Page 18 of Torn By Fate

I had been in Belgium for almost two weeks after chasing whispers and dead ends.

Serafina was here; I sensed it in my bones.

I could feel it, her scent lingering in the breeze, like a physical touch on my skin.

I could feel her.

But she was really fucking good at playing hide and seek. My stubborn wife kept slipping through my fingers like smoke. Goddamn it.

I lifted the glass and let the whiskey, a single malt from Islay, roll across my tongue before swallowing. It tasted of smoke and peat. I liked the bitterness.

The burn in my throat reminded me that I was still here, still breathing, still capable of feeling something that wasn’t grief or rage or the hollow, aching absence of the woman who had put a bullet in me.

The stool beside me scraped against the floor.

I didn’t look up. I didn’t have to.

I’d learned to read people by their presence alone—the weight of their body, the cadence of their breath, the scent that preceded them. This one smelled like vanilla and something floral, too sweet, too expensive, and deliberately applied.

A woman. Young. And she was too close for my liking.

Her scent invaded my space, and I didn’t fucking like that.

Her hand landed on my shoulder, her fingers light, soft, and feminine. Presumptuous.

My body went rigid.

Every muscle locked, every nerve ending firing at once, and I turned my head slowly, fixing her with a look that had made hardened men piss themselves in my soundproof basement.

Her breath hitched and her hand retreated immediately, as if she’d been burned.

Good.

She was pretty in the way that most women who approached strange men in bars were pretty… carefully assembled, from the dark waves of her hair to the red of her lips to the way her dress clung to curves; she clearly wanted to be noticed.

Her eyes were brown, warm, and slightly wide with the realization that she’d miscalculated into thinking that I would be… interested… in her.

The thought almost made me laugh.

“I’m not interested,” I said. My voice was flat, stripped of anything that could be mistaken for warmth. I didn’t have time for some stupid misunderstanding in a stupid fucking bar.

I let my gaze drop to her left hand, where a gold band sat on her ring finger, catching the dim light of the bar. That rock was huge. She hadn’t removed her ring. She didn’t even try to hide it. “Especially not in married women,” I finished drily.

She didn’t flinch at my subtle accusation.

Instead, she leaned her hips against the bar, a coy smile playing at her lips. There was a particular defiance in her expression, and it annoyed me.

“Then why are you sitting alone in a bar at midnight?” she asked, her voice carrying a challenge that was almost admirable. Almost. She reached out, her finger sliding over my wedding band on my left hand. “If your wife satisfies you, you’d be home, in bed with her, instead of drinking by yourself at a sleazy bar.”

My fingers clenched around the glass. Her words landed with quiet, painful precision. It found the fracture under my ribs, digging itself there, splitting the wound open once again.

I thought of Serafina… her hazel eyes, her dark hair spread across my pillow, the way she tasted when I kissed her. The way she had looked at me when she pulled the trigger—beautiful and merciless—an angel of death. Callous and ruthless. But ethereal nonetheless.

My jaw tightened, the muscles in my neck corded with the effort of keeping my expression neutral.

I couldn’t touch another woman.

That was the truth of it, the ugly, pathetic truth that I carried like a second scar beneath the one she’d given me.