CHAPTER ELEVEN
ADRIAN
Two weeks later
The bright lights of the Pingo Doce hummed the same exhausted repetition as every supermarket in every city she’d fled to. The particular musty sweetness of overripe fruit lingered even as we walked farther away from the produce section.
Serafina filled her cart with the most mundane inventory. She wore a cream linen blouse and dark jeans. Her long hair was pinned loosely at the nape of her neck. She looked like a woman who had come to Portugal to find herself.
But she was a woman who had no idea that another contract had been placed on her life eleven days ago.
She’d chosen Lisbon this time, and I’d chosen to stop pretending I wasn’t following her. I stopped hiding in the shadows a week into her relocation, because there was no longer any strategic advantage to it.
And the pretense had become its own form of cruelty—to her, to myself, to whatever fragile thread that still bound us together.
So I let her see me. In the café across from her hotel. On the tram she took to the university library, where she pretended to read academic books. Outside the pharmacy, where she bought the same brand of ibuprofen she’d always used.
I made my presence a constant. I made myself undeniable.
I knew it confused her, which was why I wasn’t hiding anymore. I liked her confusion; I liked the idea of me consuming her every thought.
My wife hadn’t noticed me yet, trailing after her in the supermarket. She was distracted today.
I shook my head, tsking quietly as I followed just a few steps behind her. Distraction would get her killed.
And that was exactly why I was here.
I reached past her and placed the pack of Always Ultra-Thin into her cart beside the bottle of apple juice.
She had found a fondness for apple juice.
Serafina went still, every muscle in her body clamping down in rigidness before her shoulders dropped and she let out a sigh.
“You’re in my way,” she said, without turning.
Her eyes flickered to the pack of pads in her cart, her lips thinning in frustration. “You’re tracking my menstrual cycle now.” She peeked over her shoulders, her eyes narrowing on me. “That’s genuinely disturbing, Salvatore.”
“Your cycle starts in four days. You always stock up three days before,” I said with a shrug. “I’m saving you a trip.”
“Oh, that’s very husbandly of you.”
“I take my husbandly duties very seriously. Your sarcasm is misplaced.”
A humorless laugh escaped her. “You’ve been following me across continents, to multiple countries and lurking outside my hotel rooms at two in the morning, and now you’re stocking my cart with feminine hygiene products. Do you hear yourself?”
“I hear myself just fine.”
She made a disgusted sound in the back of her throat. “You’re sick.”
“Probably.”
I shoved my hands in my black jeans and walked around, moving to the front of her cart. She gripped the cart handle with both hands, and I watched the tendons in her forearms tighten. She was deciding whether to push past me or to stand her ground.
Her eyes flickered past me and then she sighed, long and hard.
“I’m tired of this, Adrian. You keep following me, and I expect you to take revenge for what I had done to you.
I keep waiting for you to hurt me, but it’s been months, and this game has become exhausting.
I’m no longer enjoying the thrill of the chase, and I don’t think you are either.
So, I want you to leave,” Serafina said.
“Not this supermarket. Not this city. I want you to leave my life. Permanently. The way you should have left it the night I put a bullet in you.”
The wound ached at the mention, a dull phantom pulse beneath my clavicle. I’d kept the scar, like I had kept all my other scars. But I treasured this one specifically because it was a reminder that I had trusted the wrong woman.
“One day soon…” I said, “you’re going to tell me why you did that.”
Her expression didn’t change. “You took every choice I had and—”
“No.” I kept my voice low, even.
Her jaw locked, and she pressed her lips together.
“That’s not why you did it,” I told her. “I know what resentment looks like. I’ve lived inside it my entire life. What you did that night wasn’t resentment.”
Serafina held my gaze. “You don’t know what I feel,” she said.
“No.” I shook my head. “I know what you did. And it wasn’t the act of a woman who’d been forced into a wedding.
Forced unions happen in our world every day.
Women endure them, and they don’t put bullets through their husbands’ chests because they know what awaits them after that fact.
It was something else that drove you to do what you did.
Something you’re carrying that has nothing to do with me or Matteo or any arrangement our families made. ”
For a moment—just a mere second—I thought Serafina might tell me the truth. Her mouth opened. An unfamiliar emotion moved behind her eyes, something raw and unguarded that she usually kept locked behind layers of composure.
Then it was gone, sealed behind the familiar wall of contempt.
