Chapter 5
ELENA
My eyelids fluttered open to a harsh, blinding light.
For a moment, I couldn’t understand where I was.
Sunlight poured over me like molten gold, too bright.
The air carried a sharp blend of ocean salt and something faintly masculine.
I inhaled sharply, my lungs aching as though I had been asleep far too long.
My body felt... heavy.
Disoriented.
I shifted slightly, and the silk beneath me rustled with a soft, delicate whisper.
Cool air brushed against my skin—and that was when the realization hit me.
I was no longer at the altar.
I wasn’t even in a hospital room, as I had expected.
There were no walls.
No ceiling.
Endless, open sky stretched above me, vast and impossibly blue, framed only by a sleek glass railing that separated this place from the drop below.
Panic surged through me in a violent rush.
I shot upright, my heart slamming hard against my ribs.
My eyes darted across the space, searching frantically for anything familiar.
But everything was... foreign.
This was an expansive, luxurious rooftop terrace
Polished teak flooring stretched beneath me, warm under my feet as I swung my legs off the bed.
Modern loungers sat neatly arranged, their clean lines untouched.
Every detail screamed wealth.
This place...
It wasn’t just high.
It felt like floating above reality.
My breath hitched.
I pressed a hand to my chest, trying to steady the violent rhythm of my heart.
Then I noticed the dress—my wedding dress, still on me.
Wrinkled. Slightly torn at the seam where I must have collapsed.
My gaze dropped to my hand.
The place where Vincenzo had forced the ring onto my finger was no longer bleeding, but a faint, angry scar circled the skin beneath it—a permanent reminder etched into flesh.
The ring itself sat there, unmoving, unyielding, as though it had fused to me.
My breath caught.
A quiet, heavy realization settled over me.
I was no longer a woman on the run.
I was a married woman.
Everything came rushing back.
The wedding. The eyes on me.
Vincenzo.
His gaze—cold. Unreadable.
The kiss.
The taste of peach spreading across my tongue.
Then the tightening in my throat.
The burning. The suffocation.
My body giving out.
Then—blackness.
A sharp, ragged inhale tore from my chest.
I spun toward the dark corner of the terrace, where I’d thought I’d glimpsed a shadow moments ago—and there he was.
A figure, unmistakably familiar.
Vincenzo Orsini.
Sitting in the shadows beneath a pergola draped in white jasmine vines, as though he had been waiting for me the entire time.
He lounged in a low wooden chair carved from dark, rich wood, the kind that looked handcrafted.
One leg crossed over the other with effortless elegance.
A newspaper rested in his hands, the pages slightly creased from use.
He looked... calm.
Black-rimmed glasses rested on the bridge of his nose, catching the light.
His dark hair was neatly styled, not a strand out of place.
In the early sunlight, his features were sharply defined—high cheekbones, a strong jawline shadowed with just enough stubble, lips pressed into a firm, unreadable line.
My chest tightened.
“Vincenzo...” My voice came out weak.
But he didn’t respond.
Didn’t move. Didn’t acknowledge me.
Only after a long, suffocating pause did he slowly lower the newspaper, folding it with deliberate precision.
The sound of the paper rustling seemed louder than it should have been in the quiet air.
He set it aside on the glass table.
Then, just as carefully, he removed his glasses and placed them atop the paper.
Every movement was intentional.
Finally, his gaze lifted to mine.
And something inside me went still.
Because whatever warmth I had once remembered from the boy I’d met in that cave eighteen years ago—the boy I’d spent fourteen hours with—was gone.
Completely.
“Vin...” My voice trembled, sharp and raw as I took a hesitant step forward, bare feet whispering against the polished wood. “Did you... try to kill me?”
A flicker—barely there—crossed his expression.
He leaned back slightly, studying me in silence.
My fists clenched at my sides.
“I—I don’t understand!” I forced the words out, trembling but rising in intensity.
“You knew how deadly allergic I am to peach, and you kissed me anyway, your lips carrying it! Why... why would you want me dead? I’ve done nothing to you—I never asked for this marriage, and yet here I am, at your mercy!”
Silence.
That same suffocating, infuriating silence.
My pulse pounded louder.
“Answer me, Vincenzo,” my voice broke.
“Why? What have I ever done to you? Why... why would you abandon your own bride just to marry me?”
I took another step forward, anger overtaking the fear.
“Do you even know what I’ve carried all these years? I never stopped thinking about you. Eighteen years, Vin. Eighteen years wondering where you were, if you were safe, if the world had been kind to you. I searched for you. I prayed for you. I never once forgot you.”
