CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ADRIAN
I sat across from her, the armchair groaning softly under my weight as I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, hands clasped between them.
The blood on my cheek had dried to a thin, flaking crust, and I could feel it pull against my skin every time I shifted my jaw. The scratches my wife had left burned but they weren’t deep, not dangerous.
They were a reminder of the violence she had poured into me though, the years of fury she’d been carrying.
I didn’t wipe the blood away. I wanted to feel it. Her rage. Her fear. Her contempt.
She sat there with the blanket wrapped tightly around her waist, her arms pinned to her sides, her face streaked with tears and flushed with the aftermath of rage.
Serafina—or Elyssa.
I couldn't seem to reconcile the two names with the same women.
I had married Serafina.
I had known her as Serafina.
And even after realizing she wasn't who she had claimed to be, that was still the name my mind reached for whenever I thought of her. Serafina.
It was the name I had spoken when I took my vows, the name I had whispered in throes of pleasure.
But now I knew there was another name attached to the woman who was my wife.
Elyssa.
I didn’t know what to do with that information.
So for now, she was Serafina.
She was Serafina until I decided she wasn't.
She looked small. Fragile. But her fragility was deceptive. It concealed something sharp and lethal beneath the surface, like a blade wrapped in silk.
My wife was a weapon without her even realizing.
Her lips twisted cruelly.
And she was talking. Fina-fucking-lly.
The words poured out of her in a torrent she couldn’t stem.
“I spent months in foster care,” she said, and her voice had changed.
The fury had drained from it and the tone was more distant now, as if she was simply recounting someone else’s story.
“Six different homes in four months. Nobody wanted a fifteen-year-old girl who screamed herself awake every night. I was damaged goods. Too old, too broken, too much trouble.”
Her eyes were fixed somewhere beyond my left shoulder, seeing something I couldn’t see. The memory of those months lived in her. I saw it in the tightness around her mouth, the way her fingers curled and uncurled against the blanket.
“Then my mother’s sister came for me. An aunt I had never met before, though I have heard of. She was familiar because my mother often spoke of her. Elena, her older sister. She lived in California.”
I didn’t interrupt. I sat perfectly still and listened, because the truth she was giving me was more valuable than anything I’d ever been offered. And I understood with the cold, tactical clarity that had kept me alive this long, that the moment I broke the flow, she might stop.
Serafins might retreat behind the walls she had spent years constructing, and I would lose her before I could get the whole of her.
“I didn’t know how I was going to make you pay,” she continued, and her gaze shifted back to mine, sharp for a single moment.
“Not at first. I was fifteen, Adrian. I was grieving, I was broken, I was living in a stranger’s house in a city I didn’t know.
But I knew one thing with absolute certainty…
I would have my revenge. I would find the man who ordered my family burned alive, and I would destroy him. ”
The certainty in her voice was absolute. It didn't waver, there was no doubt in it, and now I knew that conviction didn't bend under the weight of made and circumstances.
This was the same kind of conviction that could build empires and toppled them the same. I recognized it because I had seen it before—in my father’s eyes, in my grandfather’s voice, in the mirror every morning.
It was the lethal certainty of someone who had decided, irrevocably, that they would not be denied.
“So, I did my research,” Serafina said. “As best as I could. There wasn’t much about you and your family on the internet. The Salvatore name existed in whispers and rumors…criminal organizations, mafia connections, but nothing concrete. Nothing I could use.”
She paused, and something shifted in her expression, a flicker of what might have been satisfaction, or disbelief, or both.
“But fate was on your side,” I murmured, finally speaking, saying the words she was thinking aloud.
Her lips curled with a sharp, deadly smile. “Fate was indeed on my side.” The words came out quietly, almost reverently, not matching her expression. As if she still couldn’t quite believe the coincidence that had delivered her to this moment.
“My aunt was a cook at St. Clare’s Academy for Girls.
An exclusive boarding school for the rich and the corrupted.
She had been there for years. She was good at what she did, reliable, invisible.
” Serafina paused, swallowing. “One day, she was staying late for an event, some kind of fundraising gala. She asked me to come with her because she didn’t want me sitting alone in the apartment. ”
Her voice dropped lower, and I found myself leaning forward, drawn in by the gravity of what she was about to say.
