Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 70097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 234(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 234(@300wpm)
“What are they about?” she asked, her voice rough from crying.
I swallowed past the lump in my throat, and my arm tightened around her shoulders. “There’s a man,” I said. The words came out slowly, each one extracted from where they had been buried deep. “He doesn’t have a face. I’ve never seen his face; I don’t think my mind will let me. But he’s on top of me, and his hand is over my mouth, and he takes—” My throat closed. I swallowed. “He takes what I’m not willing to give. What I never agreed to give.”
Elyssa’s hand found mine. Her fingers were warm and steady, and she carefully interlaced them with mine.
“Serafina.” Her voice hardened, undeniably more protective. “Has someone… did someone assault you?”
“No,” I whispered shakily. Not yet…
The words hung in the dark between us.
I had been sold as a broodmare when I was a mere child, before I even understood what it meant.
“The faceless man in my dreams,” I continued. “He’s my betrothed. The man I’m going to marry. The man whose heir I’m meant to carry.” I turned my hand in hers, gripping it tightly. “There’s a gold, gilded cage waiting for me. My mind just shows me what that cage looks like every night before I have to eventually step inside it. One day, I will get that dreadful call from my father, and I will be forced to go back home–back to where I belong. Back to the man who was promised my soul, my body.”
Elyssa didn’t say anything for a long time. I could feel her breathing beside me, the rise and fall of her rib cage against my arm, and I waited for the platitudes—the comfortable lies that people offered when the truth was too ugly to sit with.
She didn’t offer any of those.
“I’m sorry,” she said instead. Just that. Two words stripped of everything except what they actually meant.
“Your past is haunting, and my future is terrifying to even think of,” I murmured. “I guess we’re more alike than you think.”
“We are,” Elyssa said quietly. “More than you know.”
Her thumb moved across the back of my hand, a slow, rhythmic stroke that grounded me.
I shifted on the mattress, fully lying beside her, and I leaned into her. The sheets were still damp with her sweat, but I didn’t care. Elyssa adjusted her weight and turned on her side to face me, our hands still linked between us. I curled my body toward hers until our foreheads were nearly touching and I could almost hear the steady beat of her heart through the thin fabric of her shirt.
We lay there in the dark, breathing together.
Neither of us spoke. There was nothing left to say, and the shared silence was soothing.
Elyssa’s breathing slowed, her eyes fluttering close. The warmth of her hand remained in mine, a solid reassurance in the darkness of her room. My eyelids grew heavy.
I didn’t fight it. For once, I didn’t fight it.
Inhale, exhale.
For the first time in longer than I could remember, sleep came without the faceless man waiting for me on the other side of consciousness. There was only the rhythm of our breathing, the weight of Elyssa’s hand in mine, and the fragile, improbable sense that I wasn’t alone.
I slept.
And I didn’t dream.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SERAFINA
The bass was alive.
It pulsed through the polished floor beneath my feet, crawling up my legs and settling deep inside my ribs, each beat vibrating through bone and flesh.
The club was a cathedral of darkness and sin, drenched in crimson light and caged with black walls. In the middle of the dance floor, bodies swayed and drifted together like something between a fervent prayer and subtle predation.
I had chosen this place deliberately, the kind of place where faces dissolved into shifting shadows, and names were lost beneath the deafening music. It was a relentless assault that buried conversations and drowned out guilty consciences.
Gooseflesh peppered my skin, and my lower spine tingled.
Thud.
I felt him before I saw him.
I always did.
The thing about Adrian Salvatore was that he announced himself in a very particular way. Dangerous and silent.
The air around me changed, growing dense and crackling with tension.
Some people carried their presence like a scent.
He carried it like an approaching storm—inevitable, relentless, and impossible to ignore.
Blood roared between my ears, and my heart thudded again, loud and hard against my rib cage.
I didn’t turn around.
I stopped turning around three weeks ago when I learned that no matter where I looked… my eyes never found him.
Yet…
He was always watching.
I knew it. I felt it—his unwavering gaze.
But I never knew where he stood, where he watched from.
He was always carefully hidden in the shadows, letting the darkness swallow him.
Fine. Let him look. Let him watch. Let him do what he’d been doing across four countries and a dozen cities—hover menacingly at the periphery, close enough to remind me I was being hunted, but far enough to deny me the satisfaction of confrontation.