CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ADRIAN
Serafina slept, and I watched.
She was so beautiful, my chest ached.
I watched because I couldn’t bear to take my eyes off her.
She was so broken, my chest throbbed.
The hotel suite was quiet, the AC a soft white noise that masked the city outside.
We moved three hours ago, into a new hotel, far away from the one she had been in before. The new suite occupied the top floor of the Four Seasons Ritz, a building with high security, a private elevator that required a key card and two exits on this floor I’d already mapped.
My wife should have been in a hotel like this in the first place. Not in whatever sleazy lodging she had been escaping to.
I should have stopped her stubborn, reckless action way before.
I gave her the freedom to run…
If I hadn’t, none of this would have happened. Goddamn it.
I sat in the armchair beside the king-sized bed, my elbows on my knees, my hands hanging loose between them. The blood was gone from my skin, I’d scrubbed it raw in the shower, the water scalding as I watched it swirl pink down the drain.
My hands were clean, but I could still feel the blood on them. Beneath my nails. In the creases of my knuckles. A phantom warmth that no amount of soap could strip away.
Serafina’s temple was red, the skin swollen and angry where her attacker’s fist had caught her. A bruise was already forming beneath the surface, darkening to a reddish pink.
Her left cheek was worse, almost purple already, the bruise spreading from her cheekbone down toward her jaw in a mottled, ugly stain. The skin was tight and shiny where the swelling had begun.
I memorized every bruise like I catalogued everything else about her—compulsively. Obsessively. Intinctively.
I could see the faint impression of knuckles under the discoloration. He had hit her hard enough that the bone beneath could have fractured but she was lucky enough the angle of the blow saved her.
I looked at her hands where they lay against the white duvet, fingers slightly curled into loose fists. The nails on her left hand were chipped and broken.
She fought him with those hands.
My wife had clawed at his wrists, raked his skin, driven her thumbs into his eyes with a feral desperation that made my lungs cave in my chest every time I thought about it.
Her left fingers were swollen, the knuckles puffy, from when she’d punched him. Serafina had broken his nose. My wife, who weighed merely a hundred and fifteen pounds, had broken an assassin’s nose, who was much bigger, much taller than her, with her bare fist.
Pride and guilt twisted together in my gut, a poisonous knot that seemed to take root there. It burrowed right into the crevices of me, spreading its venom.
I should have been there sooner.
It was all I could think of since the moment I had kicked the door open and seen his hands around her throat.
I was three minutes too late.
Three minutes.
Three minutes during which she’d been pinned beneath a man twice her size, fighting for the very breath she needed to stay alive.
Her broken sobs still echoed in my ears.
Not the sounds she had made during the attack, those had been silent, choked off by his hands.
But the sounds that came after, when the adrenaline drained and the terror took its place.
The raw, fractured sounds of a woman who had looked death in the face and survived only because I’d arrived in time to pull it off of her.
Fuck, my chest hurt, the pain spreading under the flesh and bones. A dull, persistent ache that had nothing to do with the bullet scar under my shirt.
The image of her flashed in front of my eyes, the way her body had curled into itself against that wall, shaking, her fingers pressed against the bruises on her throat. As if she could hold the memory of his hands away from her.
I had killed men without flinching.
I had watched them bleed out on concrete and felt nothing but the cold satisfaction of a job completed. But the sight of my wife, bruised, trembling, her eyes wide with a terror I had never seen in them before—that undid something in me.
I leaned back in the chair and my eyes closed for half a second before I opened them again to stare at Serafina’s sleeping form.
Rocco had handled the body.
I called him to Lisbon six days ago, a decision driven by an instinct I couldn’t quite understand. The third assassin was different from the others. Smarter, more patient, operating with a discipline that had unnerved me.
I knew I might need backup. I knew if something went wrong, I couldn’t afford to be the one dealing with the aftermath while Serafina needed me.
I wished my instinct had been wrong, but unfortunately, I was right.
Rocco had taken one look at the lifeless body, then at Serafina huddled against the wall, and said nothing.
That was Rocco.
He didn’t ask questions that didn’t need asking. He didn’t offer senseless comfort.
He simply moved the body, and arranged the new hotel while I took care of my wife. The cleanup had been thorough because Rocco has always been thorough in everything he did.
Serafina hadn’t let me near her at first.
