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)
And now I had more enemies than I could possibly know.
Every mistake I made had been fatal.
Yet, I found myself still alive, still breathing.
Maybe I was just lucky. Maybe fate had pitied me.
Or maybe it was thanks to the man sleeping beside me.
My husband whom I tried to kill.
The memory ambushed me without warning, the same merciless replay into the moment that had shattered everything.
My index finger twitched.
“Serafina,” Adrian breathed. My name left his lips like a prayer, a mere whisper—soft, almost reverent.
The thundering of my heart echoed in my ears, loud and deafening.
His dark blue gaze held mine, shocked. I waited for the horror; I waited for him to realize that I was his executioner. The damnation he had never seen coming.
But it never came.
The shock in his eyes hardened into determination. Steady. Unyielding.
Adrian Salvatore didn’t question me. He didn’t plead for his life.
He didn’t fear me.
He simply… accepted his fate.
I pulled the trigger.
The gunshot ripped through the room, enormous and merciless. It swallowed every thought, every breath, every other sound that existed.
It consumed everything except the sight of Adrian stumbling backward, one step and then two, his hand pressed to his chest where the blood was already seeping through, darkening the fabric of his shirt.
He collapsed into the armchair behind him, and the wood groaned beneath the impact.
His lips parted, and for one slow moment, I thought he wanted to speak. But he didn’t make a sound. No groan. No curse. No accusation.
He wouldn’t even give me the satisfaction of hearing his pain.
Even in death, Adrian remained arrogant.
His eyes never wavered from mine, almost as if he wanted to memorize me. My face. My eyes. Every detail of the woman who had just ended his life.
As though he had already decided I would be the last thing he carried with him into the empty darkness that awaited him.
His lashes fluttered and then his eyes slipped closed. His head tipped back against the armchair, and the blood continued to spill, spreading across Matteo’s ivory carpet into a dark stain, in a shape that was obscenely beautiful—a dark flower, consuming everything it touched.
My finger still rested on the trigger, twitching against the metal.
I felt Matteo’s presence behind me, the heat of him, and his expectation, the absolute certainty that I would complete what I had started.
But my finger would not move.
Pain sliced through me instead, a slow, serpentine thing that coiled around my ribs and squeezed until I could barely breathe. A tear slid down my cheek, and I hated it, hated the weakness of it, hated that my body could betray me so completely while my hand remained frozen on a weapon I no longer had the will to use.
Adrian was dying.
I could see it in the way his chest rose and fell—too shallow, too fast, the rhythm of a body already surrendering.
Six years.
Six damning years since he had taken something from me that I could never reclaim, and now I stood with the means of vengeance warm in my palm and I couldn’t —
I could not.
Matteo took a step toward me. I heard it in the shift of his weight as he closed the distance between us. The sound pulled me out of whatever paralysis had seized me, and I turned.
The gun came with me.
I pointed it at him.
The barrel trembled in my hand, barely, but I held it steady enough that he stopped moving.
His expression changed. It wasn’t fear because Matteo Salvatore did not feel fear, or if he did, he had trained himself out of it so thoroughly that the emotion was like an unused muscle.
His eyes moved from the gun to my face, and I watched him reassess me in real time.
I had made an unexpected move. I was no longer the piece he had positioned.
I wasn’t the pawn he used to his advantage anymore.
And I wouldn’t be discarded so easily.
After all, I had something he needed. Something he had been so desperate for.
Our bargain had been for mutual advantages.
“Serafina,” he warned, eyes hardening on me.
“Don’t,” I said. It surprised me how steady my voice sounded. “Don’t come closer.”
He didn’t.
Matteo stood there, perfectly still. “You’re making a mistake,” he said. Quiet. Controlled. The tone he used when he wanted you to believe he was being reasonable.
But the thing about Matteo was that he had never been truly… reasonable.
“Maybe I am,” I scoffed.
He raised his hands slowly, palms out, and his lips twitched into that arrogant smirk that was so achingly similar to his brother’s—the same curve of the mouth, the same lazy confidence.
But Adrian’s arrogance had always been tempered by something almost human, while Matteo’s carried nothing but depravity.
I saw it now. The evil in him. The rot that made him who he was.
I had missed it before because I had been too focused on surviving, too focused on hiding my truth instead of the man moving the pieces on the chessboard.