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)
The room fell silent for a long, heartbreaking second. I could hear the hum of the AC, the distant murmur of traffic from the street below, and under all of it, I heard the steady, brutal pounding of my own heartbeat.
Her words settled into me slowly, sinking beneath my skin with each passing second.
Disbelief came first.
Then anger.
Then it was something else that was more unsettling… the sickening realization that everything I had believed about my wife, about our marriage, about the woman I trusted enough to let into the most guarded parts of my life, had been built on a lie.
And it wasn't just any lie.
“So I made a plan,” my wife continued speaking, not caring that everything she was revealing was breaking apart our already fragile marriage. “I learned as much as I could about Serafina from my aunt. Everything Elena knew and she knew a lot, because she’d been working at that school for years, and my aunt had taken a liking to her.”
She paused, and a complicated expression moved across her face… guilt, maybe.
“Serafina was quiet. Shy. Reserved. She was bullied by the other girls at the academy. My aunt felt sorry for her. She’d bring her extra food, talk to her, treat her like a person when nobody else did.”
The bitterness in her voice was unmistakable now, sharp and cutting. “And I used that to my advantage. I used my aunt’s compassion, her connection to this girl, to learn everything I needed to know. Where Serafina was going to university. What she was studying. What her schedule looked like. What she ate, what she wore, who she talked to.”
She met my eyes, and the look she gave me was challenging—daring me to judge her, to condemn the methodical, ruthless way she had dismantled another woman’s life.
“And then slowly,” she said, “piece by piece, the plan came together. The careful moves. The calculated steps. It took years, Adrian. Years of watching, of waiting, of positioning myself exactly where I needed to be.”
Her voice dropped to barely a whisper, and I had to lean closer to hear her, not wanting to miss any details of her deceit and needing to know the full truth before I decided what to do with my wife.
“We became housemates. We shared an apartment. We became friends.” The word friends came out like it tasted wrong, poisonous in her mouth. “She didn’t know who I truly was. She trusted me. She told me things. She let me close.”
A cold realization moved through my chest. The woman sitting across from me, wrapped in a restraint, with furious tears still glistening on her cheek, had orchestrated a plan that would have even earned my grandfather’s respect.
The utter patience of it.
The absolute precision.
The absolute, unwavering commitment to a goal that had consumed six years of her life.
She never broke.
She never once lost sight of the endgame.
My wife didn't simply survive.
She had planned her vendetta and executed it with a discipline that would have made any man in my world proud.
She didn't just randomly stumble into my world. She had built around it, carved her way into it.
Piece by piece. Lie by lie. Without shedding blood, but equally just as ruthless.
She had been in complete control when I foolishly had been thinking that I held the power.
But all this time, I had been standing exactly where she wanted me.
My cock twitched.
Fuck me.
“She never suspected,” she said. “Not once. Not even at the end.”
“And then one day,” I finally spoke, because I needed to hear her say it. I needed to understand the moment when the mask came off. “It was time to reveal your truth.”
She nodded. A single, sharp movement. “And I did.”
“And what truth is that exactly?”
My voice came out rougher than I intended, stripped of the measured composure I usually wore like armor.
“A truth I never knew myself until I turned sixteen,” she explained, “when my aunt told me the truth about my mother and father.”
“You see, Angelo Garza did truly fall in love,” she continued, and her voice had taken on a quality I hadn’t heard before—something almost tender, almost reverent, wrapped around a core of bitterness so deep it had calcified into something permanent. “But he fell in love with a woman who didn’t really belong to him.”
The confusion must have shown on my face because she noticed. Of course she noticed. Now I had realized this woman noticed everything, and she weaponized everything she learned.
My wife laughed. A small, bitter sound that held no humor whatsoever.
“You can’t keep up, Salvatore?” The mockery in her voice was deliberate, aimed where she thought it would hurt. “Is this too much for you? The great Adrian Salvatore humbled by a little girl’s story?”
My jaw tightened, the muscle tensing under the skin, the involuntary betrayal of my body. I pressed my lips together, swallowed once, and when I spoke, the words came out flat.