She huffed. “Wow, you have me all figured out.”
Goddamn it, her sass would be the death of me one day. Fucking truly.
“But that’s not what matters right now.”
She tilted her head. The gesture was almost feline, calculated and assessing. “What could possibly matter more than the fact that your wife tried to kill you, the mighty Adrian Salvatore… the Reaper?”
“Because someone is trying to kill you.”
The words landed between us like a dropped glass. Her hands stilled on the shopping cart. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t blink. Serafina studied me quietly for a second, her brows slightly furrowed.
Around us, the supermarket carried on as if I didn’t just drop the confession that a killer was on the loose. It was just a typical morning shopping trip in Lisbon.
Except nothing about this was casual for me and Serafina.
“You,” she deadpanned.
A muscle ticked in my jaw at her response. Of course my wife would think that. She had developed a habit of assuming the worst of me. Maybe I was partially to blame since I had, after all, given her enough reasons to think the worst of me.
“Not me,” I said, holding back a sigh.
She narrowed her eyes. “Is it Matteo?”
“Not Matteo either.”
In fact, my brother has been strangely quiet since that fateful night. I still didn’t understand why.
He should have finished the job for Serafina after she left. He could have put another bullet through me. This time, he would have made certain it was fatal. Because Matteo never missed, unlike my wife’s aim.
Instead, he called for the doctor.
He helped our father bury the gossip before it reached the wrong ears.
He… saved my life.
And I knew Matteo well enough to understand that it was very unlikely he did it out of brotherly love.
No, he wanted something else. From me. Or maybe from Serafina.
I didn’t know yet. I still hadn’t figured that out.
But I knew one thing with absolute certainty. He would collect the debt, one way or another. Sooner rather than later.
For now, that problem could wait. We’d deal with it when we went back home.
“Then who?” Serafina asked
“I don’t know yet.”
She laughed again, and the sound was hollow, stripped of any warmth.
“You don’t know.” She repeated my words, making them sound like an accusation.
“You materialize in this grocery store, invade every corner of my life like a festered wound, and now you tell me there’s an assassin coming for me, but you don’t know who sent them. ”
Her voice grew louder with each word as she dropped the pretense, her careful composure.
“I intercepted two assassins already,” I said slowly. “And I killed them both for you. One in Brussels and another in Andorra. There is a third one now, here in Lisbon. I know because I’ve seen him following you.”
To my surprise, this one was different from the others. He was a lot smarter. More patient. He hadn’t made a single careless move. He kept his distance and knew how to disappear into a crowd, making it hard for even me to track him down.
It would have been a delightful challenge if it wasn’t my wife’s life in danger.
“I’m working through it,” I finally finished.
Serafina scoffed. “Do you know who wants me dead? Specifically.”
I opened my mouth to answer, but she cut me off. “A name. A face. Anything that isn’t your convenient, manufactured crisis designed to somewhat make me dependent on you again?”
My jaw clenched. “No.”
She held my stare for several seconds and then nodded once. “Then I don’t believe you.” She said it cleanly, without hesitation, and started pushing her cart again as if to dismiss me. “I won’t be falling for your lies again, Salvatore.”
“You’re a Salvatore now too,” I said, following behind her, my patience thinning with every step. I wouldn’t be dismissed so easily. “We are both Salvatores. Whether you like it or not. And that means your potential death is a problem—my problem—even if you don’t believe that the threat exists.”
She came to a halt abruptly, and I nearly walked into her. Serafina spun around to face me, eyes hardening with fury. “You are the threat in my godforsaken life.”
I stepped closer, my arm snaking forward so I could grasp her delicate wrist in my hand. Her pulse fluttered beneath my fingers. Fast. Furious. Alive.
“You hate me for trying to kill you,” she whispered, trying to wrench her hand free, but I held tight. Not enough to hurt her but a reminder that I could. Her free hand came up and pressed against my chest as she tried to create some distance between us.
“You’ve been toying with me all this time. Why do you care if I live or not? Wouldn’t that be good riddance for you?” Her eyes searched mine. “Maybe you will end up with a more docile wife after my death. Someone more to your liking. Someone who wouldn’t try to put a bullet through you.”
Something dark stirred beneath my ribs.
“You belong to me, Serafina. And I need to keep you alive.”
“Why. Do. You. Care?”