Page 32 of Torn By Fate

I respected that too.

It changed nothing, though.

The dagger in my hand moved.

It was one clean stroke, left to right, following the natural life of his throat.

The cut was precise, deep enough to sever his carotid arteries.

There was no sound at first. Just the wet, tearing whisper of the blade parting flesh, and then the blood—erupting and pulsing from the wound in rhythmic spurts that painted the brick wall behind him in a grotesque arc.

He clutched at his neck with both hands. I let go and walked around to face him. His eyes locked onto mine, wide and terrified, and I watched the light behind them fade.

He made a sound. It wasn’t exactly a scream. It was a wet sound as his body tried to breathe through a throat that no longer existed.

His fingers pressed against the wound as if he could hold the blood inside. Too fucking late for that now.

Henry collapsed to his knees. Then to his side. The blood pooled beneath him, spreading across the cracked concrete in a slow, mesmerizing stain.

I wiped the blade on my pant leg, leaving dark streaks across the black fabric.

The threat was gone. Eradicated.

But the satisfaction I should have felt—the cold, clean clarity that always followed a kill—wasn’t there.

If not Henry, then someone else would be hired to hunt Serafina down.

There was a price on my wife’s head.

And I still had to find out who put it there.

CHAPTER SEVEN

SERAFINA

THE PAST

A scream tore through the apartment, and it hit me like a physical blow—a blade of sound that sliced through the walls and the thin membrane of my sleep.

I was on my feet before I understood I was awake, before my mind had fully registered the noise.

My heart slammed against my ribs with such force I could feel it in my throat, like a frantic animal trapped behind bone. The scream came again, sharper this time, and I was moving before I could stop myself. My shin caught the edge of the nightstand, and pain bloomed sharp and bright, but I was already stumbling forward, catching myself against the doorframe with both hands.

The pain was flitting and forgotten when another scream, this one more terrifying than the last two, echoed through the apartment.

Elyssa.

Her room was across the hall, the door closed, but I knew it wasn’t locked. It never was.

I pushed through it, and in the darkness of her room, the first thing I heard was a sound, not a scream anymore, but something worse. Something raw and guttural, a broken moan that seemed to climb up from somewhere deep inside her and break apart on the way out.

The streetlight outside her window cast long, angular shadows across her room through the slit in the curtains. I found Elyssa in the center of the queen bed, her body arched and rigid, bedsheets twisted around her, and her head thrashing against the pillow.

Sweat plastered her blonde hair to her temples and her neck; her skin gleamed in the faint light, slick and feverish. Her hands fisted the bedsheets, her knuckles white with the tension.

“No,” she sobbed, her anguished cries drowning out the actual word. It was more like a guttural sound shaped by terror. “No, no, please—”

God, she looked so pained.