Daddy’s Forbidden Obsession

Elena’s POVI stood outside Marcus’s apartment door with a bottle of wine tucked under my arm, rehearsing the words I’d been saving for two years like a prayer I was finally allowed to say out loud.Tonight was my graduation party, four years of school behind me, a ballroom full of people waiting at the Aurelian Hotel to toast a future I’d worked myself half to death for. In one week, a separate weight was waiting for me too, a dinner with the man who had funded every single year of that life since I was eleven years old, a stranger my aunt only ever called “your guardian” in a tone that made him sound more like a debt I owed than a person who existed. But before any of that, tonight belongs to me and Marcus. I wanted to tell him I loved him. I wanted, finally, after two years of being careful, of waiting for a certainty that never fully arrived, to stop being careful.I let myself in with my key, quiet, already smiling at the thought of surprising him, and found the door to his home

The city outside my window never used to keep me awake. That week, it did.I lay in bed each night listening to traffic bleed through the glass, counting the gaps between passing cars like they were something I could use to steady myself, and every time my mind went quiet enough to drift, it went straight back to his hands, his mouth, the low, unhurried certainty in his voice. “Let Daddy hear you.” I would surface from half-sleep with my heart going too fast, sheets twisted around my legs like I’d been fighting something in my dreams, and it took long, disoriented minutes each time to remember I was safe in my own room and not still pinned against that wall with his fingers buried inside me.The card lived in the bottom of my purse, but it may as well have lived under my skin. I felt it there constantly, a low hum at the edge of every ordinary moment, buying coffee, sitting through a lecture I couldn’t recall a single word of afterward, lying to Aunt Diane’s face about being fine. I t

Elena’s POVThe car ride was silent except for the low hum of the engine and the occasional crackle of a radio somewhere up front. Adriano sat beside me, close enough that I could feel the heat off his body, far enough that our arms never touched, and I couldn’t stop replaying the rooftop, the terrace, the version of him that had listened to me talk about heartbreak like my pain actually mattered to him, weighed now against a full week of silence he’d apparently chosen to keep.“You knew,” I finally said, staring straight ahead. “This whole week. You knew who I was, and you let me sit there thinking I’d imagined the whole thing, or worse, that I’d made it up in my head.”His jaw flexed, just barely, a muscle jumping under his skin before he smoothed it away. “I recognized your pendant that night, before you ever told me your name was Elena. I’ve known since then.”“And you didn’t say anything. Not a word, not a warning, nothing at all.”“What was I supposed to say?” His voice was low,