CHAPTER TWO
ADRIAN
Breathe in. Breathe out.
I inhaled deeply, allowing the oxygen to fill my lungs, feeling them expand and then I exhaled.
My heart thudded in my chest, a strong beat against my rib cage. I flexed my fingers and then closed them into tight fists by my sides. My nails dug into the skin of the palms, the pain fleeting but real.
Ah, so that was what it felt like to be alive.
My eyes remained on the windows. Black glass. From the outside, my office was a void—a dark, unreadable surface that gave nothing away. No one could see in. But from the inside, I could see everything.
I watched the woods.
The trees were bare this time of the year—January, the dead, cold heart of winter. The branches clawed at the iron-gray sky like skeletal fingers begging for mercy.
There was no mercy, though.
Not in this world.
Not in the afterlife.
I had long stopped believing in mercy or justice.
The universe wasn’t cruel. You see, cruelty requires intent.
The universe was simply… indifferent to suffering.
It didn’t mourn the innocent or punish the guilty. It merely kept turning, swallowing every fractured scream and every broken prayer without pause.
Pain and loss didn’t arrive all at once. It was a cycle… that chipped away at you, carving out pieces into your flesh until it buried under your bones, until there was nothing more than a gaping hole in your soul. Until there was so much emptiness inside you that it was simply a never-ending pit.
It was just the way of life. It was exactly what I had been taught, and I had learned that lesson a long time ago.
From my father’s cold indifference as he murdered my mother in their marital bed.
From my brother’s ultimate triumph after killing my unborn child and leaving his cold body for me to find.
And my wife’s wrenching betrayal…
Serafina Salvatore—my sweet, sweet wife—shot me.
She pulled the fucking trigger and left me to bleed on my brother’s expensive rug.
My hand drifted, unthinking, to the center of my chest. Just below the clavicle, an inch left of the sternum, the wound had gone from ugly and red to a dull violet, but the flesh beneath still itched with the memory of violence.
My wife’s treachery.
I pressed the scar with two fingers, hard. The pain was both real and not. Some days it hummed like the aftershock of a gunshot; other times, it was only a numb reminder that I’d failed to calculate for her ruthlessness.
That I trusted the wrong woman. That I had allowed myself to be vulnerable to my wife, all the while she had been planning for my ultimate demise with my enemy.
Serafina had aimed for my heart.
She missed. Barely.
She had great aim, almost too good.
It made me wonder if she had really missed my heart or if she had intended for the bullet to land exactly where it did, precisely half an inch away.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
My heart was still beating.
Inhale. Exhale.
I was still alive.
The same hand moved up, from my heart to the chain around my neck.
The chain I wore since I woke up from my coma.
My fingers dangled around the chain before drifting to the small, round metal that hung from it.
It rested in the middle of my chest, right between my two pectorals, always hidden under my shirt.
A reminder that Serafina trusted the wrong man
She trusted Matteo. My wife chose my brother.
My chest rumbled with a low growl at the thought. Fuck, I couldn’t wait to get my hands aroound her pretty, dainty throat. I wanted to look into her eyes as I fucked the betrayal out of her. To remind her that she belonged with me.
To me.
I was her husband, whether she liked it or not, accepted it or not.
Till death do us fucking part.
I grabbed the glass off my desk, bringing it to my nose. I breathed in the scent of whiskey, enjoying the smell of it before taking a sip. It burned down my throat, and I grinned.
Fuck, it felt good to be alive.
I could still recall the tang of disinfectant, the sticky shroud of blood drying in my ribs, the low voices arguing over whether to call a surgeon or just finish me off right there.
I had been unconscious for most of it, but the body never truly forgot.
It kept a running tally.
It stored each memory within its flesh, carved each betrayal into its bones, and wore every scar like a confession no one else could read.
***
I heard the sound of his boots against the hardwood floors in the hallway before he knocked on my door. It was a short triple rap, then a pause, then two more.
“Enter,” I said.
