Page 95 of Torn By Fate

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

ADRIAN

I sat across from her, the armchair groaning softly under my weight as I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, hands clasped between them.

The blood on my cheek had dried to a thin, flaky crust, and I could feel it pull against my skin every time I shifted my jaw. The scratches my wife had left burned, but they weren’t deep, not dangerous.

They were a reminder of the violence she had poured into me though, the years of fury she’d been carrying.

I didn’t wipe the blood away. I wanted to feel it. Her rage. Her fear. Her contempt.

She sat there with the blanket wrapped tightly around her waist, her arms pinned to her sides, her face streaked with tears and flushed with the aftermath of rage.

Serafina—or Elyssa.

I couldn't seem to reconcile the two names with the same women.

I had married Serafina.

I had known her as Serafina.

And even after realizing she wasn’t who she had claimed to be, that was still the name my mind reached for whenever I thought of her. Serafina.

It was the name I had spoken when I took my vows, the name I had whispered in throes of pleasure.

But now I knew there was another name attached to the woman who was my wife.

Elyssa.

I didn’t know what to do with that information.

So for now, she was Serafina.

She was Serafina until I decided she wasn't.

She looked small. Fragile. But her fragility was deceptive. It concealed something sharp and lethal beneath the surface, like a blade wrapped in silk.

My wife was a weapon without her even realizing.

Her lips twisted cruelly.

And she was talking. Fina-fucking-lly.

The words poured out of her in a torrent she couldn’t stem.

“I spent months in foster care,” she said, and her voice had changed. The fury had drained from it, and the tone was more distant now, as if she was simply recounting someone else’s story. “Six different homes in four months. Nobody wanted a fifteen-year-old girl who screamed herself awake every night. I was damaged goods. Too old, too broken, too much trouble.”

Her eyes were fixed somewhere beyond my left shoulder, seeing something I couldn’t see. The memory of those months lived in her. I saw it in the tightness around her mouth, the way her fingers curled and uncurled against the blanket.

“Then my mother’s sister came for me. An aunt I had never met before, though I had heard of. She was familiar because my mother often spoke of her. Elena, her older sister. She lived in California.”

I didn’t interrupt. I sat perfectly still and listened, because the truth she was giving me was more valuable than anything I’d ever been offered. And I understood with cold, tactical clarity that had kept me alive this long, that the moment I broke the flow, she might stop.

Serafina might retreat behind the walls she had spent years constructing, and I would lose her before I could get all of her.

“I didn’t know how I was going to make you pay,” she continued, and her gaze shifted back to mine, sharp for a single moment. “Not at first. I was fifteen, Adrian. I was grieving, I was broken, I was living in a stranger’s house in a city I didn’t know. But I knew one thing with absolute certainty… I would have my revenge. I would find the man who ordered my family burned alive, and I would destroy him.”

The certainty in her voice was absolute. It didn't waver; there was no doubt in it, and now I knew that conviction didn't bend under the weight of any circumstances.