CHAPTER SIX
ADRIAN
The darkness was my oldest friend, and it has never disappointed me.
Tonight, it served me well.
I leaned against the rough bark of the oak tree, perfectly positioned in the shadow it cast across the hotel parking lot.
From here, I could see her window—third floor, second from the left—without being seen myself.
The angle was deliberate, calculated with the precision my father had drilled into me since childhood.
Never expose yourself. Never give them the advantage of knowing where you are.
The darkness was not empty. It never was.
I had learned that lesson before I could read, before I could tie my own shoes, before I understood that the men who came to our house at night with their low voices and their hands in the pockets of their custom suits were not there to play cards.
The darkness held things. It held watchers. It held secrets.
And tonight, like every night since I’d found her in this small hotel, I was the thing the darkness held.
The light in her room shifted, and my body tensed instinctively. I watched as she appeared at the window, a slender silhouette against the yellow glow of her laptop screen.
Serafina stood at the glass with her arms crossed loosely beneath her breasts, her gaze moving across the street in a slow, methodical sweep that I recognized immediately.
My jaw tightened.
She was looking for me.
I didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.
She knew I was here.
The realization sent a strange, unwelcomed heat through my chest, curling under my ribs. It wasn’t pride or ego. No, it was something far more unsettling… the feeling of being truly seen by someone who shouldn’t have been able to see me at all.
Her gaze swept across the parking lot, paused briefly on my position, then moved on.
She couldn’t see me, of course. I’d made sure of that. I was a ghost, a figment, a phantom lingering just beyond the edge of her perception. Invisible until I chose otherwise.
She pressed her palm against the window. Even from this distance, I could see the set of her jaw, the uncertainty in her gaze, the tension in her shoulders. She was waiting. Testing. Trying to draw me out.
I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.
After a long minute, her expression shifted. It wasn’t disappointment like I had expected—I would have recognized disappointment, would have cataloged it, and would have filed it away with all the other expressions I’d memorized from her face since we had gotten married.
This was something else.
The slight tilt of her chin and the way her lower lip caught briefly between her teeth before she released it… she was being thoughtful, in a very deceptive manner.
Her hand dropped from the window, and her fingers found the hem of her shirt. Serafina slowly played with the hem, almost teasingly before she pulled it over her head in one fluid motion.
Blood roared between my ears, pulse thundering at the base of my throat.
For a moment, every single thought evaded me.
I couldn’t fucking think.
The white cotton fell to the floor behind her, and my mouth went dry. She stood there in nothing but her bra and shorts, pale skin glowing in the dim light.
Something primal and unwelcome stirred in my gut.
My hand tightened against the tree trunk. The bark bit into my palm, and I welcomed it—the small, sharp pain that kept me anchored to this moment, to the reality of what was happening.
What the hell was she doing?
Serafina reached behind her back, unhooking her bra with practiced ease. The straps slipped from her shoulders, and my breath caught in my throat as she let it drop, joining the shirt on the floor.
Goddamn it.
Her perky breasts were perfectly shaped, her nipples tightening in small buds as the cool air brushed against her bare skin.
My arms dropped, but my hands clenched into fists at my sides.
This was deliberate. Calculated.
She knew I was watching—she had to know—and she was putting on a show designed to unravel me.
Her hands moved to the waistband of her pink shorts next, pushing them down over her hips with agonizing slowness. She stepped out of them, then hooked her thumbs into the elastic of her underwear.
I watched, like a goddamn pervert, utterly transfixed, as she slid those down too, until she stood completely naked in front of the window.
Every inch of Serafina was exposed to me.
The gentle curve of her waist, the soft flare of her hips, and the dark triangle between her legs.
My body responded to her display with embarrassing predictability, blood rushing south as my dick hardened against my thigh.
My wife was beautiful in a way that made my chest ache, in a way that had nothing to do with the scar tissue still healing beneath my shirt.
She turned slightly, and my dick twitched again. I saw the curve of her hip, the dip of her waist, and the way her spine curved in the warm light.
Every inch of her was flawless.
Flawless and mine.
