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)
But she was a woman who had no idea that another contract had been placed on her life eleven days ago.
She’d chosen Lisbon this time, and I’d chosen to stop pretending I wasn’t following her. I stopped hiding in the shadows a week into her relocation, because there was no longer any strategic advantage to it.
And the pretense had become its own form of cruelty—to her, to myself, to whatever fragile thread that still bound us together.
So I let her see me. In the café across from her hotel. On the tram she took to the university library, where she pretended to read academic books. Outside the pharmacy, where she bought the same brand of ibuprofen she’d always used.
I made my presence a constant. I made myself undeniable.
I knew it confused her, which was why I wasn’t hiding anymore. I liked her confusion; I liked the idea of me consuming her every thought.
My wife hadn’t noticed me yet, trailing after her in the supermarket. She was distracted today.
I shook my head, tsking quietly as I followed just a few steps behind her. Distraction would get her killed.
And that was exactly why I was here.
I reached past her and placed the pack of Always Ultra-Thin into her cart beside the bottle of apple juice.
She had found a fondness for apple juice.
Serafina went still, every muscle in her body clamping down in rigidness before her shoulders dropped and she let out a sigh.
“You’re in my way,” she said, without turning.
Her eyes flickered to the pack of pads in her cart, her lips thinning in frustration. “You’re tracking my menstrual cycle now.” She peeked over her shoulders, her eyes narrowing on me. “That’s genuinely disturbing, Salvatore.”
“Your cycle starts in four days. You always stock up three days before,” I said with a shrug. “I’m saving you a trip.”
“Oh, that’s very husbandly of you.”
“I take my husbandly duties very seriously. Your sarcasm is misplaced.”
A humorless laugh escaped her. “You’ve been following me across continents, to multiple countries and lurking outside my hotel rooms at two in the morning, and now you’re stocking my cart with feminine hygiene products. Do you hear yourself?”
“I hear myself just fine.”
She made a disgusted sound in the back of her throat. “You’re sick.”
“Probably.”
I shoved my hands in my black jeans and walked around, moving to the front of her cart. She gripped the cart handle with both hands, and I watched the tendons in her forearms tighten. She was deciding whether to push past me or to stand her ground.
Her eyes flickered past me and then she sighed, long and hard. “I’m tired of this, Adrian. You keep following me, and I expect you to take revenge for what I had done to you. I keep waiting for you to hurt me, but it’s been months, and this game has become exhausting. I’m no longer enjoying the thrill of the chase, and I don’t think you are either. So, I want you to leave,” Serafina said. “Not this supermarket. Not this city. I want you to leave my life. Permanently. The way you should have left it the night I put a bullet in you.”
The wound ached at the mention, a dull phantom pulse beneath my clavicle. I’d kept the scar, like I had kept all my other scars. But I treasured this one specifically because it was a reminder that I had trusted the wrong woman.
“One day soon…” I said, “you’re going to tell me why you did that.”
Her expression didn’t change. “You took every choice I had and—”
“No.” I kept my voice low, even.
Her jaw locked, and she pressed her lips together.
“That’s not why you did it,” I told her. “I know what resentment looks like. I’ve lived inside it my entire life. What you did that night wasn’t resentment.”
Serafina held my gaze. “You don’t know what I feel,” she said.
“No.” I shook my head. “I know what you did. And it wasn’t the act of a woman who’d been forced into a wedding. Forced unions happen in our world every day. Women endure them, and they don’t put bullets through their husbands’ chests because they know what awaits them after that fact. It was something else that drove you to do what you did. Something you’re carrying that has nothing to do with me or Matteo or any arrangement our families made.”
For a moment—just a mere second—I thought Serafina might tell me the truth. Her mouth opened. An unfamiliar emotion moved behind her eyes, something raw and unguarded that she usually kept locked behind layers of composure.
Then it was gone, sealed behind the familiar wall of contempt.
She huffed. “Wow, you have me all figured out.”
Goddamn it, her sass would be the death of me one day. Fucking truly.
“But that’s not what matters right now.”
She tilted her head. The gesture was almost feline, calculated and assessing. “What could possibly matter more than the fact that your wife tried to kill you, the mighty Adrian Salvatore… the Reaper?”