CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SERAFINA
The belt clicked softly as Adrian secured it around his wrists for the third night in a row.
I watched from my side of the bed, the comforter pulled to my chin, as he tested the restraint with a practiced tug, like he had done the previous nights.
My gaze flickered to where the leather had left faint red marks on his skin, but he didn’t seem to mind. It was so strange, watching him bind himself at my saying, watching him relinquish the control he always maintained with stubborn arrogance.
“You don’t have to do that anymore,” I whispered, though we both knew it wasn’t true. The ritual had become our nightly ceremony, his promise to me made tangible.
His pale eyes met mine. “Do you trust me to sleep beside you?”
I pressed my lips together. I didn’t answer.
I didn’t trust Adrian. But not in the way he thought. I strangely believed his words when he said he wouldn’t touch me unless I asked him to. Maybe that was stupid of me. Maybe I was being silly.
I didn’t trust him with my heart. With my truth. With my future.
He burned me once.
And I bore the scars—physically and in every corner of my memories.
I could never trust Adrian Salvatore.
Not in all the ways that it actually mattered.
When I didn’t respond, he spoke for me, his voice a little rough. “Then I still have to do this.” His lips twisted with almost a bittersweet smile.
It made my heart ache. How strange.
This feeling…it was unwelcomed. Unnecessary. Purely a weakness that I didn’t need.
I turned away, listening to the rustle of sheets as he settled beside me. The space between us remained, a narrow canyon of unspoken words.
His breathing eventually steadied into sleep while mine remained stubbornly alert. Every time I inhaled, I was reminded of his presence. Every exhale begged for another breath because somehow… in some unacceptable way… his scent had become almost… addictive.
Damn it all, my fate was sealed.
My downfall was absolute.
It was shamelessly ironic and almost comical. Though nothing about that realization was truly… humorous. It felt more like a death sentence.
Sleep refused to come.
The ceiling stretched above me like a blank canvas. I counted the cracks I had memorized over the past three nights—nine in total, branching like veins across the white surface. I followed their paths with my eyes, tracing them from one wall to the other, and found no answers in their patterns.
There were no answers in anything anymore.
I painted the ceiling with my fears and all the uncertainties that were part of my life now. The peace treaty between Matteo and me was simply ashes now.
I had been lied to.
I had chosen wrong.
And now I had more enemies than I could possibly know.
Every mistake I made had been fatal.
Yet, I found myself still alive, still breathing.
Maybe I was just lucky. Maybe fate had pitied me.
Or maybe it was thanks to the man sleeping beside me.
My husband whom I tried to kill.
The memory ambushed me without warning, the same merciless replay into the moment that had shattered everything.
My index finger twitched.
“Serafina,” Adrian breathed. My name left his lips like a prayer, a mere whisper—soft, almost reverent.
The thundering of my heart echoed in my ears, loud and deafening.
His dark blue gaze held mine, shocked. I waited for the horror, I waited for him to realize that I was his executioner. The damnation he had never seen coming.
But it never came.
The shock in his eyes hardened into determination. Steady. Unyielding.
Adrian Salvatore didn’t question me. He didn’t plead for his life.
He didn’t fear me.
He simply…accepted his fate.
I pulled the trigger.
The gunshot ripped through the room, enormous and merciless. It swallowed every thought, every breath, every other sound that existed.
It consumed everything except the sight of Adrian stumbling backward, one step and then two, his hand pressed to his chest where the blood was already seeping through, darkening the fabric of his shirt.
He collapsed into the armchair behind him and the wood groaned beneath the impact.
His lips parted, and for one slow moment, I thought he wanted to speak. But he didn’t make a sound. No groan. No curse. No accusation.
He wouldn’t even give me the satisfaction of hearing his pain.
Even in death, Adrian remained arrogant.
His eyes never wavered from mine, almost as if he wanted to memorize me. My face. My eyes. Every detail of the woman who had just ended his life.
As though he had already decided I would be the last thing he carried with him into the empty darkness that awaited him.
His lashes fluttered and then his eyes slipped closed. His head tipped back against the armchair, and the blood continued to spill, spreading across Matteo’s ivory carpet into a dark stain, in a shape that was obscenely beautiful—a dark flower, consuming everything it touched.
My finger still rested on the trigger, twitching against the metal.
I felt Matteo’s presence behind me, the heat of him and his expectation, the absolute certainty that I would complete what I had started.
