The hunger was feral, consuming, terrifying in its intensity.
But I didn’t move.
I let my ego take the reins—that fortress of pride, fear, and discipline I had built to survive far worse than longing.
I reminded myself that desire was a liability. That attachment was a weakness enemies exploited. That admitting what I felt would give it shape, weight, consequence.
Real feelings were dangerous.
And I could not afford danger inside my own walls.
While I pretended indifference, my men scoured the globe for her sister—the true architect of my nightmares. I had never believed she was dead. Women like her didn’t vanish; they adapted. They shed skins. They survived.
She had killed my sister on Al-Chapo’s orders—brutal, efficient, professional. But Maria... Maria had been personal. Slaughtered alongside our unborn child in a vendetta that went far beyond obedience or business.
Whether she’d had a handler or acted alone no longer mattered.
I wanted her found.
Broken.
Ended.
Leads came in from everywhere—Moscow, Prague, Istanbul, Mexico City. Each one promising, each one dissolving into nothing. She stayed one step ahead, a ghost slipping through borders and identities as easily as breathing.
And while the hunt dragged on, our home decayed into something unrecognizable.
A mausoleum.
Elena ate alone in the dining room, seated at one end of a table long enough to host a summit.
I could hear the faint scrape of her fork against porcelain, the quiet clink of cutlery echoing through the cavernous space. She never lingered. Never called for company. The food often went half-touched.
I waited.
Only when her footsteps retreated upstairs—soft, measured, resigned—did I enter the dining room. I took my place at the opposite end, staring at the empty chair across from me like it was an accusation. The food was always cold by then. I ate anyway, mechanically, without tasting a single bite.
Two people.
Husband and wife.
Bound by vows and vengeance, sharing a mansion that rang hollow with absence. The silence between us wasn’t peaceful—it was loaded, volatile, screaming with everything we refused to say.
Some nights, long after she’d closed her bedroom door, I sat alone in the dark and wondered if the silence was killing us both.
And whether, in trying so hard not to lose myself to her...
I was already lost.
I tortured myself with thoughts of her.
They came unbidden, invasive, threading through my mind at the most inopportune moments—during briefings, negotiations, executions.
I imagined her not as she was now—quiet, withdrawn, guarded—but as a map I wanted to memorize completely.
Every scar on her soul.
Every fracture she carried beneath that composed exterior. I wanted to know the names of every bastard who had ever hurt her, every hand that had touched her without permission, every voice that had broken her spirit.
