Page 17 of Torn By Fate

I hastily reached for a fry. It was crisp on the outside, soft within, and I ate three of them in quick succession before I caught myself.

My eyes landed on Elyssa. She placed her burger down and looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite understand. It wasn’t amusement, nor was it pity, but something closer to recognition.

“Is this your first time?” she asked slowly, her voice quiet. The question was gentle, stripped of judgment.

I could have lied.

Maybe I should have.

“I’ve never had burgers and fries before.” I swallowed. The shame arrived before I could stop it. My cheeks heated, my throat tightening with unsaid emotions as I realized that I was showing myself to be… inexperienced.

But Elyssa didn’t laugh.

She simply picked up her burger again and took another bite, chewing thoughtfully.

“They’re good, right?” she said. “The first one’s always the best.”

The tenderness in her voice was so unexpected, so foreign that it slashed through something buried deep inside me, dislodging emotions I’d spent years carefully entombing. “I think this might be my favorite meal.”

Elyssa’s lips twitched with a genuine smile at my words, and she motioned for me to continue eating.

I took another bite.

The grease dripped onto my thumb, and I didn’t reach for a napkin immediately. I let it sit there, warm and real, evidence of a choice I had made for myself.

However small it was, this choice belonged entirely to me.

CHAPTER FOUR

ADRIAN

The whiskey burned down my throat.

I should have stopped after my second glass, but now I was on my third.

I took another sip, and this time, it burned the way a lie did… slow at first, and then all at once.

Just like my marriage had been a lie.

I sat at the far end of the bar, where the light barely reached. Men like me belong in the shadows. The place was called Le Fantôme—The Ghost—and it lived up to its name. A narrow, low-ceilinged room buried beneath an old bookshop on a cobblestone street in Brussels.

The air smelled of stale beer and cigarette smoke embedded in the walls. A jukebox in the corner played a low, mournful jazz tune, the saxophone weeping into the dimness.

Well shit, this was depressing.

I ran a hand over my face, sighing. How the fuck did I find myself here, in this situation?

There was a mix of people… a few locals hunched over their beers at the tables along the wall, a couple of American students laughing too loudly near the door, a businessman in a rumpled suit with a glass of something clear at the opposite end of the bar. All conversations were swallowed by the thick, heavy atmosphere.

I turned the glass slowly between my fingers, watching the amber liquid catch the light.

I had been here for two hours. Maybe three. The third glass of whiskey was barely touched. I didn’t drink to get drunk anymore—I drank because the burn in my throat was the only sensation I could reliably feel without it being tied to her.

Thud.

Just the thought of her, my wife, was a landmine.

I couldn’t think of Serafina without the scar on my chest throbbing in response, a phantom pulse that synchronized with my heartbeat like a second, broken organ.