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)
I carried it through my arranged marriage to the Salvatore family, through the moment I had learned my truth—my real truth—and how I could use it to complete my vengeance.
I was barely fifteen when I lost everything, when the world I knew was reduced to ash and the screams of my dying family. When I learned that some men could look you in the eye and order your destruction without a single flicker of remorse.
I was fifteen when I realized just how ugly our world is.
And I was sixteen when I found the truth.
And now, standing in this hotel suite with the man who had orchestrated it all, the rage that had been festering inside me for six years erupted with a violence that shocked even me.
“What are you talking about?”
His voice. That voice. The same low, unhurried cadence I’d heard through the cracked window, giving the order that had destroyed my life. The confusion in his tone, the careful, calculated confusion of a man who had spent his entire life constructing lies—made something inside me snap. A physical snap that I heard echoing in my ears.
I lunged at him.
The years of pain, of grief, of silent, screaming fury that I had locked away behind walls of composure and compliance—all of it came pouring out of me at once. Unhinged. Violent. No longer contained.
My fist connected with his chest, and the impact reverberated up my arm, but I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel anything except the desperate, animalistic need to hurt him the way he had hurt me.
“You killed them,” I screamed, driving my fist into his chest again. “You burned them!”
My knuckles cracked against the hard plane of his sternum, and pain shot through my hand, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop.
Every blow was a release, a fraction of the agony I had been carrying for six years expelled through the violence of my body.
Adrian stumbled backward, his expression shifting from confusion to dark surprise, maybe, or the first flicker of recognition.
He caught my wrist, his fingers closing around it with a grip that was iron-tight and unyielding. “Serafina—” he tried to say, but I didn’t want to hear his lies anymore, his arrogant facade, the careful construction of a man who had spent his entire life pretending to be something other than what he was. Purely evil. Inhumane. Heartless in a way that would make even the devil cry.
Adrian Salvatore was rotting flesh underneath tailored suits.
“My brother was only six,” I screamed, the words tearing through my damaged throat. “He was so young. A CHILD. He was only a child!”
I fought against his hold, my free hand swinging wildly, connecting with his jaw, his shoulder, the side of his head.
My nails raked across his cheek, drawing blood in thin, bright lines, and I wanted more.
I wanted to claw his eyes out, to tear him apart with my bare hands the way the fire had torn apart everything innocent I had ever loved.
“You burned them,” I sobbed, each word a blade turned inward and outward simultaneously. A vicious cut through my flesh, digging into wounds that never properly healed, wounds that had silently festered. “YOU. BURNED. THEM.”
His hand on my wrists tightened impossibly, the bones grinding together beneath his grip, and the pain was so sharp and immediate—but it meant nothing.
Physical pain meant nothing. It was a ghost compared to the inferno that had been burning inside me for six years.
“ENOUGH.”
The word exploded from him with a force that seemed to shake the walls of the suite.
He didn't simply shout. It was a roar, primal and raw, the sound of a man whose control had finally fractured completely.
The echo of it bounced off the plaster, filling the room, and for one fractured second, the world went silent.
Then his hands were on me. Adrian wasn't gentle or careful as he dragged me backward, my heels scraping against the carpet, and shoved me into the armchair with enough force that I thought it would topple over with me still on it.
I lunged forward, trying to stand, but he was already there, towering over me, his body blocking everything else, his shadow falling across me like a shroud.
I looked up at him. Tall, broad, his face streaked with blood from where I had scratched him, his eyes blazing with something I couldn’t name.
He was terrifying. He was magnificent. He was the monster who had destroyed my world, and I stared up at him without flinching.
I wasn’t frightened.
I had nothing to be scared of anymore. Death had already taken everything from me once—my father, my brother, the future I had been promised—and if Adrian decided to kill me now, it would be a mercy.
Maybe death would be sweeter than living with the memories that continued to haunt me, that woke me screaming in the dark, that made every breath taste like smoke and ash.