Page 8 of Torn By Fate

But now all I could think of was how incomplete it felt.

How it was never as fulfilling as I had imagined, but I craved it anyway.

And then I thought about the taste of ash on my tongue and how it stayed with me, even after the fire was gone.

Adrian Salvatore deserved everything I did to him.

And I would do it all over again if I had the chance.

CHAPTER TWO

ADRIAN

Breathe in. Breathe out.

I inhaled deeply, allowing the oxygen to fill my lungs, feeling them expand and then I exhaled.

My heart thudded in my chest, a strong beat against my rib cage. I flexed my fingers and then closed them into tight fists by my sides. My nails dug into the skin of the palms, the pain fleeting but real.

Ah, so that was what it felt like to be alive.

My eyes remained on the windows. Black glass. From the outside, my office was a void—a dark, unreadable surface that gave nothing away. No one could see in. But from the inside, I could see everything.

I watched the woods.

The trees were bare this time of the year—January, the dead, cold heart of winter. The branches clawed at the iron-gray sky like skeletal fingers begging for mercy.

There was no mercy, though.

Not in this world.

Not in the afterlife.

I had long stopped believing in mercy or justice.

The universe wasn’t cruel. You see, cruelty requires intent.

The universe was simply… indifferent to suffering.

It didn’t mourn the innocent or punish the guilty. It merely kept turning, swallowing every fractured scream and every broken prayer without pause.

Pain and loss didn’t arrive all at once. It was a cycle… that chipped away at you, carving out pieces into your flesh until it buried under your bones, until there was nothing more than a gaping hole in your soul. Until there was so much emptiness inside you that it was simply a never-ending pit.

It was just the way of life. It was exactly what I had been taught, and I had learned that lesson a long time ago.

From my father’s cold indifference as he murdered my mother in their marital bed.

From my brother’s ultimate triumph after killing my unborn child and leaving his cold body for me to find.

And my wife’s wrenching betrayal…

Serafina Salvatore—my sweet, sweet wife—shot me.

She pulled the fucking trigger and left me to bleed on my brother’s expensive rug.

My hand drifted, unthinking, to the center of my chest. Just below the clavicle, an inch left of the sternum, the wound had gone from ugly and red to a dull violet, but the flesh beneath still itched with the memory of violence.

My wife’s treachery.