Page 91 of Torn By Fate

The feeling of the fire licking through my flesh still felt so alive, I could feel it even more.

I had thought that this was it.

In those final seconds of consciousness, I thought this was how I would die. Surrounded by flames, alone, with the screams of my family still ringing in my ears.

Then, I woke up in the hospital, the room white and sterile. Everything smelled like antiseptic and bleach, and the light was so bright it hurt my eyes. My throat had been bandaged, and when I tried to speak, no sound came out. Just a rasp, a whisper of air through damaged tissue.

A nurse appeared. Then a doctor. Then a police officer, his hat in his hands, his expression carefully arranged into something that was supposed to be sympathetic.

“You’re the only survivor,” he said. “The gas stove in the kitchen exploded. Your father must have left the gas on after cooking. It was an accident.”

A terrible, tragic accident, they said.

I stared at him. My mouth opened. Nothing came out.

“Your father and your brother... they were in the kitchen when it happened. You were in the bedroom, farther from the blast. That’s why you survived.”

He truly believed this…

I saw it in his eyes, the genuine sorrow, the quiet relief that he could file this away as a tragedy rather than an investigation. An accident. A gas leak. A family destroyed by a simple, mundane oversight.

Only I knew the truth.

Only I had heard that phone call.

Only I knew of the man with the dark blue eyes standing in our tiny living room, speaking my father's old name like it was a weapon, an order of death he had to fulfill.

“Burn it. All of it. I want no evidence that Angelo Garza ever existed.”

I had carried that truth inside me for six years. Through foster care, through the endless nights of screaming myself awake, through the therapy sessions where I had been told to “process my grief and accept the accident and move forward.”

I carried it through my arranged marriage to the Salvatore family, through the moment I had learned my truth—my real truth—and how I could use it to complete my vengeance.

I was barely fifteen when I lost everything, when the world I knew was reduced to ash and the screams of my dying family. When I learned that some men could look you in the eye and order your destruction without a single flicker of remorse.

I was fifteen when I realized just how ugly our world is.

And I was sixteen when I found the truth.

And now, standing in this hotel suite with the man who had orchestrated it all, the rage that had been festering inside me for six years erupted with a violence that shocked even me.

“What are you talking about?”

His voice. That voice. The same low, unhurried cadence I’d heard through the cracked window, giving the order that had destroyed my life. The confusion in his tone, the careful, calculated confusion of a man who had spent his entire life constructing lies—made something inside me snap. A physical snap that I heard echoing in my ears.

I lunged at him.

The years of pain, of grief, of silent, screaming fury that I had locked away behind walls of composure and compliance—all of it came pouring out of me at once. Unhinged. Violent. No longer contained.

My fist connected with his chest, and the impact reverberated up my arm, but I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel anything except the desperate, animalistic need to hurt him the way he had hurt me.

“You killed them,” I screamed, driving my fist into his chest again. “You burned them!”

My knuckles cracked against the hard plane of his sternum, and pain shot through my hand, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop.

Every blow was a release, a fraction of the agony I had been carrying for six years expelled through the violence of my body.

Adrian stumbled backward, his expression shifting from confusion to dark surprise, maybe, or the first flicker of recognition.