The heavy oak door swung open without a sound. In the window’s reflection, his reflection materialized. First Rocco’s broad shoulders filled the frame, then I saw his lips tight with a grim line. He stepped inside my office, the weight of him settling into the silence.
“Evening,” he said, his voice a low gravel in the quiet room before he closed the door behind him.
I nodded, eyes still on the dark windows. Rocco carried a folder in one hand. “What have you found?”
He crossed the room in three large steps and set the folder on my desk. “The trail went cold after Casablanca.”
My hand tightened around the glass at his words. “Morocco?” I asked.
I turned around to face him as he opened the file with careful fingers. Inside were photos, a stack of printed emails, and some pages covered in his precise, all-capitals handwriting.
He laid out the photos in a grid, top to bottom.
And there she was.
My wife.
Ethereal as I remembered.
In one photo, Serafina was wearing a loose headscarf and sunglasses big enough to cover half her face. It looked like she was in a street market, and she was trying very hard to fit in.
Another photo—Serafina ducking into a taxi.
Serafina sitting at a small table outside a cafe, an iced coffee in her hand.
Every photo looked like a still from a surveillance film.
And in none of them did she look back.
So careless. Too naive and unguarded.
Rocco tapped one photo, then another. “First in Tangier. Two weeks ago. Next is Marrakesh, four days after. Nothing since.”
“My dear wife seems to be enjoying a nice world tour,” I drawled, eyes still on the photos.
I can’t take my fucking eyes off her.
Goddamn it, I was pathetic.
Rocco shrugged. “She’s smart.”
Indeed, she was.
“Not smarter than me.” I sipped my drink. “She’s too reckless in her escape, almost like she’s not trying hard enough.”
In some perverse subconscious, I wondered if she wanted to be found.
I wondered if she was enjoying knowing the fact that I was coming for her, chasing her until I would eventually bring her home.
I had not forgiven Serafina for shooting me. I had also not forgiven her for running. The two things were indistinguishable in my mind.
I was not a sentimental man. I didn’t believe in fate, or justice, or love the way poets wrote about it. But there was something in the ache in my chest, the shrapnel of Serafina’s bullet burrowed close to the bone, that made me almost zealous about finding her.
“Well,” Rocco rumbled, the low light catching the faint white scar that bisected his upper lip as it tugged into a half-smirk. “She did shoot you and—”
The glass in my hand paused halfway to my mouth. “Finish that sentence,” I said calmly, my eyes narrowing on him before taking another slow, deliberate sip of my whiskey. “I dare you.”
That stupid smirk was gone just as quickly. He raised his hands, a gesture both placating and theatrical—a mock surrender. The knuckles of his hand were freshly scabbed. Either from the pit fight or… he needed answers from someone who wasn’t too keen on talking. “I wouldn’t dare.”
“You were thinking it,” I accused, but only half-seriously.
Rocco met my gaze, his dark eyes holding mine for a beat too long.
He was one of the few men who could do so…
look me in the eyes and not cower. We had stood next to each other, slick with rain and blood, in alleyways and warehouses that smelled of rust, fear, and death, since the night I took the title of Capo.
We had bled in the same gutters, extracted confessions from men who were less than rats, their pleas still echoing in my ears.
Rocco, the bastard son of my father’s Consigliere, was more than a soldier. He was the archive of my history, the one man who knew the weight of every soul I’d sent to hell.
Unknowingly, he was the anchor to my chaos. The keeper of every secret that mattered.
Well, most of them anyway.
“Do you want me to keep looking?” Rocco asked.
There was a slow pulse at the center of my chest, right where my scar was. “What do you think she’ll do next?”
He thought about it for a moment, his face moving with something almost like pity in the lines of his mouth. I didn’t know why I asked him that question.
He didn’t know Serafina, not in the ways that mattered.
Rocco hadn’t been here when I married Serafina or during our brief marriage. I had sent him to Canada instead, hunting a man who had stolen several million dollars from one of the Salvatore’s laundering operations before disappearing without a trace.
