Page 1 of Torn By Fate

PROLOGUE

SERAFINA

The bass was alive.

It pulsed through the polished floor beneath my feet, crawling up my legs and settling deep inside my ribs, each beat vibrating through bone and flesh.

The club was a cathedral of darkness and sin, drenched in crimson light and caged with black walls. In the middle of the dance floor, bodies swayed and drifted together like something between a fervent prayer and a subtle predation.

I had chosen this place deliberately, the kind of place where faces dissolved into shifting shadows, and names were lost beneath the deafening music. It was a relentless assault that buried conversations and drowned out guilty consciences.

Gooseflesh peppered my skin and my lower spine tingled.

Thud.

I felt him before I saw him.

I always did.

The thing about him was that he announced himself in a very particular way. Dangerous and silent.

The air around me changed, growing dense and crackling with tension.

Some people carried their presence like a scent.

He carried it like an approaching storm—inevitable, relentless and impossible to ignore.

Blood roared between my ears and my heart thudded again, loud and hard against my rib cage.

I didn’t turn around.

I stopped turning around three weeks ago when I learned that no matter where I looked… my eyes never found him.

Yet…

He was always watching.

I knew it. I felt it—his unwavering gaze.

But I never knew where he stood, where he watched from.

He was always carefully hidden in the shadows, letting the darkness swallow him.

Fine. Let him look. Let him watch. Let him do what he’d been doing across four countries and a dozen cities—hovering just menacingly at the periphery. Close enough to remind me I was being hunted; far enough to deny me the satisfaction of confrontation.

I was tired of letting him win.

So tonight, I danced.

A woman’s body had its own language, every movement a sentence, every breath a confession. And I had learned to speak it fluently.

My body knew exactly what to say and how to make sure no one ever forgot hearing it.

The music shifted to something slower, darker…the beat pulling like a tide. I closed my eyes and let my hips find the rhythm, allowing my shoulders to drop. I tilted my chin back, arching my neck. My hair came loose from the bun, falling down to my lower back.

The fabric of my black dress clung to my body like a second skin, and I moved with the kind of slow sensuality that I knew. That I had been taught to use to my advantage.

After a minute, I opened my eyes. My lips twitched when a man moved toward me with the particular confidence of someone who had never been told ‘no’ in a way that mattered. He was young, closer to my age. Dark strands of hair fell across his forehead, and his lips curved with a smile that was equal parts invitation and assumption.