Chapter 10 #2
The marriage was a construct. A trap. A means to an end.
And yet the image of another man leaning close—invading her space, daring to exist in proximity to her—made something savage claw at my insides.
I wanted to storm into that club.
Wanted to wrap my hand around his throat and feel his windpipe collapse beneath my boot. Wanted to remind the world, violently, that Elena belonged to me—even if I intended to destroy her.
Instead, I gave orders.
“Keep him at a distance,” I said coldly. “If he touches her—end him.”
“Yes, boss.”
The reports assured me boundaries were maintained. The man never crossed the line.
But the damage was done.
The storm inside me didn’t pass.
It grew.
Because hatred alone didn’t explain why the thought of losing her—of someone else claiming even a fraction of her attention—felt like annihilation.
Night after night, I waited.
The living room remained dim, lit only by a single lamp and the cold glow of my laptop screen, which I kept open more as camouflage than necessity.
Reports scrolled past—numbers, shipments, names—but I absorbed none of it. My attention was trained elsewhere, every nerve tuned to the house itself, to the faintest change in its breathing.
I listened for the front door.
When it finally opened, the sound was always quiet.
Elena never slammed it. She slipped inside like someone afraid of waking a sleeping animal, footsteps careful, almost apologetic.
Sometimes she stumbled slightly—whether from exhaustion or liquor, I never asked. Her eyes were always shadowed, ringed with a sadness so deep it twisted something sharp and unforgiving in my chest.
Never happy.
Never at peace.
“I’m home,” she would murmur softly, as if the words were meant more for herself than for me.
I never looked up.
My gaze stayed fixed on the screen, jaw set, posture deliberately indifferent.
But every fiber of my body tracked her movement with ruthless precision.
The subtle sway of her hips as she crossed the room.
The way she paused at the foot of the stairs, as if gathering strength.
The faint scent she carried—jasmine tangled with cigarette smoke and cheap alcohol—drifted toward me, wrapping around my senses like a slow, deliberate assault.
My chest would constrict so violently I’d have to clench my fists beneath the desk to keep myself still.
God help me, how many times had I nearly broken?
How many nights had I come within a breath of calling her name—of rising from the chair, crossing the room in three long strides, and pulling her into me with all the violence of restraint snapping at once?
I imagined it too vividly: my hands in her hair, my mouth claiming hers, the words spilling out before I could stop them.
You’re mine.
I would burn empires for you.
The hunger was feral, consuming, terrifying in its intensity.
But I didn’t move.
I let my ego take the reins—that fortress of pride, fear, and discipline I had built to survive far worse than longing.
I reminded myself that desire was a liability. That attachment was a weakness enemies exploited. That admitting what I felt would give it shape, weight, consequence.
Real feelings were dangerous.
And I could not afford danger inside my own walls.
While I pretended indifference, my men scoured the globe for her sister—the true architect of my nightmares. I had never believed she was dead. Women like her didn’t vanish; they adapted. They shed skins. They survived.
She had killed my sister on Al-Chapo’s orders—brutal, efficient, professional. But Maria... Maria had been personal. Slaughtered alongside our unborn child in a vendetta that went far beyond obedience or business.
Whether she’d had a handler or acted alone no longer mattered.
I wanted her found.
Broken.
Ended.
Leads came in from everywhere—Moscow, Prague, Istanbul, Mexico City. Each one promising, each one dissolving into nothing. She stayed one step ahead, a ghost slipping through borders and identities as easily as breathing.
And while the hunt dragged on, our home decayed into something unrecognizable.
A mausoleum.
Elena ate alone in the dining room, seated at one end of a table long enough to host a summit.
I could hear the faint scrape of her fork against porcelain, the quiet clink of cutlery echoing through the cavernous space. She never lingered. Never called for company. The food often went half-touched.
I waited.
Only when her footsteps retreated upstairs—soft, measured, resigned—did I enter the dining room. I took my place at the opposite end, staring at the empty chair across from me like it was an accusation. The food was always cold by then. I ate anyway, mechanically, without tasting a single bite.
Two people.
Husband and wife.
Bound by vows and vengeance, sharing a mansion that rang hollow with absence. The silence between us wasn’t peaceful—it was loaded, volatile, screaming with everything we refused to say.