He thought a new country and identity would keep him alive.
It hadn’t.
Rocco came back two days after I woke up from my coma, so he only knew the shortened version of my marriage to Serafina.
“She’ll keep moving.” He shrugged. “Going to places no one would expect. She’s smart enough to figure out that she can’t stay in one place if she wants to evade the consequences of her actions.”
That I already knew.
Serafina had long realized that staying in one spot for too long would make catching her easier. That was why she kept moving every few days, staying no longer than a week in one particular city.
I trusted Rocco to find her. He knew people; he had eyes and ears in many places, in many countries. I knew he would eventually track her down, and this time, the trail wouldn’t go cold.
But I wasn’t enjoying the thrill of the chase anymore as I stayed sitting in my house, behind these goddamn walls, while my wife was running across continents.
No… this wouldn’t do anymore.
“You can stop the search.”
Rocco’s brow furrowed in confusion. “But—”
“I will find her.” I rolled my head from side to side, the vertebrae in my neck cracking as some of the tension bled away. “It’s been a bit boring staying here while everyone else does the job of finding her. She’s my wife, after all. This is my duty.”
“You’ve been healing.”
I waved a hand dismissively. “I am healed.”
It had been six weeks since Serafina shot me.
My heart had stopped once, only briefly…
and the doctor kept me under for a week while my body decided whether or not it wanted to continue.
Dr. Woods insisted I was incredibly lucky the lack of oxygen hadn’t left me with permanent brain damage after my heart stopped.
As if waking up with a hole through my chest and a wife who wanted me dead qualified as good fortune.
Yeah, lucky… What a fucking joke.
When I woke up, everything had come back to me like a collection of broken clips, a looped tape. The sound of the gunshot, the pain spreading through my chest, the smell of blood.
And the look on Serafina’s face.
Her beautiful, cold hazel eyes.
The slow, merciless smile on her pretty lips.
I remembered how exquisite she looked.
Ethereal and deadly.
“She’s learning fast,” Rocco finally said after a second of silence. He closed the folder. “She paid off a girl in the Tangier market. The girl said she wanted to be invisible.”
“She can run as much and as far as she wants,” I said, my voice low and dark. “I’m good at finding people.”
I turned back around, facing the windows once again.
Rocco understood that I was done with the conversation. He left the folder on my desk, and I watched in the reflection as he quietly left my office. The door closed behind him with a soft click, and I was once again alone in my office. In the silence that Serafina had left behind.
In the darkness of the night, my eyes landed on Nyx first as she pranced around the perimeter of the estate and then her two brothers following behind her, Orion and Shadow.
Nyx paused at the far edge of the grounds and lifted her nose to the air, trying to catch the scent of something she wouldn’t find. Looking for someone who had left them behind.
My Dobermans had realized that Serafina was missing, that she wasn’t home anymore. They liked her, had accepted her as a part of the pack… and now, they were confused by her absence.
It was time to bring my wife home. For all of our sakes.
“The girl said she wanted to be invisible.”
I smiled despite myself.
My beautiful wife believed she escaped me; she believed she could disappear.
How adorable.
She had recklessly forgotten one simple truth.
The world might lose her.
But I never would.
She could change her name, cross oceans and continents, and bury herself beneath thousands of unfamiliar faces, and I’d still find her. Her attempts to vanish were ultimately futile.
Serafina would never be invisible to me, no matter how hard she tried.
I’d know which one was her shadow in a frenzied crowd. I’d recognize the rhythm of her heartbeat in complete darkness.
She wasn’t running from me.
She was only delaying the moment I had my hands on her again.
I’d built a bloody empire on finding people who didn’t want to be found.
And yet Serafina thought I wouldn’t find her.
How. Fucking. Adorable.
The crystal glass shattered in my fist, and blood trickled between my fingers.
Let’s see how well you can play the game, wife.