Chapter 2

In my first life, when Serena finished saying those exact words, I picked her up while she was still crying and drove her to a hotel.

Evan Brooks had never been my choice. Someone had handed him to me.

While Serena was turning her family upside down for him, he was in that hotel with his hands all over somebody else.

By the time I got her there, he was with a wealthy woman in her sixties.

Serena saw it, and the two of them tore into each other.

They ended up chasing each other out into the road, and a car came through at speed and killed Evan where he stood.

Serena went into shock.

Not long after that, she married me.

I thought she'd finally come to her senses.

What I hadn't expected was that in the third year of our marriage she'd shut our son in the basement and starve him to death. He wasn't a month old.

Then she took me down to look at the body.

I held him and cried and asked her why.

Serena answered by driving a knife into my chest.

"Because of Evan, obviously.

"Does it hurt, Adrian? When my Evan died, it hurt a hundred times more than this.

"You owed him. You deserve it."

Only then did I understand that she had never let him go.

Marrying me had been one step in a plan to make me pay for him.

With the last breath I had, I asked her.

"Serena, we grew up together. I never once did anything to wrong you.

"You saw with your own eyes what he was. What was there to love?"

Her eyes went poisonous. She kicked my hand off the toe of her shoe.

"He knew how to enjoy himself, and he had the looks to back it up.

"Rich women wanted to spend money on him. So did I.

"He wanted to play around, so I paid to have him to myself. Who asked you to interfere?"

When she said it, the floor went out from under me.

She had known exactly what he was. More than that, she'd wanted him for it.

All those years I'd been afraid of hurting her, afraid of making her cry, and I had never once laid a hand on her.

And she'd been ready to hand herself over to Evan Brooks with her checkbook open.

The pain took my breath.

And then, out of nowhere, I remembered how the two of them had met.

Serena had come to the office to see me. I was in a meeting, so I sent my assistant down to bring her up.

Evan got to her first.

Afterward, upstairs, she'd told me about a cat.

There was a cat crying down in the parking garage, poor thing, and Evan had gone out and bought it something to eat. He was so kind. I ought to give him a raise.

I'd nodded and said sure.

Thinking about it now: security in a downtown office tower is airtight. How exactly does a stray cat get into a private garage?

That cat was down there because Evan put it down there.

He wanted her to believe he was kind, that he had lines he wouldn't cross.

And Serena, who had only ever lived like a princess because my family kept hers afloat, walked into it exactly as he'd intended.

The memory ran out.

And for the first time, I put my hand up and caught the thing she'd thrown at me instead of letting it hit me.

"Adrian, don't be angry. Let us talk to her. She'll come around."

Her parents were looking at me the way people look at a man holding their note.

Serena's face was still full of temper. She looked at me the way you'd look at a stray dog that wouldn't stop following you home.

If she hated me that much, there was nothing left to say.

I laughed under my breath, dropped the pillow she'd thrown on the floor, and said it calmly.