Page 73 of Torn By Fate

My husband whom I tried to kill.

The memory ambushed me without warning, the same merciless replay into the moment that had shattered everything.

My index finger twitched.

“Serafina,” Adrian breathed. My name left his lips like a prayer, a mere whisper—soft, almost reverent.

The thundering of my heart echoed in my ears, loud and deafening.

His dark blue gaze held mine, shocked. I waited for the horror; I waited for him to realize that I was his executioner. The damnation he had never seen coming.

But it never came.

The shock in his eyes hardened into determination. Steady. Unyielding.

Adrian Salvatore didn’t question me. He didn’t plead for his life.

He didn’t fear me.

He simply… accepted his fate.

I pulled the trigger.

The gunshot ripped through the room, enormous and merciless. It swallowed every thought, every breath, every other sound that existed.

It consumed everything except the sight of Adrian stumbling backward, one step and then two, his hand pressed to his chest where the blood was already seeping through, darkening the fabric of his shirt.

He collapsed into the armchair behind him, and the wood groaned beneath the impact.

His lips parted, and for one slow moment, I thought he wanted to speak. But he didn’t make a sound. No groan. No curse. No accusation.

He wouldn’t even give me the satisfaction of hearing his pain.

Even in death, Adrian remained arrogant.

His eyes never wavered from mine, almost as if he wanted to memorize me. My face. My eyes. Every detail of the woman who had just ended his life.

As though he had already decided I would be the last thing he carried with him into the empty darkness that awaited him.

His lashes fluttered and then his eyes slipped closed. His head tipped back against the armchair, and the blood continued to spill, spreading across Matteo’s ivory carpet into a dark stain, in a shape that was obscenely beautiful—a dark flower, consuming everything it touched.

My finger still rested on the trigger, twitching against the metal.

I felt Matteo’s presence behind me, the heat of him, and his expectation, the absolute certainty that I would complete what I had started.

But my finger would not move.

Pain sliced through me instead, a slow, serpentine thing that coiled around my ribs and squeezed until I could barely breathe. A tear slid down my cheek, and I hated it, hated the weakness of it, hated that my body could betray me so completely while my hand remained frozen on a weapon I no longer had the will to use.

Adrian was dying.

I could see it in the way his chest rose and fell—too shallow, too fast, the rhythm of a body already surrendering.

Six years.

Six damning years since he had taken something from me that I could never reclaim, and now I stood with the means of vengeance warm in my palm and I couldn’t —

I could not.