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)
He left my side and crossed to the window, standing with his back to me, his hands clasped behind him. His shoulders were broad and rigid beneath the black fabric of his shirt.
“No,” he said. The word was quiet, almost reluctant, as if admitting it would change the undeniable truth. “I never wanted anything different. I don’t know a different life.”
He turned from the window, and his expression was unreadable. “This is the only life I’ve ever known,” he said. “I was born into it. I lived it. I breathed it. It’s in my blood and my bones and every decision I’ve ever made. It’s the only thing that has ever made sense to me.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was low and even. “And in this life, I have control.”
I studied him, the sharpness of his jaw, the careful stillness of his body, the way he held himself like a man who had built his identity on the certainty of his own authority.
I saw it in the steadiness of his gaze, the absence of doubt in his expression.
This life was not a choice Adrian had made.
It was the air he breathed, the ground he walked on, the only reality he had ever known.
And he was comfortable in it.
That was the part that unsettled me most. It wasn’t the violence he breathed. No, what unsettled me was the ease with which he inhabited the brutality of this life, the way cruelty fit him like a second skin, worn so naturally that he couldn’t imagine being without it.
“Do you really have control?” I asked softly. “Or is it just an illusion?”
Something flickered across his face, a fracture in his composure. It was brief and devastating, but it was gone before I could name it.
I had seen it, though. The doubt. The fragile uncertainty he would never let anyone else witness. I saw it. I felt it.
Adrian didn’t answer. Instead, he asked a question of his own. “Do you want a normal life, Serafina?”
The question hit me like a physical blow, catching me off guard. I opened my mouth to deflect, hating that he was trying to see me, trying to break my walls, but the words dissolved before they could form.
I looked away from him, toward the window, where the city stretched beyond in the colorful sunset.
“I wanted to be a doctor.” I finally spoke after a moment of silence. The words came out quietly, a confession I never told anyone else. I hated how vulnerable they sounded. How exposed they made me feel. “I wanted to save people’s lives. I wanted to do something that mattered, something that made the world better instead of worse.”
And yet here I was.
The irony was so ugly, so bitter, my eyes stung.
I swallowed, and the motion sent a dull ache through the bruises on my neck. “Instead, I married into the family that wants to destroy mine, and now I’m making lists of people I want dead, and someone is trying to kill me because of a last name I never chose.”
Adrian didn’t respond immediately.
Instead, he crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating from his body but far enough that we weren’t touching. The mattress dipped under his weight.
The muscles in his jaw tightened and released.
“Do I want a normal life?” I repeated his question, mulling over the endless possibilities that none would ever become a reality. “Yes. I want normalcy. I want to wake up in the morning and not wonder if today is the day someone puts a bullet in me. I want to have a conversation that doesn’t involve blood or death or the people who want us dead.”
The words poured out of me, and I couldn’t stop them, the dam I had built around my true feelings cracking under the weight of everything that had happened. “I want to have friends who don’t know what my last name means. I want to be someone who matters for reasons that have nothing to do with whose daughter I am or whose wife I became.”
My voice broke on the last word, and I pressed my lips together, fighting the urge to scream, to cry at the utter unfairness that had been dealt to me. “But nothing will ever be normal again,” I whispered shakily. “The life I knew before is gone. Everything I knew has been stained by death and blood, and I can’t wash it off. I can’t go back to being the person I was before all of this because that person doesn’t exist anymore. She died the night—”
I stopped. The words caught in my throat, and I couldn’t finish the sentence.
No, that truth… he couldn’t know.
Not yet.
That truth was mine and mine alone. It belonged to me, it fueled my need for vengeance, it kept me going…