CHAPTER FOUR
ADRIAN
The whiskey burned down my throat.
I should have stopped after my second glass, but now I was on my third.
I took another sip, and this time, it burned the way a lie did… slow at first, and then all at once.
Just like my marriage had been a lie.
I sat at the far end of the bar, where the light barely reached. Men like me belong in the shadows. The place was called Le Fant?me—The Ghost—and it lived up to its name. A narrow, low-ceilinged room buried beneath an old bookshop on a cobblestone street in Brussels.
The air smelled of stale beer and cigarette smoke embedded in the walls. A jukebox in the corner played a low, mournful jazz tune, the saxophone weeping into the dimness.
Well shit, this was depressing.
I ran a hand over my face, sighing. How the fuck did I find myself here, in this situation?
There was a mix of people… a few locals hunched over their beers at the tables along the wall, a couple of American students laughing too loudly near the door, a businessman in a rumpled suit with a glass of something clear at the opposite end of the bar.
All conversations were swallowed by the thick, heavy atmosphere.
I turned the glass slowly between my fingers, watching the amber liquid catch the light.
I had been here for two hours. Maybe three. The third glass of whiskey was barely touched. I didn’t drink to get drunk anymore—I drank because the burn in my throat was the only sensation I could reliably feel without it being tied to her.
Thud.
Just the thought of her, my wife, was a landmine.
I couldn’t think of Serafina without the scar on my chest throbbing in response, a phantom pulse that synchronized with my heartbeat like a second, broken organ.
I had been in Belgium for almost two weeks after chasing whispers and dead ends.
Serafina was here; I sensed it in my bones.
I could feel it, her scent lingering in the breeze, like a physical touch on my skin.
I could feel her.
But she was really fucking good at playing hide and seek. My stubborn wife kept slipping through my fingers like smoke. Goddamn it.
I lifted the glass and let the whiskey, a single malt from Islay, roll across my tongue before swallowing. It tasted of smoke and peat. I liked the bitterness.
The burn in my throat reminded me that I was still here, still breathing, still capable of feeling something that wasn’t grief or rage or the hollow, aching absence of the woman who had put a bullet in me.
The stool beside me scraped against the floor.
I didn’t look up. I didn’t have to.
I’d learned to read people by their presence alone—the weight of their body, the cadence of their breath, the scent that preceded them. This one smelled like vanilla and something floral, too sweet, too expensive, and deliberately applied.
A woman. Young. And she was too close for my liking.
Her scent invaded my space, and I didn’t fucking like that.
Her hand landed on my shoulder, her fingers light, soft, and feminine. Presumptuous.
My body went rigid.
Every muscle locked, every nerve ending firing at once, and I turned my head slowly, fixing her with a look that had made hardened men piss themselves in my soundproof basement.
Her breath hitched and her hand retreated immediately, as if she’d been burned.
Good.
She was pretty in the way that most women who approached strange men in bars were pretty… carefully assembled, from the dark waves of her hair to the red of her lips to the way her dress clung to curves; she clearly wanted to be noticed.
Her eyes were brown, warm, and slightly wide with the realization that she’d miscalculated into thinking that I would be… interested… in her.
The thought almost made me laugh.
“I’m not interested,” I said. My voice was flat, stripped of anything that could be mistaken for warmth. I didn’t have time for some stupid misunderstanding in a stupid fucking bar.
I let my gaze drop to her left hand, where a gold band sat on her ring finger, catching the dim light of the bar. That rock was huge. She hadn’t removed her ring. She didn’t even try to hide it. “Especially not in married women,” I finished drily.
She didn’t flinch at my subtle accusation.
Instead, she leaned her hips against the bar, a coy smile playing at her lips. There was a particular defiance in her expression, and it annoyed me.
“Then why are you sitting alone in a bar at midnight?” she asked, her voice carrying a challenge that was almost admirable.
Almost. She reached out, her finger sliding over my wedding band on my left hand.
“If your wife satisfies you, you’d be home, in bed with her, instead of drinking by yourself at a sleazy bar. ”
My fingers clenched around the glass. Her words landed with quiet, painful precision. It found the fracture under my ribs, digging itself there, splitting the wound open once again.
