Page 99 of Torn By Fate

“Jesus Christ,” I hissed under my breath.

I leaned back in the chair, my body retreating from the magnitude of what she’d just revealed, creating distance between us. A distance we both needed from that revelation.

The armchair creaked beneath me, the leather groaning in protest.

The sheer, staggering audacity of Elyssa made something in my chest tighten. It wasn’t fear or anger. It was a feeling more complex, one I couldn’t quite understand. Maybe it was respect… pride… or alarm at the fact that a woman like her could lie so perfectly.

I raised my hand, silencing the rest of her confession because now it was easy to figure the rest out by myself. She had already laid everything else out so perfectly. A fucking genius she was.

“Let me finish the story for you. You told the real Serafina the truth… and she realized that she could escape this arranged marriage and live her life freely if you took her place?”

She twisted her lips once and then nodded. “We looked more alike than we wanted to admit. After all, we both had Santino’s blood running through our veins. We were born just a few months apart. We were the right age… and somehow, everything seemed to work in our favor. Serafina had been living away from her family long enough that she had grown and changed, and they wouldn’t recognize her truly. She looked different than how she did the last time her family saw her. She had grown into a woman. And if I were to take her place… with us resembling each other so closely…”

“No one would bat an eye,” I finished for her. “You fit right in.”

“Bingo.” She smiled cruelly.

“Fuck, you’re insane. A fucking genius, but insane.”

She lifted her chin in an arrogant way that both impressed me and pissed me off.

“Do you realize how dangerous your… plan was? How deadly this could have been for you? One small mistake, one tiny flaw… and it would have been fatal.”

“The things I’ve done to get here, to get to you…” Her voice trailed off. “It was all worth it.”

“Fuck me, you’re actually more unhinged that I thought you were.”

Than even I was.

Holy shit, she actually frightened me with her recklessness and fearless audacity.

But she was wrong about one thing.

Terribly wrong.

I leaned forward, bringing our faces closer. “I have to applaud your brain. You truly impressed me, Serafina.” I shook my head. Fuck, this was going to be hard to get used to. “Elyssa. But it pains me, it truly fucking pains me to tell you that all of this… all the planning, the orchestrating you did… it was all for nothing. Because I didn’t kill Angelo Garza.”

She hissed in response, baring her teeth at me. “Lies.”

I nodded. I knew she wouldn’t believe me. That was fine.

But I needed her to hear my truth, even if she didn’t believe me. “I don’t know what you heard. I don’t know what you chose to believe, but I know what I did, what I had control over, and I didn’t kill Angelo that night.”

I had given him twenty-four hours to move, a new country, new identities for him and his children. I remembered leaving his house, receiving the call from my father to ask me to come back because he needed me to handle a business matter urgently.

He hadn’t known I had found Angelo yet after all the years it took me to track him down. No one knew. No one except the two soldiers with me.

But I killed them myself that night before I flew out, back to New York, to where my father was waiting for me.

Serafina’s version of that night didn’t add up.

There was something else, something bigger than what she knew, what I knew.

And I needed to find out who the fuck gave that order.

My chest tightened.

Because… the answer was obvious. But I needed solid proof. I needed to really know.