A Second Bite At The Cherry

MURDER

FOUR

PENELOPE

A few minutes after they caught me, they knocked me out cold with a palm to the neck.

When I had roused in the boot of a moving car, my wrists were tied tightly behind me.

I kept twisting my hands anyway.

Not because I thought it would work, but because staying still felt like giving up.

But the knot was tough and tight and made the ropes bite deep into my flesh.

The warehouse they brought me to smelled like rusting iron and old rotting corpses.

I was trembling visibly when they pushed me down onto a wooden chair.

There were five of them now and I could tell because I wasn't blindfolded.

"Alpha Crest asked us to start the process before anything goes wrong."

"Hopefully Salvatore replies fast and cooperates so we can get the hell out of here sooner than later," another said.

It was the two from the parking lot and a third one who seemed to be in charge.

The one who seemed to be in charge crouched down to my eye level.

"Your husband is your lord and personal saviour now," he said to me.

I did not say a word to him.

I was busy thinking about Duke's face that morning when he walked out on me.

How ordinary it had looked because I had not known then what I know now.

Inside me, Petra was pacing back and forth the way she only did when something was deeply wrong and she had no way to fix it.

"Call Salvatore," another said.

He was the one who made the call.

He put the phone on speaker and set it on the table in front of me so I could hear.

My stomach began to churn.

It rang twice.

"Who is this?" Duke's voice came through a second later, clear and unbothered.

Something in my chest moved in response to it the way it always had.

Out of habit.

Out of years of loving him.

Petra went very still.

I hated myself for it.

"Salvatore?" One of the men asked.

"Yes," he hissed. "Who's this?"

The impatience in his voice was glaring.

I wondered where he was now.

Still with Thalia I supposed.

"Your wife is with us, Alpha Salvatore," the third man started immediately.

Duke said nothing.

"Ready the documents to the land in court to be delivered at a given address unless her life will be wasted accordingly."

The other one leaned in.

"We want ten billion transferred along with it or we will send her back in pieces," he chipped in.

I gulped at the threat.

There was a pause.

Then Duke started to laugh.

It was a short, quiet laugh.

The kind that meant that he had found something to be genuinely stupid.

My brows rose.

I was sitting in a cold warehouse with my hands tied tight and he was laughing?

What exactly was hilarious?

My life was in danger here.

Petra let out a sound inside me that was not quite a whimper and not quite a growl.

Just something in between that had no name in particular.

"How much did she pay you to do this?" he finally asked when he stopped laughing.

My eyes widened.

He thought I hired these people or what?

My breathing grew heavy.

Not from the words he had spoken alone, but from how easy they were.

How quickly he had decided what this was without even an interest to investigate.

The man in charge looked at me.

"Isn't this your husband's voice? Or did we get the wrong man?" He demanded.

"Duke?" I spoke.

There was a small shuffle.

"Penelope, stop this nonsense you are doing and go right home."

He wasn't home yet.

That was the first thing I deduced from his entire sentence.

"If it's money you want, I will give it to you. You do not have to do all these."

I swallowed.

"Duke, this isn't planned," I began. "I told you I was being kidnapped."

My voice rose an octave.

"If only you had left Thalia and paid attention I wouldn't even be here."

I was shouting now.

But I didn't care.

One of the men shot me a warning look.

"If you hadn't been busy staying buried in Thalia, I would not be here right now."

I shook my head desperately.

"I am telling you this is not a joke," the man said. "We have her right now."

"And I am telling you that Penelope is just an attention seeking woman who would willingly burn a building down if it meant I looked in her direction."

His voice was easy, almost bored.

"Whatever she promised you, she cannot pay it. She has nothing in her name."

Nothing in her name.

And he was right.

Every account, every property, every single one of the businesses I had bled for was registered under Duke Salvatore.

Because I had trusted him completely.

He had audaciously cheated on me with Thalia and even gotten her pregnant.

I was such a fool.

Petra pressed herself against the inside of my chest and stayed there.

She did not fight.

She did not growl.

She just stayed with me like she was trying to hold me together from the inside.

"We will prove it to you."

One pulled out his phone from his pocket and began to record a video.

The man nodded at the one standing to my right who then raised his gun.

My heart leaped high in my chest as he fired once at the floor, close to me.

It was close enough for me to scream.

The sound tore out of my throat before I could stop myself.

My scream and the gunshot sound mixed and filled the entire warehouse.

"Shut up," someone snapped at me.

When it faded I was shaking so hard that my teeth were gnashing uncontrollably.

