Page 3 of Torn By Fate

His body caged around me, broad shoulders and solid muscles pressing against my back until there wasn’t an inch of space left between us.

His mouth found my ear. God, he was so close. So impossibly close the familiar scent of him filled my senses, his heat spreading through my body, covering me like a second layer of cloth.

His warm, controlled breath feathered against the shell of my ear, his lips barely touching my skin.

“Hello, wife.”

CHAPTER ONE

SERAFINA

Three months ago

The air was thick, acrid, burning my lungs with each panicked breath.

I opened my mouth to scream, but only a choked sound came out. My gaze darted around the room, searching frantically, but I couldn’t see anything past the smoke, past the flame.

Fire.

It was everywhere.

It cloaked everything.

It suffocated. It burned. It raged.

I tried to breathe… but I couldn’t.

The flame licked at my upper thigh, right where the flesh was the most tender. The air crackled around me, growing hotter and hotter with every passing second. The heat pulsed, searing through my flesh, burying itself underneath like a poison that ravaged from inside.

I coughed, but it was more like retching that sounded like a slowly dying animal.

I thought I screamed.

I did.

I must have.

My mother always told me good girls didn’t scream, didn’t make a scene.

We were polite. Poised and demure.

But good girls weren’t supposed to be burned alive.

I tasted the bitter flake of ash on my tongue, soft as the first snowflake would be but twice as damning. Cruel and poisonous.

A reminder of death.

Somewhere beyond the walls, I heard him scream, the pitch of his voice piercing through even the snap of burning wood.

He wasn’t screaming for help.

No…

He screamed, knowing that help would never come.

He called out my name, his little frightened voice.

“I’m here,” I croaked, but I knew he couldn’t hear me.