CHAPTER TWENTY #2
He was terrifying. He was magnificent. He was the monster who had destroyed my world, and I stared up at him without flinching.
I wasn’t frightened.
I had nothing to be scared of anymore. Death had already taken everything from me once—my father, my brother, the future I had been promised—and if Adrian decided to kill me now, it would be a mercy.
Maybe death would be sweeter than living with the memories that continued to haunt me, that woke me screaming in the dark, that made every breath taste like smoke and ash.
Maybe I would be able to reunite with my father and brother, to find them in whatever came after death, to tell them how sorry I was—sorry for surviving, sorry for failing, sorry for everything I couldn't do.
He dragged the second armchair across the carpet, and positioned it directly across from me. The distance between us was barely two feet, close enough that I could see the pulse hammering in his throat, the way his jaw worked as he clenched and unclenched his teeth.
I tried to stand again. My body surged upward, fueled by a fury that had no outlet, and Adrian moved with the speed that reminded me he was trained for violence.
His hand pressed against my shoulder, shoving me back hard into the seat with such furious force, it knocked the air from my lungs.
I gasped, heart thundering against my ribcage.
“Sit the fuck down.”
The command was absolute. Final. As if he expected me to comply with his command like everyone else seemed to.
My lips curled. And then…
I spat in his face.
The saliva hit him square on the cheek, a thin, wet streak before it began to slide down toward his jaw.
Adrian went completely still. He didn't tense, his body didn't go rigid… he just stilled. I recognized it was the kind stillness that precedes something catastrophic, the calm before a storm that would level everything in its path.
I lifted my chin, refusing to cower, refusing to let him intimidate me.
His eyes locked onto mine.
I watched the muscles in his throat work as he swallowed, watched the blood from my scratches pulse in thin rivulets across his skin.
His expression was unreadable—not angry, not offended, but there was something under his carefully maintained composure. A flicker of emotion I couldn't quite understand.
“I will excuse that for now,” he said quietly. “Just this once. Because you’re currently very emotional and in pain...” A pause. The faintest tightening around his eyes. “And confused.”
“Fuck you.”
Adrian didn’t respond.
Instead, he reached for the thin white blanket that had been folded beneath the comforter on the bed and he pulled it free with a single, fluid motion and crossed back to me.
I saw what he intended a second before he moved. My body tensed, every muscle coiling in preparation for a fight, but it didn’t matter.
He was faster, stronger, and the rage that had fueled my assault had drained me, leaving behind a hollowness and my muscles shaking.
The blanket wrapped around me and the armchair in a single, practiced motion. Tight around my torso, pinning my arms to my sides, the fabric twisted and secured with the kind of efficiency that suggested he had done this many times before.
I struggled, twisting my body, trying to free my arms, but the restraint held. The more I fought, the tighter it became.
“Let me go,” I hissed, the words scraping against my bruised throat.
“I will,” he said, settling into the armchair across from me, his posture deceptively relaxed. “After we have a talk.”
“A talk?” The laugh that escaped me was brittle, shattered. “What is there to talk about?”
“Oh, we have a lot to talk about, Serafina.” His eyes held mine, steady and unblinking. “Or Elyssa. Whoever you are.”
The use of my real name on his tongue—the name I hadn’t heard spoken aloud in years, the name that belonged to the girl who had died in that fire—sent a cold spike through my body.
A crack resonated through my chest, a fissure in the wall I had built around my identity, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe.
He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped loosely between them. The blood on his cheek had begun to dry, darkening.
He looked like a man who had been through a war and hadn’t yet decided whether he had won.
“First…” he said, his voice dropping to that low, unhurried tone that I was beginning to hate. “You’re going to tell me... if you really are Elyssa, how did you take Serafina’s place?” His stormy blue eyes held mine, unblinking. “And where is the real Serafina?”
Thud.
I pressed my lips together.
The muscles in my jaw locked, and I felt the familiar, stubborn resistance building inside me. He didn’t deserve my truth. He didn’t deserve anything from me.
The silence stretched between us.
I could hear my own breathing, shallow, and rapid. The blanket was tight around my chest, constricting my lungs, and I focused on that sensation—the physical discomfort—because it was easier than focusing on the question he had asked.
Adrian studied my silence for a long moment, his gaze moving across my face with the same calculated patience I had grown used to seeing in him.
Then he made a soft sound, a dismissive tsk that scraped against my nerves.
God, I hated how indifferent he always tried to act. Regarding everything and everyone like he had encountered an obstacle he had expected and he wasn't the least bit concerned.
“Okay, fine.” He settled back in the chair, crossing one ankle over the opposite knee. The movement was casual, almost bored, his posture deceptively relaxed.
But I could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his fingers pressed together until the knuckles went white. “Too tough of a question to start with. How about this one: the reason you shot me that night, it was because...”
He trailed off, leaving the sentence unfinished, an open invitation that he expected me to walk through.
And I did.
Because the truth—this truth, at least—was a weapon I had been sharpening for six years, and I wanted him to feel it pierce his cold, rotting heart.
“It was my vengeance,” I said, and my voice came out steady despite the restraint around me, despite my body still trembling with the rage that still lived in me, despite the pain that festered deeper and deeper into my bones, into the marrow of my very being.
“I orchestrated your death for the last six years. I dreamed of pulling that trigger every night ever since I woke up in that hospital bed, alone and never the same again.”
My revelation filled the space between us, heavy and irrevocable.
I watched him make sense of them, watched the way his expression shifted, not dramatically, because nothing about Adrian was dramatic. I saw it in the tightening around his mouth, the slight narrowing of his darkened eyes.
Anyone else could have missed it.
But I didn't.
I didn't because I had waited for this moment for a very long time and I didn't want to miss a single moment of his realization.
“Every night…” I continued, because now that I had started, I couldn’t stop, the dam had broken and my flooding words, emotions, were carrying me forward with a momentum that felt both terrifying and inevitable.
“I closed my eyes and I saw your face. The face of the man who ordered my family to be burned alive and felt absolutely no remorse in doing so.”
Adrian didn’t move at my confession. He sat across from me, perfectly still, his gaze fixed on mine with an intensity that made my skin prickle. “How did you take the real Serafina’s place?”
I knew why he wanted to know the truth. After all, the real Serafina mattered to him. She was the real daughter of Santino Morelli, the one he was supposed to trick into a marriage.
Except, I tricked him into marrying me.
I had played every card perfectly.
And Adrian had never once seen it coming.
He never discovered the truth about his wife. Never realized that the woman beside him wasn't even who she claimed to be.
What a fool he was.
No…
What a fool I played him to be.
I was never his pawn.
He was mine.
Every move, every life, every carefully orchestrated steps that had brought us here, I had planned it all along before he ever realized he was even a part of the game.
And maybe…it was finally time to tell him the truth.
I had nothing left to hide now. Nothing else to lose.
He already knew who I was.
Now, it was time he learned my real identity.
And how well I had schemed, manipulated and orchestrated all of this