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)
“It is my most prized possession,” I drawled.
Her defense crumbled entirely under the confession. “I don’t understand you.”
“Why did you truly pull that trigger, Serafina?” I demanded, closing the remaining distance between us. “What drove you to such hatred? I know the hate you carry isn’t because I tricked you into this marriage, so don’t lie to me. No more deceptions, Serafina. I’m done. I need the truth.”
She locked her jaw, refusing to speak.
“Tell me why.” I took a step forward, forcing her back.
Her hazel eyes flared with dark agony.
“Start talking.” Another step toward her, this one crowding her against the wall again. I was done playing this game with her. The truth would come out today, one way or another, even if I had to physically force it out of her. “Your lies are getting exhausting, wife. I had promised to always be honest with you no matter how ugly it is, how bitter it is. Now, it’s your turn. Why?”
“Stop!”
“TELL ME WHY!” I bellowed, my patience finally snapping.
“Because you murdered my family!”
Air locked in my lungs. My world came to a sudden, screeching halt.
My heart stopped. “What?”
Silence descended, thick and suffocating.
“You burned them alive,” she whispered brokenly, a single tear sliding down her cheek. I had never seen such agony on someone’s face before. “You are a monster.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SERAFINA
“You are a monster.”
The words left my mouth and hung in the fragile air between us, sharp and final. Accusatory. Adrian didn’t flinch. He didn’t even blink. Those dark, devastating blue eyes—the same ones I’d first seen through a cracked door six years ago—held mine.
And suddenly I was fifteen again.
The cake sat on the kitchen table, lopsided and frosted in my father’s typical shade of pink. It was always too dark because he never measured the food coloring right. One candle burned at the center, its flame steady and small in the quietness of our two-bedroom house. The whole place smelled like vanilla and buttercream frosting.
I loved that smell. The cozy smell of… home.
“Blow it out,” my father said.
I leaned forward and blew out a soft breath, extinguishing the flame in a single try. A thin thread of smoke curled upward and dissolved.
Their soft claps vibrated against the cream walls of the kitchen. “Make a wish, sweet girl.”
I didn’t have to think twice about the wish. It was the same one I had every year, the same wish I knew with utmost certainty that it was the only thing I ever wanted, the only thing I ever cared about in my life. “I wish to be a doctor,” I said. It was the only future I could imagine that felt entirely my own, that I felt I had control over.
Caleb, cross-legged on the floor with his Nintendo balanced on his knees, snorted without looking up. “You’re not supposed to wish out loud or it won’t come true.”
I shrugged. “All my wishes always come true.”
That was partially true, but I knew how hard I was working toward my future. I was studying hard to become what I wanted to be. I skipped a grade; I was the best student in my class… in my school, actually. Exemplary.
My father had taught me one thing and it was that nothing was ever handed to us. Nothing was just coincidence or luck. No, if we wanted something, we had to work for it. Tirelessly. Relentlessly. Until it became ours.
My father’s hand came up and tucked a strand of brown hair behind my ear. His fingers were warm and slightly rough, the way they always were, calloused from whatever work he did during the day that he never really talked about. “You will do great things when you grow up,” he said quietly. “Your mother would be proud.”
I looked past him to the mantel above the small fireplace we never used. The photograph sat in its silver frame, the only one we had. My mother, blonde and luminous, smiling with her chin tilted up the way I’d been told I did when I was being stubborn.
I missed her in the way you miss something you’ve never really had—a hollow, shapeless ache that my father had spent years filling with his own careful, constant love.
Caleb was only a few months old when we lost her, and I had just turned nine. Her death hadn’t truly registered with me then. I didn’t really understand what it meant at first. To lose a mother. To grow up without her.
But I remembered her. Her face and the sound of her genuine laughter. I remembered the way she made my favorite omelet. I remembered the vanilla birthday cakes she’d make for me, the same one my father had tried to replicate every year since she was gone.
He had never let us feel her absence. He had made sure of that.
I picked up my fork and was about to take the first bite of cake, the corner piece, always the corner piece, because the frosting was thickest there and it was my favorite part, when the knock came.