Chapter Six: Shattered Reflections
393 Words
The files lay spread before her like open wounds. Selene sat in the dim glow of her apartment, her eyes tracing line after line of transactions, acquisitions, and signatures. Each word should have fueled her vengeance, should have steeled her heart against the man whose kiss still lingered on her lips.
But the deeper she read, the more the edges of her world blurred.
The contracts bore the same name over and over—not Adrian’s. His father’s. Vincenzo D’Angelo.
It had been him. The cunning patriarch. The hand behind the fire that consumed her family’s estate, the predator who had devoured her father’s business piece by piece. Adrian’s name appeared only in recent years, appended like a shadow, the heir inheriting an empire already stained with blood.
Selene’s chest tightened. All this time, she had sharpened her hate for Adrian, molding her very soul into a weapon against him. Yet the man she kissed, the man she vowed to destroy—he might not be guilty at all.
Her reflection in the glass table trembled back at her: a stranger’s face painted with elegance, eyes burning with confusion. Who was she now, if not the avenger? If her enemy was not Adrian, then what had she become?
Her phone buzzed. A message from Adrian.
Dinner tomorrow. No excuses.
The boldness of it made her lips curl in a bitter smile. He was relentless, drawn to her even as suspicion gnawed at him. And she—damn her own heart—was drawn back.
She closed the laptop, pressing her fingers to her temples. “You fool,” she whispered to herself. “You swore to destroy him, not to fall into his arms.”
Yet memory betrayed her: his touch on her cheek, his lips against hers, the way he looked at her as though he still saw the girl she had buried in the fire.
Tears pricked her eyes, sharp and unwelcome. She had lived years without them, hardened into steel. Now, in Adrian’s presence, she was breaking apart.
Selene rose abruptly, pacing the room, her silk gown whispering across the floor. She would not cry. She could not.
But when she stopped before the mirror, the truth stared back.
She was no longer certain of anything—
not her vengeance, not her identity,
and worst of all, not her heart.
- Writer
