at all. My whole world was different, and I didn’t know if anything had changed.“Fair enough.” She smiled. “Let’s start smaller. You saw McKenna, right?”“I did.” I sank my fingers deeper into Francis’s fur. “And she seemed good. I mean, not good. She looked like someone had run her through a woodchipper. But”—I shook my head—“she seemed good with everything?”Lauren frowned. “What does that mean?”“Like, she wouldn’t stop talking about it.” I shrugged. “And always with the same excitement she had when saying hi or talking about her family.

PaigeBeth sat in the backseat of Tom’s car, sniffling and fiddling with the receipt I’d given her with my number on it. She’d asked to be taken to her mother’s house, and the pressure in my lungs had finally released. Laying out Steve felt great, but only leaving Beth with my number hadn’t felt like nearly enough. This was much, much better.“Mom warned me, you know,” Beth said. “She said Steve was trouble, that he was the exact same kind of guy as her third husband, who ended up in prison. But I didn’t li-i-sten!” Beth dissolved into tears.I reached back and patted her knee. I’d never really known what to do with tears, but I knew the feeling that everything bad that happened to you was your fault.“You’re listening now,” I said.Beth sucked in a deep breath. “Am I? Steve’s the only guy who’s ever gonna love me. I’m damaged goods now.”“No,” I said with surprising vehemence. “Steve was a fucking liar.”Beth shook her head. “He was the only one who told me how annoying my laugh was,