Her hand came up and her fingers trailed along her own skin. Slowly and deliberately, tracing the line of her collarbone, then lower, following the slope of her breast without touching her hardened nipples, and moving across her flat stomach.
Every touch on her delicate skin was… purposefully intimate.
A performance.
A provocation.
Serafina was a woman who had deviously calculated exactly what she was doing and how it needed to be done.
And God help me, it was working.
The sound that left my throat was almost animalistic.
My cock was hard. Painfully, stupidly hard, pressing against the front of my black pants with an insistence that bordered on humiliation.
My wife was a mad woman; everything about her was maddening, and she drove me fucking mad.
I pressed the heel of my palm against my hardness through my pants—rough, punishing, the way a man disciplines something that has gotten out of control.
A low groan escaped my throat before I could stop it.
The pressure sent a bolt of sensation through me that was equal parts relief and agony, and I bit down on the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper.
Her hand drifted lower, dipping below her navel. The dim light caught the pale skin of her inner thighs and left the center of her in deliberate shadow.
My hand moved again. I couldn’t stop it. The rough drag of fabric against the length of me was its own kind of torture. I pressed harder, grinding my palm against the ridge of my cock through my pants, and the sound that escaped me this time was closer to a curse than a groan.
It was the knowledge that she was doing this for me, for the watcher she couldn’t find in the darkness but knew was there—that knowledge was what unraveled me.
Serafina was teasing me. Playing with me.
And I was allowing her, standing in the darkness like some pathetic voyeur while my wife—the woman who had tried to kill me—put on a dirty show.
This time, the anger that surged through me was welcomed. Familiar. It burned away the desire licking against my flesh, replacing it with something colder, more manageable.
I dropped my hand from my cock and straightened against the tree, forcing my breathing to slow. Inhale. Exhale.
My heart steadied, and I breathed in, more composed now.
Two can play this game, wife.
One of us would break.
And it wouldn’t be me.
Her hand paused against her skin, right between the juncture of her thighs. Serafina didn’t delve deeper, her touch lingering just… there.
She looked out the window one more time.
Our eyes met across the distance—or they would have, if she could have seen me.
She couldn’t. I knew she couldn’t. I was invisible. I was nothing but a shadow that she had chosen to perform for.
She lingered at the window for another moment, her fingers dancing along the inside of her thigh. Then, with a final glance toward the darkness where I stood hidden, she turned and walked away from the window, disappearing from view.
Just like that. One fluid movement, and she was walking out of the frame, leaving the window empty, holding nothing but the ghost of her shape and the memory of her skin.
I remained motionless, my body still aching with unfulfilled desire, my mind racing with questions I couldn’t possibly answer.
She had left everything to my imagination.
Unfortunately… not just mine.
I turned my head to the left, where I knew he was standing.
My wife’s stalker.
He hadn’t seen me yet. I was sure of it.
He stood thirty feet to my left, tucked into the recessed doorway of a shuttered laundromat, his attention fixed on the window I had been watching, the same one that had held my wife’s naked body minutes ago.
My blood boiled. The thought of him seeing what was meant for my eyes only infuriated me. But he wouldn’t survive the night long enough for it to matter.
I could think of it as his final feast… a last pitiful taste of pleasure before I delivered the final blow of death he deserved.
I took him in, my eyes tracing the length of his solid, tall body. His posture was wrong for a civilian. Too still, too balanced, his weight distributed evenly between both feet in the way of a man who expected to move quickly and swiftly.
His outfit was dark, every piece black and functional. Nothing that would draw attention.
He was taller than I’d initially assessed. Broad shoulders and long powerful legs. His face was angled away from me, but I could see the line of his jaw, the way he held his chin slightly elevated—arrogant and composed. Too confident.
He stepped out of the doorway and began walking.
He moved unhurriedly, cutting across the parking lot toward the narrow gap between the hotel and the adjacent parking structure, an alleyway that ran the length of the building before emptying onto the opposite side street.
I pushed off from the tree and followed.
The passageway opened before us, narrow and filthy. Dumpsters lined the left wall, their lids rusted and askew.
The man walked into the alley without hesitation, and I let him get twenty paces ahead before I closed the distance.