My voice broke. “And now... now that we finally meet again, you do this? You kiss me with peach on your lips—knowing what it could do to me? Tell me, Vin... why? Was it power? Revenge? Or... is this who you’ve become?”
My chest tightened painfully.
Still nothing.
Not a word.
Not even a shift in his expression.
My hands trembled.
“Sit.” His voice finally cut through the silence.
He leaned forward, forearms resting on his thighs, fingers steepled, eyes locking onto mine with that dark intensity.
I didn’t move.
My legs refused.
I needed answers—why he had married me out of nowhere, why he had kissed me with peach on his lips, why he had almost killed me.
He tilted his head slightly, as if weighing my defiance.
Then his words came, slow and menacing:
“It already took everything I have to make sure you wake up at all. You are alive because I allowed it,” he growled, teeth clenched. “So sit the fuck down!”
The velvet in his tone barely hid the steel beneath.
It pressed against me, demanding compliance.
I stiffened.
My chest tightened painfully.
Forcing myself to move, I slid to the edge of the bed, hands gripping the sheets.
I sat, but my gaze never left him, defiant and questioning, every nerve on fire from the mix of fear, and disbelief.
“Today, you become my wife,” Vincenzo said, his dark gaze boring into mine without a flicker of hesitation.
“Legally. Irrevocably. I do not give a damn how foreign that word is to you.”
The words sank slowly, like iron being pressed against my chest.
“You are mine,” he continued, each syllable deliberate. “To command. To punish. To break. To destroy. To end... if I so choose.”
My breath hitched.
“That woman whose place you took at the altar today... she is my first love,” he said, voice low.
“Violet,” he breathed the name, a flicker of something softer passing through, then vanished as his tone hardened.
“She was supposed to stand beside me today. Take my rings. Become my wife.”
“She was my first kiss,” he added, almost casually, as if reminiscing over a trivial memory. “My promised future.”
My stomach churned.
A future. One that I had clearly... disrupted.
“I refused to wed Violet,” he said, his voice dropping to a growl that seemed to vibrate through the air itself.
“Even though she stood there, dressed in white, ready to become my wife—the life she begged for... I denied her. Not because I hated her.”
He stepped closer, and the shadow of his immense frame swallowed mine.
“Far from it. I denied her because you belong to me. Here. Under my roof. Under my gaze. And I will break you, piece by piece. I will make you hurt—vehemently, completely—and every moment of it will happen while you are trapped... entirely in the palm of my hand.”
The words struck me like a fist.
My pulse raced, my breath caught in ragged, shallow gasps.
“What have I done to deserve this?” I demanded, my voice rising, trembling with rage and disbelief. “I wasn’t cruel to you in that cave—not in any way.”
My heart pounded, confusion and anger tangling until I couldn’t tell one from the other.
“Why... why would you want to break me?” I added, my voice cracking. “Why marry me if it was only to ruin me?”
For a long, suffocating moment, he said nothing.
Did nothing.
I froze, staring into the abyss of his dark gaze, terrified of the demon lurking beneath the surface—the part of him that could end me with a word.
Instinctively, I stood and stepped back.
He moved.
One deliberate step.
Then another.
Until the space between us shrank to nothing, until the air itself felt too thin to breathe.
For a heartbeat, he simply stared, silent, suffocating.
And then—
His voice, calm and controlled, carried through the tension like steel:
“You are innocent of your own deeds. Yet the blood in your veins binds you to the man who destroyed me—and that is enough.”
His eyes were dark storms, heavy with anger and ancient hatred.
“Eighteen years ago...” His tone sharpened, colder now, each word a blade. “I was kidnapped from my father’s home in Italy... and trafficked to California.”
My brows knit.
“Guess who kidnapped me?” His voice was rough, every word like a whip across my chest. “Who locked me in darkness, starved me, beat me... over and over, until I was nothing but blood and fear?”
I swallowed hard.
“You found me at that cave,” he continued, his presence suffocating. “Bruised. Broken. Bleeding. And you... you asked who did this, what had happened. But I was too scared. Too terrified to speak. Too haunted to tell the truth.”
He let the words hang in the air, sharp and cutting.
“You kept wiping the blood that wouldn’t stop—flowing, dripping, from between my legs. Even after two hours, it still poured. Do you even know where it came from? Do you know the source of the pain, the bruises that cut deeper than anything you could see?”
My chest tightened. Memories slammed back—