Julian’s plea hung in the air for a single, silent second. His eyes, wide and swimming with manufactured tears, searched mine for a flicker of the old Elena, the woman who had once nursed him through a fever with a devotion bordering on worship. He found nothing. Only the polished, impenetrable surface of a stranger.
And in that void, the desperation curdled into something else. Something primal and ugly.
The change was terrifyingly swift. The sniveling mask of the penitent husband melted away, and beneath it was the raw, contorted face of a cornered animal. A low growl rumbled in his chest, a sound completely alien to the smooth, charismatic man I had known. His eyes darted from my impassive face to the figure still crumpled in a heap of ruined silk a few feet away. To the source of his