I thought of Serafina… her hazel eyes, her dark hair spread across my pillow, the way she tasted when I kissed her. The way she had looked at me when she pulled the trigger—beautiful and merciless—an angel of death. Callous and ruthless. But ethereal nonetheless.
My jaw tightened, the muscles in my neck corded with the effort of keeping my expression neutral.
I couldn’t touch another woman.
That was the truth of it, the ugly, pathetic truth that I carried like a second scar beneath the one she’d given me.
Serafina had shot me, betrayed me, left me bleeding on my brother’s floor, and still—still—my body rejected any contact that wasn’t hers.
Other women’s touch felt wrong against my skin.
Their scents were wrong. Their warmth was wrong. Their voices were wrong.
Even the idea of letting someone else close enough to touch me made something in my chest recoil violently, a reflex I couldn’t override no matter how much I told myself that she didn’t deserve my loyalty or my fidelity. Yet my goddamn body refused to move on.
My wife had ruined me in ways that went beyond the physical scar she left me with.
She had rewired something fundamental, something that made the thought of another woman’s touch feel like a betrayal—not of her, but of me. Of whatever broken, twisted thing I had become in her presence.
It was pathetic.
It was maddening.
Fuck, she was maddening.
Goddamn it, I wanted to hate her.
I needed to hate her.
And I did. I fucking did. I fucking hated her.
The woman’s hand drifted up my arm again, slowly, deliberately, seductively. “It’s such a shame, a handsome man like you, forced to be alone and loyal.”
The last piece of restraint inside me finally snapped.
I felt it like it was something physical living inside me, contained, and now it cracked, splintering the last of whatever control I had of it.
“Walk away,” I uttered quietly, the words coming out measured, controlled despite the violence stirring inside me. “You don’t want to know what happens when I’m pissed off.”
Something in my voice must have convinced her; she must have recognized the genuine danger beneath the calm, because the smile plastered on her face faltered, and she straightened. Her bravado crumbled. Her lips parted, then closed.
She took a step back, then another, and turned without another word, her heels clicking against the worn floor as she retreated to wherever she’d come from.
I exhaled slowly, turning back to my drink. The whiskey stared up at me like a dark, accusing eye.
“That’s no way to treat a lady, Salvatore.”
The voice was familiar. Deep, rough, and tinged with the particular cadence of a man who had seen many dark, terrible things.
The stool beside me scraped again.
This time, the presence was different. Heavier. Male. The scent of cologne was woodsy and aggressive, masking the faint metallic tang of something I recognized immediately.
Blood.
Old blood that stayed in the fabric no matter how many times you washed it.
I didn’t need to look to know who it was. The voice confirmed it before I even turned my head. I knew he had been there, watching me for some time now, since I had set foot in this bar.
I had waited for him to approach me.
I huffed at his ridiculous words. “You’re the last person to speak on how to be a gentleman.”
“Adrian Salvatore,” he drawled, chuckling darkly. “Drinking alone in a Belgian bar. How the mighty have fallen.” He settled onto the stool with comfortable arrogance.
Vincenzo, heir to the Castellano family, was never known for asking before he intruded.
I turned to face him.
Vincenzo was massive, built like he had been specifically designed for violence—broad shoulders, thick chest, his arms straining against the fabric of a black button-down that cost more than most people’s rent.
He was tall, taller than me by at least two inches, at six-foot-five.
And he carried every pound of his bulk like armor, like a weapon he was perpetually ready to deploy.
His face was square-jawed and handsome despite the damage.
He had the face that made anyone look twice, not because of its perfect symmetry but because of what had been done to it.
The scar dominated his left side. It ran from just below his temple, cutting diagonally across his cheekbone, through the corner of his mouth, and ending at the edge of his jaw.
The tissue was thick and raised, pale against his olive skin.
The scar came from a blade wielded with intent—not a clean cut but a sawing, vicious drag meant to maim rather than kill.
It pulled his left lip into a permanent half-sneer, giving him an expression that hovered between amusement and menace even when his face was at rest.
He wore it like a crown.
Like the scar was proof of his survival, of his toughness, of the fact that whatever had tried to destroy him had failed.
His dark eyes gleamed with the particular madness that had always lurked behind them, a flickering instability that made most men keep their distance and made Vincenzo himself believe he was untouchable.
No man was untouchable.
“What are you doing in Belgium, Vincenzo?” I asked, keeping my voice even.