CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SERAFINA
“You are a monster.”
The words left my mouth and hung in the fragile air between us, sharp and final. Accusatory. Adrian didn’t flinch. He didn’t even blink. Those dark, devastating blue eyes—the same ones I’d first seen through a cracked door six years ago—held mine.
And suddenly I was fifteen again.
The cake sat on the kitchen table, lopsided and frosted in my father’s typical shade of pink.
It was always too dark because he never measured the food coloring right.
One candle burned at the center, its flame steady and small in the quietness of our two-bedroom house.
The whole place smelled like vanilla and butter cream frosting.
I loved that smell. The cozy smell of…home.
“Blow it out,” my father said.
I leaned forward and blew out a soft breath, extinguishing the flame in a single try. A thin thread of smoke curled upward and dissolved.
Their soft claps vibrated against the cream walls of the kitchen. “Make a wish, sweet girl.”
I didn’t have to think twice about the wish.
It was the same one I had every year, the same wish I knew with utmost certainty that it was the only thing I ever wanted, I ever cared about in my life.
“I wish to be a doctor,” I said. It was the only future I could imagine that felt entirely my own, that I felt I had control over.
Caleb, cross-legged on the floor with his Nintendo balanced on his knees, snorted without looking up. “You’re not supposed to wish out loud or it won’t come true.”
I shrugged. “All my wishes always come true.”
That was partially true but I knew how hard I was working toward my future. I was studying hard to become what I wanted to be. I skipped a grade, I was the best student in my class…in my school, actually. Exemplary.
My father had taught me one thing and it was that nothing ever just simply handed to us. Nothing was just coincidence or luck. No, if we wanted something, we had to work for it. Tirelessly. Relentlessly. Until it became ours.
My father’s hand came up and tucked a strand of brown hair behind my ear.
His fingers were warm and slightly rough, the way they always were, calloused from whatever work he did during the day that he never really talked about.
“You will do great things when you grow up,” he said quietly. “Your mother would be proud.”
I looked past him, to the mantel above the small fireplace we never used. The photograph sat in its silver frame, the only one we had. My mother, blonde and luminous, smiling with her chin tilted up the way I’d been told I did when I was being stubborn.
I missed her in the way you miss something you’ve never really had—a hollow, shapeless ache that my father had spent years filling with his own careful, constant love.
Caleb was only a few months old when we lost her, and I had just turned nine. Her death hadn’t truly registered with me then. I didn’t really understand what it meant at first. To lose a mother. To grow up without her.
But I remembered her. Her face and the sound of her genuine laughter, I remembered the way she made my favorite omelet. I remembered the vanilla birthday cakes she’d make for me, the same one my father had tried to replicate every year since she was gone.
He had never let us feel her absence. He had made sure of that.
I picked up my fork and was about to take the first bite of cake, the corner piece, always the corner piece, because the frosting was thickest there and it was my favorite part, when the knock came.
My father’s brows furrowed at the sound before he stood up and went to answer the door. But when he opened the door….
His whole body went completely still.
For a fraction of a second, his face did something I’d never seen it do before—a harsh flicker in his expression, quick and cold and then slowly his face went pale beneath his tan. The color drained so completely that the small scar near his jaw stood out white against the skin.
I set down my fork.
Caleb didn’t look up from his game. The electronic chirping of Mario jumping over something filled the kitchen, cheerful and oblivious.
My father swallowed hard, his throat boobing roughly and he positioned himself so that his body blocked the entire entryway to the living room. Behind him, I could see nothing.
“Why don’t you take your brother inside the bedroom?” he said, speaking to me without turning. His voice was steady, all too steady. “I need to speak with these gentlemen privately.”
I stood. My legs felt strange under me, disconnected. A part of me didn’t want to leave but I knew that I had to listen to my father. “Come on, Caleb,” I said.
He groaned. “But I’m at the castle level—”
“Now.” The urgency in my voice must have reached him, because he looked up then, his small face scrunched in annoyance.
Caleb was never a stubborn kid, so he stood and shuffled past me, Nintendo clutched against his chest. I followed him down the short hallway to the bedroom we shared, closing the door behind us.
The bedroom was small. Two single beds separated by a nightstand, a window that overlooked the alley, a dresser with a mirror that had a crack in the corner, and my desk in the corner of the room. It was perfect for us. Cozy.
Caleb dropped onto his bed and immediately resumed his game, the tinny music filling the room as though nothing at all was wrong.
It wasn’t…
Everyone was fine.
But why did my father’s face pale like that?
I had never seen that expression on his face before… such…fear.
I paced. Three steps from the door to the window, three steps back.
My heart felt strange in my chest, hammering fast and heavy, like the wings of a caged hummingbird, trying to escape.
Something was wrong.
