And I wanted them dead.
Not quickly. Not mercifully. I imagined hunting them down one by one, stripping away their defenses, forcing them to look me in the eye as they begged for an end I would delay just long enough for regret to settle into their bones.
The violence of the thought frightened me.
Just as much as the softer ones did.
I caught myself fantasizing about something far more dangerous—sitting across from her at the dining table, not in silence, but in ease. Sharing a meal. Listening to her speak without flinching, without fear. Hearing her laugh—really laugh—and letting that sound fill the cavernous emptiness of the house until it no longer echoed like a tomb.
Those thoughts were treason.
So I crushed them.
I reminded myself that this pull toward her was not tenderness—it was obsession, born of proximity and guilt and unresolved vengeance. That if I let it grow, it would shatter the walls I’d built to survive. Walls that kept me untouchable.
Distance was safety.
Distance kept the beast leashed.
Then, at the end of the third week of our marriage, everything changed.
A breakthrough.
One of my most reliable intelligence channels—clean, vetted, uncorrupted—placed her sister in Panama. Alive. Active. Fortified inside a heavily guarded compound on the outskirts of the city, surrounded by mercenaries and layers of security that screamed long-term planning.
I deployed immediately.
Eight of my best operatives. Men I trusted with my life. Men who didn’t make mistakes.
They moved like shadows through the humid streets, heat clinging to them like a second skin.
Surveillance footage showed fleeting glimpses—her sister’s silhouette darting through crowds, slipping into back alleys, vanishing through doors that led nowhere.
She was U.S.-trained, Special Agent caliber, a ghost with intimate knowledge of urban warfare and escape tactics.
She led them deliberately.
Into the underbelly of the city. Into a derelict tunnel system abandoned decades ago, unstable and half-collapsed.
My men followed, methodical, cautious—until the trap was sprung.
She triggered the collapse herself.
The tunnel caved in with a roar that swallowed screams and gunfire alike. Concrete and earth crushed steel and bone. Six of my men died instantly.
The remaining two barely made it out. They clawed through debris with bleeding hands, half-buried, half-conscious, dragging themselves into the open.
They were soaked in blood and dust, shaken to the core, carrying nothing with them but survival—and the crushing weight of failure.
And she vanished.
Again.
When the report reached me, something inside my chest detonated.
Rage exploded like a grenade, shredding every shred of restraint I had left. I tore my office apart—glass shattered, furniture splintered, fists split against stone.
How had she slipped away again? How had she outplayed me so completely?
