CHAPTER TWENTY
SERAFINA (ELYSSA)
His face blurred in front of me. The room tilted, the walls dissolving into smoke and flame, and suddenly I wasn’t in the hotel suite anymore.
I was fifteen years old, standing in my bedroom, listening to those men speaking outside the window.
The memory crashed over me like a wave, pulling me under, and I couldn’t fight it.
I didn’t want to.
I could feel it—the severing heat. The heat that had seared into my skin and never truly left.
Fire.
The smell hit me first. That acrid, chemical sweetness that I would spend the rest of my life trying to scrub from my nostrils.
Gas. It had been gas, leaking from the stove in the kitchen, filling the house with its invisible, suffocating presence while I stood in my room and listened to the conversation I wasn’t supposed to hear.
“Burn it. All of it. I want no evidence that Angelo Garza ever existed.”
The voice on the phone had been low, controlled, unmistakable.
I was too shocked to move for a minute. And I had been a minute too late to react.
Then, there was an explosion.
The sound was the loudest thing I’d ever heard, louder than the thunder I was scared of at night.
It tore through the house like a living thing, shattering windows, splintering walls, and I was thrown backward, the door slamming shut behind me.
The fire came next.
Not slowly, not gradually—all at once, a wall of orange and red that devoured everything in its path. Everything vanished.
Everything between me and the door became an inferno, and I heard them.
My father.
His screams weren’t the sounds of a man in pain—they were the sounds of a man being unmade. Raw, animal, stripped of every layer of composure and dignity. I heard his body hit the floor, heard the wet, crackling sound of flesh meeting flame, and I screamed his name until my throat bled.
“Papa! Papa, I'm here. Please—”
But he couldn’t hear me. Or if he could, he couldn’t reach me. The fire was between us, a breathing monster that consumed everything it touched.
And my brother.
God, Caleb.
His cries were different. Higher, thinner, the terrified wailing of a child who didn’t understand what was happening to him. He had been in the kitchen where he had gone back to show our father that he had completed the Mario level he had previously been stuck on.
He was six years old. Only six.
His voice rose and fell in a rhythm that I could still hear in my nightmares and would for the rest of my life. Sharp, piercing screams that dissolved into wet, gurgling sobs as the fire found him, as it crawled across his small body and ate him alive.
I heard it. Every brutal, torturous second of it.
The sound of my father and brother burning to death, trapped in the kitchen while I stood on the other side of a wall of flame, helpless, useless, alive.
The smell was the worst part.
It permeated everything, the smoke, the burning wood, the furniture, and beneath it all, something darker, cruel and utterly. horrifying.
The scent of charred flesh, of hair and skin and muscle burning, filling the house with a stench that was so dreadfully wrong that my body rejected it before my mind could process it.
I remembered the way I had gag at the smell, the retching, sickening sound I made while I suffocated.
I remembered pressing my face against the carpet and breathing through the fibers, desperate for clean air, but there was no clean air.
There was only smoke and death and the cruel sound of my family dying on the other side of the wall.
I had watched the fire crawl across the ceiling, blackening the plaster, eating through the drywall with a voracious hunger that seemed almost sentient.
It consumed the curtains, the bedding, everything it touched with a ferocity that was utterly terrifying.
The feeling of the fire licking through my flesh still felt so alive, I could feel it even more.
I had thought that this was it.
In those final seconds of consciousness, I thought this was how I would die. Surrounded by flame, alone, with the screams of my family still ringing in my ears.
Then, I woke up in the hospital, the room white and sterile. Everything smelled like antiseptic and bleach, and the light was so bright it hurt my eyes. My throat had been bandaged, and when I tried to speak, no sound came out. Just a rasp, a whisper of air through damaged tissue.
A nurse appeared. Then a doctor. Then a police officer, his hat in his hands, his expression carefully arranged into something that was supposed to be sympathetic.
“You’re the only survivor,” he said. “The gas stove in the kitchen exploded. Your father must have left the gas on after cooking. It was an accident.”
A terrible, tragic accident, they said.
I stared at him. My mouth opened. Nothing came out.
“Your father and your brother... they were in the kitchen when it happened. You were in the bedroom, further from the blast. That’s why you survived.”
