CHAPTER ONE
SERAFINA
Three months ago
The air was thick, acrid, burning my lungs with each panicked breath.
I opened my mouth to scream, but only a choked sound came out. My gaze darted around the room, searching frantically, but I couldn’t see anything past the smoke, past the flame.
Fire.
It was everywhere.
It cloaked everything.
It suffocated. It burned. It raged.
I tried to breathe… but I couldn’t.
The flame licked at my upper thigh, right where the flesh was the most tender. The air crackled around me, growing hotter and hotter with every passing second. The heat pulsed, searing through my flesh, burying itself underneath like a poison that ravaged from inside.
I coughed, but it was more like retching that sounded like a slowly dying animal.
I thought I screamed.
I did.
I must have.
My mother always told me good girls didn’t scream, didn’t make a scene.
We were polite. Poised and demure.
But good girls weren’t supposed to be burned alive.
I tasted the bitter flake of ash on my tongue, soft as the first snowflake would be but twice as damning. Cruel and poisonous.
A reminder of death.
Somewhere beyond the walls, I heard him scream, the pitch of his voice piercing through even the snap of burning wood.
He wasn’t screaming for help.
No…
He screamed, knowing that help would never come.
He called out my name, his little frightened voice.
“I’m here,” I croaked, but I knew he couldn’t hear me.
He called out my name again, his sweet painful voice.
I tried to stand, but my legs buckled, pain searing through my body, and I collapsed to the scalding floor again.
“N-no,” I sobbed through the agony.
I tried to crawl—through the flames, through the sticky, impossible air, toward the sound of him.
It hurts.
My pulse thundered in my ears, roaring and drowning every other noise as the skin on my hands and knees grew red. The agony searing through my thigh was almost unbearable.
Everything hurt as everything else around me burned.
The rug was gone, eaten away, and the hardwood floors glowed orange.
My vision blurred.
I can’t breathe.
I reached out, one last time, certain I would find him. Certain I could save him if I just tried hard enough.
I’m coming… I’m here…
I dragged my body closer to the door, where the flames raged…
The closer I got, heat rolled over me in suffocating waves, biting at my skin, scorching my lungs and my flesh tingled violently. The fire radiated against me with such ferocity that my instincts begged me to retreat, but I couldn’t…
I had to save him. I had to get to him. To them.
My skin throbbed beneath the assault, and I let out a wail. Piercing and anguished.
I was going to die.
We were going to die.
He meant for it to happen this way.
For us to die in such a deceptive, cruel manner.
He promised reprieve but then damned us like the monster he truly was.
A broken sob escaped past my throat.
I didn’t want to die.
Please…
The vision swam, the orange inferno disappearing as my world went dark.
I woke up in a full-body spasm, mouth open and gasping in a silent scream. My body was slick with sweat, trembling with the aftermath of my dream.
No, that wasn’t a dream.
It was a nightmare.
A memory.
Real and hellish.
Painful and grievous.
My heart hammered so hard I thought it might shatter a rib. My legs were tangled with the bedsheets, and I desperately tried to break free. I hated this feeling, being trapped. It suffocated me, the feeling that I couldn’t move, like I couldn’t escape.
It was too much of a reminder of that night.
Of the reality I had tried to run away from.
My eyes could barely adjust to the absolute, thick darkness in the room that seemed to consume me in the most terrifying way. I could hear the hum of the mini-fridge, the low tick of the alarm clock next to me, and the sound of the rain pebbling against the glass windows.
My chin wobbled with a silent cry.
I was alive…
My whole body tingled with awareness, but on my upper thigh, a phantom burn flared—so real I expected to see charred flesh, though I knew there was nothing there.
No flames flickering over my skin, no residue of the burn, and no lingering scar.
“Goddamn it.” I pressed a hand over my face. My cheeks were damp with tears and I let out a choked, pitiful sob into my palms.
Fire, always fire. I never dreamed of the start of it—just the middle, the worst part, the part where I was already burning, the part where it pained me the most, the moment where I realized it had all come to an end. A bitter, terrible end.
The clock beside me ticked with slow, officious indifference.
My tongue was coated, thick with the memory of smoke, with the taste of ash. I could still smell it, feel it…
I dropped my hands and peeled myself off the mattress, swinging my legs over the edge. My feet thudded against the worn hardwood floors as I stumbled blindly to the bathroom.
I fumbled with the shower faucet, turning it all the way to cold. The water arched out, splattering against the wall of the shower, and I didn’t waste another second before stepping underneath the ice-cold spray.
I stood there for a long time, the water soaking through my nightshirt and underwear, plastering the fabric to my skin, but beneath it, the burning held on. I could still feel the flames flickering over my flesh, the burnt smell filling my nostrils and settling into the back of my throat.
Another choked sob escaped me.
My hands came up, fingers digging into my scalp, clawing at it. I welcomed the sharp sting, desperate for it to eclipse the pain inside of me.