I didn’t know what, but I felt it. My body knew. My body had always known things before my mind caught up.
I stopped pacing and looked at Caleb, who was mashing buttons with complete absorption and then I went to the door.
I turned the handle slowly.
The door opened without a sound. My father had oiled the hinges himself, one of his countless small acts of maintenance that kept our world running smoothly. I pulled it back just enough. A sliver of light until a wedge of the living room was visible through the gap.
Three men stood in our living room.
The two of them were large in their frames, dressed in dark jackets that strained across their chests. They held themselves with a particular stillness, like they were stone statues of men who were waiting for instruction.
But it was the one in the center who held my attention.
He was several inches taller, his shoulders broader, though his overall build was leaner than the other two. He wore a dark suit that fit him like a second skin—seamlessly, perfectly, without effort, as though it had been tailored just for him.
His hair was dark, falling across his forehead in a way that should have looked careless but it didn’t.
His features were sharp, his angular jaw carved with definitions that should have only existed in books, and there was a small scar on his upper lip, pale and thin, that caught the light when he moved.
He was… handsome. That was the first thing my fifteen-year-old brain registered and that embarrassed me even in the moment.
But he was… handsome, in a dangerous way that dangerous men were.
Because I knew he was dangerous, everything about him screamed it.
His eyes were dark blue, stormy. Cold like the Arctic. He looked around the room with calculated patience, taking in everything—the furniture, the photographs, the birthday cake still sitting on the kitchen table behind my father, uneaten.
Those eyes missed nothing.
“Witness protection, eh?” he drawled casually.
His voice was a low rumble, carrying what I caught was a faint trace of amusement. And then he chuckled—a dry, quiet sound that held no warmth.
“That seems... inconvenient.” He tilted his head slightly, studying my father with cold indifference. “Very unlike you, Angelo.”
He paused, lifting a brow questioningly.
“Or should I call you Anthony?”
My father said nothing. I could see the back of his neck, the way the muscles had gone taut. His hands hung at his sides, open and trembling. The slightest tremor that anyone could have missed but I saw it.
I had never seen my father afraid before. Not truly.
He had always been the perfect and constant fixture in my universe, the one who made sense of a world that otherwise felt too big and complicated. To me, he had always been invincible simply because he was… my father.
But standing in our living room with these three men, he was afraid, and the fear rolling off him was so palpable I could taste it. Thick. Metallic. Bitter. Like the taste of blood on my tongue.
The man, the one with the dark blue eyes, took a step forward. Just one. But the room seemed to contract around his movement, the air crackling with his authority, almost making it harder to breathe.
“You’ve been difficult to find,” he said. “But not impossible. Nothing is impossible, Angelo. You of all people should know that.”
My father’s voice, when he finally spoke, was barely above a whisper. “My children are here.”
The man tsked, and I couldn’t see it but I almost imagined him rolling his eyes. “I’m aware.”
“You leave them out of this.”
The man’s expression didn’t change. His eyes held my father’s for a long moment, and something passed between them—some history, some understanding that existed in a language I didn’t speak.
“I have no intention of harming your children, Angelo,” he finally said. “They are innocent in your betrayal.”
Betrayal…
What did he mean? Who did my father betray?
I slammed my eyes closed, forcing the memory away. My throat burned as I swallowed back a cry.
I wanted to rage.
God, I wanted to hurt him, the same way he hurt me. Them.
“You see, there was so much I didn't know about my father. So much I didn't understand. He carried my truth, his truth… my mother’s truth, all of it, inside him for years, never once allowing it to cast a shadow over my brother and me.”
I wished I had known the truth sooner.
I wished my father hadn't trusted Adrian that night.
I swallowed against the lump in my throat, fighting back the burn that came with unshed tears. “He carried the weight of it all alone, so we wouldn't have to. He protected us from every ugly truth, every dark secrets, every piece of the world he believed we were better off not knowing.”
Adrian shook his head, brows furrowed, the corner of his eyes tightened with confusion. “I don’t understand.”
Of course he didn't…
He never knew, he would have never guessed that the woman he married could harbor such secrets.
That she was smarter than him. Better than him. More capable than him in every way that it truly mattered.
He never would have guessed that I could deceive him so completely, so effortlessly, that even he hadn't seen it coming.
“Let me introduce myself, husband.”
My lungs clenched as I spoke the words. I have waited years for this moment, to stand in front of him, to look him in the eyes and show him the truth, the consequences that he had never seen coming.
That while he had succeeded that night… he had failed to see the outcome. He never considered the possibility that the girl he never met, never saw, never heard would one day stand before him. Stronger. Smarter. And no longer powerless against him like she had been before.
My stomach twisted violently.
And for the first time in many months… I spoke my truth.
“My name is Elyssa, daughter of Angelo Garza.