He truly believed this…
I saw it in his eyes, the genuine sorrow, the quiet relief that he could file this away as a tragedy rather than an investigation. An accident. A gas leak. A family destroyed by a simple, mundane oversight.
Only I knew the truth.
Only I had heard that phone call.
Only I knew of the man with the dark blue eyes standing in our tiny living room, speaking my father's old name like it was a weapon, an order of death he had to fulfill.
“Burn it. All of it. I want no evidence that Angelo Garza ever existed.”
I had carried that truth inside me for six years. Through foster care, through the endless nights of screaming myself awake, through the therapy sessions where I had been told to “process my grief and accept the accident and move forward.”
I carried it through my arranged marriage to the Salvatore family, through the moment I had learned my truth—my real truth—and how I could use it to complete my vengeance.
I was barely fifteen when I lost everything, when the world I knew was reduced to ash and the screams of my dying family. When I learned that some men could look you in the eye and order your destruction without a single flicker of remorse.
I was fifteen when I realized just how ugly our world is.
And I was sixteen when I found the truth.
And now, standing in this hotel suite with the man who had orchestrated it all, the rage that had been festering inside me for six years erupted with a violence that shocked even me.
“What are you talking about?”
His voice. That voice. The same low, unhurried cadence I’d heard through the cracked window, giving the order that had destroyed my life.
The confusion in his tone, the careful, calculated confusion of a man who had spent his entire life constructing lies—made something inside me snap.
A physical snap that I heard echoing in my ears.
I lunged at him.
The years of pain, of grief, of silent screaming fury that I had locked away behind walls of composure and compliance—all of it came pouring out of me at once. Unhinged. Violent. No longer contained.
My fist connected with his chest, and the impact reverberated up my arm, but I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel anything except the desperate, animalistic need to hurt him the way he had hurt me.
“You killed them,” I screamed, driving my fist into his chest again. “You burned them!”
My knuckles cracked against the hard plane of his sternum, and pain shot through my hand, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop.
Every blow was a release, a fraction of the agony I had been carrying for six years expelled through the violence of my body.
Adrian stumbled backward, his expression shifting from confusion to dark surprise, maybe, or the first flicker of recognition.
He caught my wrist, his fingers closing around it with a grip that was iron-tight and unyielding.
“Serafina—” he tried to say, but I didn’t want to hear his lies anymore, his arrogant facade, the careful construction of a man who had spent his entire life pretending to be something other than what he was.
Purely evil. Inhumane. Heartless in a way that would make even the devil cry.
Adrian Salvatore was a rotting flesh underneath tailored suits.
“My brother was only six,” I screamed, the words tearing through my damaged throat. “He was so young. A CHILD. He was only a child!”
I fought against his hold, my free hand swinging wildly, connecting with his jaw, his shoulder, the side of his head.
My nails raked across his cheek, drawing blood in thin, bright lines, and I wanted more.
I wanted to claw his eyes out, to tear him apart with my bare hands the way the fire had torn apart everything innocent I had ever loved.
“You burned them,” I sobbed, each word a blade turned inward and outward simultaneously. A vicious cut through my flesh, digging into wounds that never properly healed, wounds that had silently festered. “YOU. BURNED. THEM.”
His hand on my wrists tightened impossibly, the bones grinding together beneath his grip, and the pain was so sharp and immediate—but it meant nothing.
Physical pain meant nothing. It was a ghost compared to the inferno that had been burning inside me for six years.
“ENOUGH.”
The word exploded from him with a force that seemed to shake the walls of the suite.
He didn't simply shout. It was a roar, primal and raw, the sound of a man whose control had finally fractured completely.
The echo of it bounced off the plaster, filling the room, and for one fractured second, the world went silent.
Then his hands were on me. Adrian wasn't gentle or careful, as he dragged me backward, my heels scraping against the carpet, and shoved me into the armchair with enough force that I thought it would topple over with me still on it.
I lunged forward, trying to stand, but he was already there, towering over me, his body blocking everything else, his shadow falling across me like a shroud.
I looked up at him. Tall, broad, his face streaked with blood from where I had scratched him, his eyes blazing with something I couldn’t name.