My heart palpitations increased.

And it did not settle even after he put the gun away, back into the holster.

They sent the video.

All of us waited.

His response to it came as a voice note and the man played it out loud for me.

"I never knew you were such an attention w***e, Penelope," he started.

My heart constricted.

Petra flinched.

"How long have you planned all of this? The set up? Spying on me for Crest?"

My jaw dropped.

What on earth did he mean by that?

"Because I rejected you, you have so quickly jumped ships to his side to aid him?"

I became moon-eyed.

I looked at the wall across from me because I did not know where else to look.

He genuinely believed I had arranged all of this because he rejected me?

He had taken everything I was going through and turned it into evidence of something I had done to him.

What kind of man did I marry?

"What on earth is he saying?" I whispered to no one in particular under my breath.

Duke's voice continued in the background in that same flat tone I detested.

"I rejected her this morning. She is not my mate. She is not my problem. She is not my wife in any way that matters anymore."

There was a brief pause.

"If you actually have her and you want to do me a genuine favour just kill her."

My breath hitched.

Petra went completely silent.

Not even a whimper or the soft purr I had grown so used to hearing in the back of my mind.

Just silence.

And somehow that was the worst thing of all.

"That would save me the inconvenience that comes with having to divorce her. Also send me proof when you are done too."

My mouth opened wider.

Beep. Beep.

Then the line went dead.

My chest tightened.

I sat with those words for a moment.

Kill her?

Save me the inconvenience?

He had said it the way you say take out the trash. The way you say handle it.

I had given this ungrateful man more than five years of my life.

I had dissolved my own pack just to merge it into his to make him happy.

I had helped him build everything he had from scratch.

I had sat across from lawyers and signed documents that left me with nothing.

Nothing of my own.

All because I had believed without question that his name was the same as mine.

And he had just told these strangers to kill me so he would not have to file the divorce paperwork.

Tears started to make their way down my cheeks without warning.

The sobs grew thicker, racking through every inch of my weak, tired body.

The man tried to call back immediately but the number was unreachable.

"You didn't get the wrong woman?" He asked his partner in disbelief.

"No, she's Penelope Salvatore."

He glanced at me.

I shrugged.

This wasn't my fault.

He tried again.

Still nothing.

Duke had blocked them.

The three men looked at each other.

The one in charge picked up his phone slowly and made a call.

Crest spoke from the other end.

After explaining the situation to him, he issued orders I couldn't hear in an angry voice.

The call ended almost as soon as it began and then he set the phone back down.

His jaw was tight.

"Crest has abandoned us. She could implicate any one of us."

He must have gone into this expecting to get some money from Duke.

I doubt Alpha Crest had any use for me aside from the money and documents.

But now he was standing in a cold warehouse with a woman nobody wanted.

A woman that her own husband had just discarded like something spoiled.

He most probably felt like a fool.

"Kill her," he said quietly.

Fear washed over me.

"We are not running a charity."

I did not even attempt to beg.

I had run out of that somewhere between the parking lot and the rope on my wrists.

I had nothing left to beg with and no one there left to beg either.

Besides I knew they wouldn't spare me.

Their minds were already made up.

I sat straight in that chair while feeling something settle deep inside of me.

It was not peaceful exactly.

But it was close to it. The kind of stillness that comes with losing everything. The numbness that meant there was nothing left to be afraid of.

Deep inside me, Petra reared her head for the first time since the silence had taken over.

She was not afraid either.

"Any last words?" He asked.

I shook my head.

Nothing came to mind.

I looked at the wall in front of me and I made myself a promise while I still could.

If I ever came back from this, I promised that I would do better.

I would not waste it.

I would never again be a woman who built a man and handed him the tools to destroy her.

I would never again shrink myself into something small enough to fit inside someone else's ambition.

I would not rebuild the same life with softer lighting and call it healing.

And I would never, as long as I existed, choose Duke Salvatore ever again.

I would take back everything that had been taken from me.

Every signature.

Every business deal.

Every day of those five years.

I would not grieve for him.

I would make him watch.

The gun went off.

The bullet buried itself into my skull.

My body jerked backwards instantly and blood poured out of the wound, straight over my neck and even into my eyes.

The pain was sharp and then it was warm and then it was nothing at all.

And the last thing I thought in that final sliver of a nanosecond was not his name or his face.

Instead it was Petra's voice, rising up from somewhere deep within me and clearly speaking the only word that mattered—clear, calm and certain.

Vengeance.