But my finger would not move.
Pain sliced through me instead, a slow, serpentine thing that coiled around my ribs and squeezed until I could barely breathe.
A tear slid down my cheek, and I hated it, hated the weakness of it, hated that my body could betray me so completely while my hand remained frozen on a weapon I no longer had the will to use.
Adrian was dying.
I could see it in the way his chest rose and fell—too shallow, too fast, the rhythm of a body already surrendering.
Six years.
Six damning years since he had taken something from me that I could never reclaim, and now I stood with the means of vengeance warm in my palm and I couldn’t —
I could not.
Matteo took a step toward me. I heard it in the shift of his weight as he closed the distance between us. The sound pulled me out of whatever paralysis had seized me, and I turned.
The gun came with me.
I pointed it at him.
The barrel trembled in my hand, barely, but I held it steady enough that he stopped moving.
His expression changed. It wasn’t fear because Matteo Salvatore did not feel fear, or if he did, he had trained himself out of it so thoroughly that the emotion was like an unused muscle.
His eyes moved from the gun to my face, and I watched him reassess me in real time.
I had made an unexpected move. I was no longer the piece he had positioned.
I wasn’t the pawn he used to his advantage anymore.
And I wouldn’t be discarded so easily.
After all, I had something he needed. Something he had been so desperate for.
Our bargain had been for mutual advantages.
“Serafina,” he warned, eyes hardening on me.
“Don’t,” I said. It surprised me how steady my voice sounded. “Don’t come closer.”
He didn’t.
Matteo stood there, perfectly still. “You’re making a mistake,” he said. Quiet. Controlled. The tone he used when he wanted you to believe he was being reasonable.
But the thing about Matteo was that he had never been truly…reasonable.
“Maybe I am,” I scoffed.
He raised his hands slowly, palms out, and his lips twitched into that arrogant smirk that was so achingly similar to his brother’s—the same curve of the mouth, the same lazy confidence.
But Adrian’s arrogance had always been tempered by something almost human, while Matteo’s carried nothing but depravity.
I saw it now. The evil in him. The rot that made him who he was.
I had missed it before because I had been too focused on surviving, too focused on hiding my truth instead of the man moving the pieces on the chessboard.
“Now, now,” he drawled, his voice dripping with casual amusement, like he was watching a child throw a tantrum. “This wasn’t part of our deal. You can’t kill me. I helped you.”
He didn’t look worried. Not even slightly. The weapon in my hand might as well have been a water gun to him.
Matteo didn’t think I was a danger. He had never thought I was a danger, not even when we bargained, and that was the miscalculation that could cost him everything.
“Put the gun down,” he ordered, expecting the same absolute compliance everyone else gave him.
My lips thinned, pressing into hard lines. “I should have known better than to make a deal with you.”
He chuckled and the sound scraped against my nerves. God, I hated him. “You didn’t have a choice. I found out your truth, remember?”
My body went rigid, every muscle locked into place. “I always have a choice.”
“Not in this world.” He tilted his head, studying me. “Women like you are a commodity. You don’t get to make choices.” His voice dropped, colder now, the amusement hardening into something sharper, more dangerous. He was losing patience. “Now put the gun down. I won’t ask again.”
I didn’t put the gun down.
The silence stretched between us for a long second.
“You know what else wasn’t part of the deal?” My voice came out low, barely above a whisper. “You killing my unborn child.”
As words left my mouth, I felt something physically crack deep inside me. A jagged violent rupture that flooded my chest with everything I had been holding back for weeks.
“You caused my miscarriage, didn’t you?” I hissed. The gun trembled again in my hand. “I heard what Adrian said. I heard what you did to a woman called Beth. I heard everything. How evil can you? How depraved can you be?”
Matteo’s expression didn’t change. But his eyes darkened, a warning that told me I may have pushed too far. A reminder that Matteo was, after all, a dangerous man.
“You hurt me.” The words tasted bitter on my tongue. “That wasn’t part of the deal. You took an innocent life. My baby’s life. That. Was. Not. Part. Of. The. Deal.”
Matteo dropped his arms to his sides, and then he laughed. A soft, incredulous sound, as though I had said something genuinely absurd.
When I only looked at him in confusion, he laughed even harder.
God, he was demented. Truly, fundamentally demented in a way that went beyond cruelty.