Page 19 of Torn By Fate

Serafina had shot me, betrayed me, left me bleeding on my brother’s floor, and still—still—my body rejected any contact that wasn’t hers.

Other women’s touch felt wrong against my skin.

Their scents were wrong. Their warmth was wrong. Their voices were wrong.

Even the idea of letting someone else close enough to touch me made something in my chest recoil violently, a reflex I couldn’t override no matter how much I told myself that she didn’t deserve my loyalty or my fidelity. Yet my goddamn body refused to move on.

My wife had ruined me in ways that went beyond the physical scar she left me with.

She had rewired something fundamental, something that made the thought of another woman’s touch feel like a betrayal—not of her, but of me. Of whatever broken, twisted thing I had become in her presence.

It was pathetic.

It was maddening.

Fuck, she was maddening.

Goddamn it, I wanted to hate her.

I needed to hate her.

And I did. I fucking did. I fucking hated her.

The woman’s hand drifted up my arm again, slowly, deliberately, seductively. “It’s such a shame, a handsome man like you, forced to be alone and loyal.”

The last piece of restraint inside me finally snapped.

I felt it like it was something physical living inside me, contained, and now it cracked, splintering the last of whatever control I had of it.

“Walk away,” I uttered quietly, the words coming out measured, controlled despite the violence stirring inside me. “You don’t want to know what happens when I’m pissed off.”

Something in my voice must have convinced her; she must have recognized the genuine danger beneath the calm, because the smile plastered on her face faltered, and she straightened. Her bravado crumbled. Her lips parted, then closed.

She took a step back, then another, and turned without another word, her heels clicking against the worn floor as she retreated to wherever she’d come from.

I exhaled slowly, turning back to my drink. The whiskey stared up at me like a dark, accusing eye.

“That’s no way to treat a lady, Salvatore.”

The voice was familiar. Deep, rough, and tinged with the particular cadence of a man who had seen many dark, terrible things.

The stool beside me scraped again.

This time, the presence was different. Heavier. Male. The scent of cologne was woodsy and aggressive, masking the faint metallic tang of something I recognized immediately.

Blood.

Old blood that stayed in the fabric no matter how many times you washed it.

I didn’t need to look to know who it was. The voice confirmed it before I even turned my head. I knew he had been there, watching me for some time now, since I had set foot in this bar.

I had waited for him to approach me.

I huffed at his ridiculous words. “You’re the last person to speak on how to be a gentleman.”

“Adrian Salvatore,” he drawled, chuckling darkly. “Drinking alone in a Belgian bar. How the mighty have fallen.” He settled onto the stool with comfortable arrogance.

Vincenzo, heir to the Castellano family, was never known for asking before he intruded.