Some nights, long after she’d closed her bedroom door, I sat alone in the dark and wondered if the silence was killing us both.
And whether, in trying so hard not to lose myself to her...
I was already lost.
I tortured myself with thoughts of her.
They came unbidden, invasive, threading through my mind at the most inopportune moments—during briefings, negotiations, executions.
I imagined her not as she was now—quiet, withdrawn, guarded—but as a map I wanted to memorize completely.
Every scar on her soul.
Every fracture she carried beneath that composed exterior. I wanted to know the names of every bastard who had ever hurt her, every hand that had touched her without permission, every voice that had broken her spirit.
And I wanted them dead.
Not quickly. Not mercifully. I imagined hunting them down one by one, stripping away their defenses, forcing them to look me in the eye as they begged for an end I would delay just long enough for regret to settle into their bones.
The violence of the thought frightened me.
Just as much as the softer ones did.
I caught myself fantasizing about something far more dangerous—sitting across from her at the dining table, not in silence, but in ease.
Sharing a meal. Listening to her speak without flinching, without fear.
Hearing her laugh—really laugh—and letting that sound fill the cavernous emptiness of the house until it no longer echoed like a tomb.
Those thoughts were treason.
So I crushed them.
I reminded myself that this pull toward her was not tenderness—it was obsession, born of proximity and guilt and unresolved vengeance. That if I let it grow, it would shatter the walls I’d built to survive. Walls that kept me untouchable.
Distance was safety.
Distance kept the beast leashed.
Then, at the end of the third week of our marriage, everything changed.
A breakthrough.
One of my most reliable intelligence channels—clean, vetted, uncorrupted—placed her sister in Panama. Alive. Active. Fortified inside a heavily guarded compound on the outskirts of the city, surrounded by mercenaries and layers of security that screamed long-term planning.
I deployed immediately.
Eight of my best operatives. Men I trusted with my life. Men who didn’t make mistakes.
They moved like shadows through the humid streets, heat clinging to them like a second skin.
Surveillance footage showed fleeting glimpses—her sister’s silhouette darting through crowds, slipping into back alleys, vanishing through doors that led nowhere.
She was U.S.-trained, Special Agent caliber, a ghost with intimate knowledge of urban warfare and escape tactics.
She led them deliberately.
Into the underbelly of the city. Into a derelict tunnel system abandoned decades ago, unstable and half-collapsed.
My men followed, methodical, cautious—until the trap was sprung.
She triggered the collapse herself.
The tunnel caved in with a roar that swallowed screams and gunfire alike. Concrete and earth crushed steel and bone. Six of my men died instantly.
The remaining two barely made it out. They clawed through debris with bleeding hands, half-buried, half-conscious, dragging themselves into the open.
They were soaked in blood and dust, shaken to the core, carrying nothing with them but survival—and the crushing weight of failure.
And she vanished.
Again.
When the report reached me, something inside my chest detonated.
Rage exploded like a grenade, shredding every shred of restraint I had left. I tore my office apart—glass shattered, furniture splintered, fists split against stone.
How had she slipped away again? How had she outplayed me so completely?
And then the poison crept in.
Suspicion.
My thoughts turned, inexorably, toward Elena.
There was no way her sister could have known I had men tracking her. Not unless information had leaked. Not unless someone close had warned her.
The timing was too precise. The evasion too perfect.
Had she warned her? Fed her information?
Was she still playing the obedient wife while protecting the monster who had destroyed my world?
I didn’t delegate this. I didn’t trust anyone else with it.
I hacked her phone myself.
Old habits resurfaced easily—encryption layers peeled back under my fingers like skin. And there it was. A message from an unlisted, encrypted number I traced directly back to Panama.
A string of letters and symbols. Code, most likely.
Damning enough.
And Elena’s reply followed beneath it.
“They are coming. Run.”
The words hit me like a sledgehammer to the chest.
Betrayal roared through me, eclipsing every doubt I had ever suppressed.
All this time—while I had held back, restrained my vengeance, spared her the worst out of some warped sense of mercy—she had been deceiving me?
Communicating with her sister.
Listening in on my conversations with my men.
Passing information whenever she could.
Protecting her.
Mocking me.
The realization twisted something inside me beyond recognition. The obsession curdled, darkened, sharpened into something cruel and merciless.