She sat in the corner of the small bathroom for the first hour, her back against the tile, her arms wrapped around her knees, staring at nothing. I remained on the floor across from her, close enough to reach her but far enough that she didn’t feel cornered.
It took three hours…for her to let me touch her.
Three hours of sitting on that bathroom floor as I watched my wife fall apart without me being able to do anything about it.
But Serafina was strong in ways I could never understand. The silent kind of strength that no one really saw unless you paid careful attention.
I watched her fall apart and then reassembled herself in fragments, each piece more fragile than the last. But she did it, she held herself together, on her own until she was ready for me.
When she finally reached for me, her trembling hand extending across the wet tiles, I wrapped my fingers around hers. I took her hand in mine, because I had been desperate to touch her, to feel her skin against mine, to hold her.
I needed it.
I had needed it more than I could have known, more than I could ever understand.
When she finally let me, I carried her from that hell, wrapped in a blanket and cradled in my arms, into the car and then into this hotel suite, where I would keep her safe.
Serafina stirred.
Her breathing changed first, becoming shallower, more erratic. Her fingers twitched against the duvet as a low pained whimper escaped her.
I straightened in the chair, my body going still as I recognized the threat. Not her, never her. The thread lived inside her now, and I couldn’t fight it for her.
Her head turned on the pillow., left and right, the movement restless and agitated. Her brow furrowed even as she remained asleep, her lips parting, and the sound that came out was thin and reedy, the ghost of a scream.
“Serafina.” I said her name quietly, not wanting to startle her but needing her to hear my voice.
She didn’t wake.
Her thrashing started small, a twitch in her shoulders and knees, before her whole body seized. Her back arched off the mattress, her hands clawing at the emptiness in front of her face.
Her mouth opened with a soundless scream.
“Serafina.” I leaned forward, my hand hovering above her shoulder.
I didn’t touch her. I remembered what had happened the last time I reached for her—the way she had flinched, a full-body recoil.
But I couldn’t let her drown in this nightmare, in the memories that haunted her.
My fingers brushed against her shoulders, a featherlight touch. “You’re safe. Wake up, Serafina.You’re dreaming.”
Her eyes flew open.
They were unfocused, glassy, her pupils wide. She looked at me and she screamed, a raw, shattering scream that tore from her depth of damaged throat.
Serafina wasn’t seeing me. I knew that. The terror in her eyes wasn’t directed at me.
Still, it pained me.
Her terrifying screams… her uncontrollable tears… her crippling fear.
It fucking killed me.
Her hands flew to her neck, fingers pressing against the bruises there. She released a small, fractured whimper and then a pained moan.
“Serafina.” I kept my voice low, steady, as if I was speaking to a wounded animal. “It’s me. It’s Adrian. You’re safe. Look at me.”
Her eyes found mine, and for a moment, just a small heartbreaking second, the terror receded.
“Look at me, Princess,” I repeated. “Just look. It’s me. It’s only me.”
Recognition flickered in her eyes and her expression shifted from blind panic to mindless…rage.
At me.
My hand dropped from her shoulders as she scrambled backward on the mattress, the movement graceless and desperate. Her eyes never left my face.
“You’re awake,” I said. “You’re in a new hotel. We moved, remember?” I licked my lips, watching her carefully. “Do you remember?”
Serafina didn’t answer.
Her chest heaved, each breath a visible struggle against her bruised throat.
I stayed where I was and didn’t make any sudden moves. My hands remained on my knees, visible to her and empty. I wanted her to see that I wasn’t holding anything, that I wasn’t a danger to her.. That I may have beaten a man to death but I would never, ever be a threat to her.
“Can you breathe?” I asked. “Take it slow. One breath at a time.”
Her mouth opened. And then closed. She inhaled shakily. “You.” The words came out hoarse and barely audible, scraped raw from the inside of her throat.
Her eyes dropped to my hands. My knuckles were still swollen, the skin split in places. She stared at them for a long moment, before realization slowly dawned on her.
She was off the bed before I could react, launching herself sideways. She gasped, clutching her left injured hand against her chest, but she didn’t stop. She backed away from the bed, from me, until her shoulders hit the wall beside the window.
“Serafina—”
“This is y-your fault.”
My heart thundered against my ribcage at the venomous accusation. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.