Page 46 of Torn By Fate

He pushed.

And then, I was falling.

The mattress hit my back with a soft thud. Adrian followed me down, his mouth never leaving mine, his weight settling over me.

His hand released my jaw only to thread into my hair, fisting the dark strands and tilting my head to the angle he wanted. The kiss deepened, slower, almost tender… which was somehow worse than the violence before.

Tenderness from Adrian Salvatore was a weapon I had no defense against.

It left me with nothing but the raw, trembling truth that ever since he claimed me the night before our wedding… I have remained his.

The sense of defeat sliced through me.

When he finally pulled away, my breath came in ragged, broken gasps against his mouth.

I kept my eyes closed. I couldn’t open them.

I didn’t want to see him and the satisfaction on his face. I’d see the blood that was probably still smeared across his lower lip, the possessive darkness in his gaze, and I’d lose whatever fragile composure I had left.

“I hate you,” I breathed. The words came out ragged and ruined, barely audible.

I felt his smile against my cheek. “I know, Princess.” His thumb traced the line of my jaw where I was sure his fingers had left red marks. “I like the way you hate me.”

His mouth moved to my shoulder. I felt the sharp edge of his teeth before the bite, a sharp, deliberate pressure. I gasped, my back arching off the mattress, and his tongue swept over the wound in a slow, sorry caress that felt anything but apologetic.

This was payback for my bite.

Except I made him bleed… while he was only branding me with his mark.

Then his lips found my ear, his breath hot and uneven. “I look forward to which country you take us next.” The words were a raspy whisper, a reckless promise, and a cruel threat all wrapped in one. “Good night, wife.”

The weight of him lifted from my body. I listened to his footsteps cross the room, measured and unhurried.

Then I heard the soft click of the door opening and closing.

Adrian was gone.

But he left me with more than I could bear.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ADRIAN

Two weeks later

The bright lights of the Pingo Doce hummed the same exhausted repetition as every supermarket in every city she’d fled to. The particular musty sweetness of overripe fruit lingered even as we walked farther away from the produce section.

Serafina filled her cart with the most mundane inventory. She wore a cream linen blouse and dark jeans. Her long hair was pinned loosely at the nape of her neck. She looked like a woman who had come to Portugal to find herself.

But she was a woman who had no idea that another contract had been placed on her life eleven days ago.

She’d chosen Lisbon this time, and I’d chosen to stop pretending I wasn’t following her. I stopped hiding in the shadows a week into her relocation, because there was no longer any strategic advantage to it.

And the pretense had become its own form of cruelty—to her, to myself, to whatever fragile thread that still bound us together.

So I let her see me. In the café across from her hotel. On the tram she took to the university library, where she pretended to read academic books. Outside the pharmacy, where she bought the same brand of ibuprofen she’d always used.

I made my presence a constant. I made myself undeniable.