But no physical pain was enough to silence the ache beneath my ribs.
Inhale. Exhale.
I tried to remind myself to breathe, but the panic that came with the nightmare wouldn't allow me to. My heart thudded against my rib cage, hard and loud, each beat echoing in my ears like the roar of thunder.
The clenching in my jaw tightened, my teeth grinding together as the memory assaulted me again and again.
I didn’t know how long I stood under the cold water but somehow… eventually, my body hollowed into something quieter, a familiar emptiness.
Numb.
The heat of the flames was replaced by the iciness of the water seeping into my pores, burying its coldness underneath my skin, reminding my flesh that whatever that nightmare was, it was just that—a nightmare.
An old, distant memory.
I was no longer burning.
The flames were not real.
Not anymore.
The fire was gone, old and buried in the past.
I was alive.
My jaw locked as I fought back another ugly wail clawing its way up my throat.
I am alive.
But… they weren’t.
It took several long, shaky breaths before I could uncurl my fists from my hair, and my arms dropped limply to my sides.
My fingers trembled as I reached for the faucet and turned off the water.
Silence settled over the small hotel bathroom.
I watched the water spiral into the drain, disappearing into the darkness.
For a moment I could only stare, hypnotized by its seemingly endless descent.
Water and fire.
One consumed, destroying everything it touched.
The other carried away the ashes and washed off the bleeding sins.
Both left behind nothing but ghosts.
I stepped out of the shower and peeled off the soaked clothes from my body, dropping them to the floor with a heavy, wet thud. I wrapped the towel around my body and walked back to the bedroom. I shivered with every step I took, my muscles aching with exhaustion.
They ached with the memory of the past.
Once again, the dream replayed itself in the back of my mind, a shuffling of images that refused to settle.
“Fuck,” I hissed under my breath.
I closed my eyes and exhaled through my nose, counting backward from ten. Pressing both palms to my face, I waited for the shivering to stop. I’d had nightmares before—years of them, overlapping and mutating so they became less like dreams and more like a sixth sense.
This one was different. This one felt like a message, a warning shot, a reminder trying to reassert itself after months of deliberate forgetting.
I had to force myself to forget because I had to play a part.
The perfect daughter and the dutiful wife.
I couldn’t let my past become my weakness.
The memories had to stay buried.
But now…
I could be myself. The real me.
Now, I could finally mourn.
I walked to the mini fridge and took out the last can of Diet Coke and pressed it to my cheek, letting the condensation drip down my neck. The coolness was refreshing.
Inhale. Exhale.
My heart slowed.
My pulse settled into something almost normal.
The panic, the pain… loosened its grip, retreating one measured breath at a time.
I could finally breathe.
I settled back in the queen-sized bed, my gaze sweeping over the small hotel room. It was dainty, not too expensive, but it wasn’t too shabby either. Just a nice, little hotel in the middle of Prague.
Moving across multiple countries and continents over the last six weeks has become both tiring and a little too expensive.
I thought pulling that trigger would mean freedom.
Except now… I was on the run.
Fuck me.
Fuck them.
I switched on the TV, muting the volume, and scrolled through the local news. I didn’t know what to expect, but tragedy was everywhere. A fatal accident that killed a happy family of five. A kidnapping of a newborn. A five-year-old drowning. A teenage suicide.
The anchors delivered each story with plastic precision. God, the world was a cruel and ugly place.
So cruel and ugly that I had once believed that revenge would be gratifying.
My vengeance was never born from spite.
It had been my sole purpose since I was fifteen years old.
I planned. I orchestrated. I waited.
Every sacrifice. Every lie.
For the perfect moment.
For the perfect revenge.
A life for a life.
Adrian thought he had been in control. That it was his plan all along. To force me into a marriage to protect my honor.
Oh, how utterly foolish of him.
He believed I was the gullible one. Falling into his carefully laid trap.
But he fell into my trap.
After all, innocence was the oldest weapon in the world.
And I had worn mine like a second skin. The sheltered Morelli daughter.
The pitiful bride. Every man in this dangerous world of ours had looked at me and seen exactly what I needed them to see—and every one of them underestimated me, especially my husband.
Too bad, he never knew the real me.
When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a doctor. To save lives. To do something meaningful. When I was fifteen, that dream shattered. And from that day on, I dreamed of being someone else. Something else.
Adrian’s destruction.
His killer.
I would be the one to pull the trigger.
And I did.
I shot my husband and left him for dead.
In his story, that made me the villain.
But he wrote himself into mine long before I ever held a gun.
He destroyed my happily ever after before I even knew who he truly was—the devil incarnate.
I thought vengeance would be… satisfying.
But now all I could think of was how incomplete it felt.
How it was never as fulfilling as I had imagined, but I craved it anyway.
And then I thought about the taste of ash on my tongue and how it stayed with me, even after the fire was gone.
Adrian Salvatore deserved everything I did to him.
And I would do it all over again if I had the chance