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)
Adrian paused. His hand hung in the air between us, fingers still extended, blood dripping from the split skin of his knuckles onto the carpet between us.
“Serafina,” he breathed, my name a tender caress on his tongue.
My chest tightened.
Uncontrollable tears slid down my cheeks.
I was going to die…
I believed I would…
A broken sob escaped my damaged throat. Panic bled through my veins, the aftermath settling into my body with sickening horror.
My body shuddered. With a breath. With life.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ADRIAN
Serafina slept, and I watched.
She was so beautiful; it made my chest ache.
I watched because I couldn’t bear to take my eyes off her.
She was so broken; my chest throbbed.
The hotel suite was quiet, the AC a soft white noise that masked the city outside.
We moved into a new hotel three hours ago, far away from the one she had been in before. The new suite occupied the top floor of the Four Seasons Ritz, a building with high security and a private elevator that required a key card. and two exits on this floor I’d already mapped.
My wife should have been in a hotel like this in the first place. Not in whatever sleazy lodging she had been escaping to.
I should have stopped her stubborn, reckless action way before.
I gave her the freedom to run…
If I hadn’t, none of this would have happened. Goddamn it.
I sat in the armchair beside the king-sized bed, my elbows on my knees, my hands hanging loose between them. The blood was gone from my skin; I’d scrubbed it raw in the shower, the water scalding as I watched it swirl pink down the drain.
My hands were clean, but I could still feel the blood on them. Beneath my nails. In the creases of my knuckles. A phantom warmth that no amount of soap could strip away.
Serafina’s temple was red, the skin swollen and angry where her attacker’s fist had caught her. A bruise was already forming beneath the surface, darkening to a reddish pink.
Her left cheek was worse, almost purple already, the bruise spreading from her cheekbone down toward her jaw in a mottled, ugly stain. The skin was tight and shiny where the swelling had begun.
I memorized every bruise like I catalogued everything else about her—compulsively. Obsessively. Instinctively.
I could see the faint impression of knuckles under the discoloration. He had hit her hard enough that the bone beneath could have fractured, but she was lucky enough the angle of the blow saved her.
I looked at her hands against the white duvet, her fingers curled into loose fists. The nails on her left hand were chipped and broken.
She fought him with those hands.
My wife had clawed at his wrists, raked his skin, driven her thumbs into his eyes with a feral desperation that made my lungs cave in my chest every time I thought about it.
Her left fingers were swollen, the knuckles puffy, from when she’d punched him. Serafina had broken his nose. My wife, who weighed merely a hundred and fifteen pounds, had broken an assassin’s nose, who was much bigger, much taller than her, with her bare fist.
Pride and guilt twisted together in my gut, a poisonous knot that seemed to take root there. It burrowed right into the crevices of me, spreading its venom.
I should have been there sooner.
It was all I could think of since the moment I had kicked the door open and seen his hands around her throat.
I was three minutes too late.
Three minutes.
Three minutes during which she’d been pinned beneath a man twice her size, fighting for the very breath she needed to stay alive.
Her broken sobs still echoed in my ears.
Not the sounds she had made during the attack; those had been silent, choked off by his hands.
But the sounds that came after, when the adrenaline drained and the terror took its place.
The raw, fractured sounds of a woman who had looked death in the face and survived only because I’d arrived in time to pull it off of her.
Fuck, my chest hurt, the pain spreading under flesh and bones. A dull, persistent ache that had nothing to do with the bullet scar under my shirt.
The image of her flashed in front of my eyes, the way her body had curled into itself against that wall, shaking, her fingers pressed against the bruises on her throat. As if she could hold the memory of his hands away from her.
I had killed men without flinching.
I had watched them bleed out on concrete and felt nothing but the cold satisfaction of a job completed. But the sight of my wife, bruised, trembling, her eyes wide with a terror I had never seen in them before—that undid something in me.
I leaned back in the chair, and my eyes closed for half a second before I opened them again to stare at Serafina’s sleeping form.