Page 68 of Torn By Fate

It was strange, having him here, like this.

I watched him from the bed, propped against a mountain of pillows, the comforter pulled to my waist. He stood at the kitchenette counter, pouring hot water into a cup. Adrian did this every morning since we got here, making me herbal tea because he said it would soothe the pain and irritation in my throat.

He would set the cup on the nightstand beside me but said nothing when I left it untouched.

I hated herbal tea. It tasted disgusting to me.

This was what it looked like the last two days. A married couple sharing a room, sharing a bed, though we both stayed on either side, an invisible barrier between us.

A husband bringing his wife tea while she healed. The mundane things in life that could have been normal if the foundation of our union hadn’t been built on blood.

The distance between us was delicate, a boundary we both somewhat respected even though the reasons for it were different.

I needed the space to remember that he wasn’t safe.

Adrian needed it to prove that he could be. Safe. To me. For me.

Two days of him moving through the suite like a shadow I couldn’t escape. The silence between us was so thick it was almost suffocating, and the unspoken weight of everything we had done to each other was overwhelming enough that I wanted to claw at my flesh.

I inhaled, my chest expanding with the small breath.

The room had begun to feel too small now.

His scent—his clean soap, the manly musk that was purely him, decadent and warm that I’d tried to forget and couldn’t—clung to everything. It filled the space between us, settling into the fabric of the curtains, the bedsheets, and the pillows I pressed my face against at night when the nightmares came.

And my skin.

His scent was on me, like a possessive mark I couldn’t get rid of.

I turned my head on the pillow and studied him. He was wearing black again, sweatpants that sat low on his hips and a fitted black shirt that clung to his body like a second skin.

The fabric stretched across his shoulders, pulled taut over the breadth of his chest, and I could see the muscles in his back shift beneath the material as he reached for the teabag. His arms were different than I remembered. Thicker. More defined. The biceps flexed with each movement, the tendons in his forearms thick as he stirred the coffee.

He’d always been fit, but this was different. This was a man who had spent months rebuilding himself.

Adrian must have kept himself busy in the gym when he wasn’t stalking me or standing outside my hotel windows in the middle of the night, carefully hidden in the shadows. It looked like he’d been training hard while we played cat and mouse across multiple countries.

And it wasn’t the casual maintenance to stay in shape.

This was driven by purpose and utterly with rage.

He turned, and I caught the full effect of his training. The width of his chest, the way the shirt molded to the planes of his abdomen, and the raw physicality of a body that had been honed into a deadly, devastating weapon.

Warmth pooled inside my belly. Undeniable. Involuntary.

Our eyes met across the room. Thud.

I didn’t look away. Neither did he.

The knock came before either of us could speak.

Three sharp raps, precise and measured in exact seconds in between each knock.

Adrian’s expression didn’t change, but something shifted in his posture—a subtle protectiveness. “Come in, Rocco,” he said, loud enough for the man on the other side of the door to hear.

Rocco walked in, silent, as if he were used to entering rooms without properly announcing himself. He was dressed in the same dark clothing he always wore, a charcoal suit, no tie, the collar of his black shirt open at the throat.

His expression was unreadable. And he didn’t look at me.