“And you know who I found there?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She didn’t need to. I already knew what she was going to say, what name she was going to utter on those pretty, deceptive lips of hers.
“Serafina Morelli.”
The name took shape in the air between us, heavy and almost tangible.
My fingers curled tighter where they were clasped between my knees, knuckles whitening with the pressure.
Serafina saw. She noticed my reaction and her eyes gleamed dangerously.
For the first time in years, my body betrayed me before my mind could control me. Before I could physically compose myself.
“The name was familiar to me,” she said slowly, carefully as she laid each piece of the puzzle exactly where it needed to go. “Morelli. I had heard it before. My father had mentioned it in fragments of conversations. And then it clicked.”
She held my gaze, her eyes bright with what I could only describe as ultimate triumph.
“My father was sent to spy on them, correct? The Morellis. That was his mission. That was what Enzo Salvatore sent him to Chicago to do.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to. Serafina—Elyssa already knew.
“I thought it was fate playing a joke on me.” A rough sound escaped her, not quite a laugh, not quite a sob. Something broken in between, her own emotions playing with her.
“The daughter of the man my father was sent to spy on, standing right in front of me, clueless. I thought the universe was mocking me. But then I realized…no, it wasn’t fate playing a joke. It was fate helping me.”
The room fell silent for a long, heartbreaking second. I could hear the hum of the AC, the distant murmur of traffic from the street below and under all of it, I heard the steady, brutal pounding of my own heartbeat.
Her words settled into me slowly, sinking beneath my skin with each passing second.
Disbelief came first.
Then anger.
Then it was something else that was more unsettling… the sickening realization that everything I had believed about my wife, about our marriage, about the woman I trusted enough to let into the most guarded parts of my life, had been built on a lie.
And it wasn't just any lie.
“So I made a plan,” my wife continued speaking, not caring that everything she was revealing was breaking apart our already fragile marriage.
“I learned as much as I could about Serafina from my aunt. Everything Elena knew and she knew a lot, because she’d been working at that school for years, and my aunt had taken a liking to her. ”
She paused, and a complicated expression moved across her face…guilt, maybe.
“Serafina was quiet. Shy. Reserved. She was bullied by the other girls at the academy. My aunt felt sorry for her. She’d bring her extra food, talk to her, treat her like a person when nobody else did.”
The bitterness in her voice was unmistakable now, sharp and cutting.
“And I used that to my advantage. I used my aunt’s compassion, her connection to this girl, to learn everything I needed to know.
Where Serafina was going to university. What she was studying.
What her schedule looked like. What she ate, what she wore, who she talked to. ”
She met my eyes, and the look she gave me was challenging—daring me to judge her, to condemn the methodical, ruthless way she had dismantled another woman’s life.
“And then slowly,” she said, “piece by piece, the plan came together. The careful moves. The calculated steps. It took years, Adrian. Years of watching, of waiting, of positioning myself exactly where I needed to be.”
Her voice dropped to barely a whisper, and I had to lean closer to hear her, not wanting to miss any details of her deceit and needing to know the full truth before I decided what to do with my wife.
“We became housemates. We shared an apartment. We became friends.” The word friends came out like it tasted wrong, poisonous in her mouth. “She didn’t know who I truly was. She trusted me. She told me things. She let me close.”
A cold realization moved through my chest. The woman sitting across from me, wrapped in a gas with furious tears still glistening on her cheek had orchestrated a had that would I even earned my grandfather's respect.
The utter patience of it.
The absolute precision.
The absolute, unwavering commitment to a goal that had consumed six years of her life.
She never broke.
She never once lost sight of the endgame.
My wife didn't simply survive.
She had planned her vendetta and executed it with a discipline that would have made any man in my world proud.
She didn't just randomly stumble into my world. She had built around it, carved her way into it.
Piece by piece. Lie by lie. Without shedding blood, but equally just as ruthless.
She had been in complete control when I foolishly had been thinking that I held the power.
But all this time, I had been standing exactly where she wanted me.
My cock twitched.
Fuck me.
“She never suspected,” she said. “Not once. Not even at the end.”