Page 5 of Freed By Wrath

“Thanks.”

He disappears down the hallway.

Only then do I realize I haven’t seen my cousin since she welcomed everyone at the entrance, dressed in a floor-length black gown that clung to her like liquid midnight, impossible horns curling toward the ceiling, dark brown waves, falling in that perfectly undone way only money could buy, framing a face made for candlelight and hazel eyes that missed nothing, even when she wanted you to think they did.

She’d stood beneath the archway with a champagne flute raised high, smiling like temptation itself.

“Welcome,” she’d purred. “To the best… and most sinful night of your lives.”

Lilith. She couldn’t be less than that.

I keep moving.

Where the hell are you, Dan?

The corridor off the main hallway is a different world. Narrower. The spotlights give way to a single low sconce that throws amber light across one wall and leaves the other in shadow. The concrete floor transitions to hardwood here, and the roar of the party softens into the background, leaving only the distant thump of bass and the sharp click of my heels against the floor.

Someone screams with laughter outside. A Halloween playlist bleeds faintly through the walls, something with strings and minor keys, designed to unsettle. It works. My skin prickles before I understand why.

There’s a door half-closed at the end of the hall. Warm light bleeds through the gap, and I hear his laugh before I see anything, not the party laugh, not the one he uses on clients and colleagues and everyone who needs to believe he’s charming. The other one. Lower. Unguarded. The one I used to think was only mine.

My hand finds the doorframe.

My stomach knows before I do.

I push the door open, and it takes my brain exactly three seconds to catch up with what my eyes have already registered.

Daniel.

His hand is spread across Serena’s waist, fingers digging into the small of her back with the kind of familiarity that only comes from knowing a body intimately.

Dark hair, always perfectly tousled, catches the low light, along with the thin, rimless glasses he’s worn since college. He’s still infuriatingly handsome, the kind of man who photographs beautifully at charity galas and somehow looks hollow the closer you get.

Then I see his mouth… Pressed against the curve of her neck, and then… her hands. Red nails curled into his lapel like she’s done it a hundred times before and plans to do it a hundred more.

Finally, her face. She is… smiling. Not the hostess smile she wore at the entrance, wide and practiced and aimed at the whole room. This one is smaller. Private. The smile of someone who has already won and is simply enjoying the fact of it.

I stand in the doorway for God knows how long, a silent crack spreading through my chest.

Three seconds. Then eight years.

They rewrite themselves in the space of a breath. I just want what’s best for you.

That’s not a good look, Val.

Why do you care about things like that?

You’d be so much better if you just…

Every excuse. Every criticism. Every little comment I’d dismissed without a second thought peeled back to reveal what had always been underneath. The arguments I’d lost and apologized for afterward. The plans I’d edited down to nothing. The costumes I hadn’t made. The playlists I’d let die. The version of myself I’d handed over piece by piece, convinced I was being loved into something better.

I hadn’t been loved into anything. I’d been managed.

Quietly.

Patiently.

By a man who’d learned early that the easiest way to keep something was to convince it that shrinking was the same as growing. And I had believed him. That’s the part that lands heaviest—not what he did, but how willingly I’d handed him the scissors. How many times I’d thanked him for it.