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Chapter 3
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2026-02-09 20:16:06Chapter 3
ADRIA The hot water scalded my skin, turning it pink and raw, but I didn't move to adjust the temperature. I stood under the shower spray until the bathroom filled with steam, until I could barely see my own hand in front of my face, until every trace of that soup—and his touch—had been washed down the drain. My phone buzzed on the bathroom counter, the sound cutting through the white noise of running water. I ignored it. Then it buzzed again. And again. With a sigh, I turned off the shower and wrapped myself in a towel, my wet hair dripping onto the tile floor. The phone screen lit up with a new message, and I already knew who it was from before I picked it up. **Damien: Don't bother coming back to the club. Your presence and that horrible soup you made have made Adina sick. I won't be coming home tonight either.** I stared at the message, waiting for the familiar ache in my chest, the desperate need to fix things, to apologize, to beg him to reconsider. I waited for the tears that usually came so easily, for the crushing weight of failure that had become my constant companion. Nothing came. I felt nothing but a distant, clinical observation of the words on the screen. Adina was sick. Of course she was. Probably from laughing too hard at my humiliation. And Damien wouldn't be coming home—meaning he'd be spending the night with her, or Amber, or whoever else caught his fancy. A month ago, I would have called him. Begged him to come home. Promised to make it right. Waited up all night in case he changed his mind, sitting by the door like a dog waiting for its master. I rolled my eyes and dropped the phone on the counter without responding. The silence that followed felt liberating. I walked to my closet—the small, pathetic closet where I'd hung all the bland, modest clothes Damien preferred. Beiges and grays and navy blues. Nothing too bright, nothing too attention-grabbing, nothing that might embarrass him or make me stand out. I pushed past them all, reaching for the very back where I'd shoved everything from my old life into a single garment bag. My fingers closed around soft fabric, and I pulled out a pair of black joggers and a faded gray sweatshirt from my alma mater—MIT, where I'd triple-majored in computer science, business, and engineering. The sweatshirt had paint stains on one sleeve from an art class I'd taken for fun, and a small burn hole from a late-night soldering accident in the robotics lab. I pressed the fabric to my face and breathed in deeply. It smelled like storage and dust, but underneath that, I could almost catch traces of who I used to be. Adriana Salvadore. Heiress. Genius. Fighter. Friend. Not Adriana Chen, the pathetic, desperate wife who'd erased herself for a man who'd never wanted her in the first place. I dressed quickly, my body remembering the comfort of clothes that actually fit properly, that didn't restrict my movement or make me feel like I was playing dress-up in someone else's life. I pulled my wet hair into a ponytail, grabbed my keys, and headed for the garage. The Mercedes SUV Damien had bought me sat pristine and barely used—he preferred I take taxis so I wouldn't "embarrass him with my terrible driving." Next to it, covered with a tarp and gathering dust, was my baby: a matte black Ducati Panigale V4 that I'd customized myself. I'd told Damien it belonged to a friend who was storing it here. I bypassed both vehicles and went for the BMW sedan I'd registered under a shell company—untraceable, unremarkable, perfect for disappearing. The drive to the storage facility took forty minutes. I'd rented the unit three years ago, back when I was still myself, before I'd seen that necklace and lost my mind. It was located near the outskirts of the city, in a neighborhood that straddled the line between industrial and residential, the kind of place where no one asked questions and security cameras were more for show than function. I parked in the empty lot and made my way to unit 247, punching in the code I'd memorized but never written down. The metal door rolled up with a screech of protest, revealing boxes stacked neatly against the walls, labeled in my own handwriting: **Books. Equipment. Clothes. Documents.** And there, in a fireproof safe in the corner: **Identity.** I pulled out the safe, entered the combination, and lifted the lid. Inside lay everything I'd locked away to become Damien's wife. My real driver's license. My credit cards linked to my actual accounts. My passport. My old phones—three of them, each serving different purposes. I grabbed the primary one, a custom-built smartphone with encryption that would make the NSA weep, and powered it on. The boot-up screen glowed in the dim light of the storage unit. I watched the loading bar inch forward, my heart rate picking up for the first time since I'd dropped that thermos upstairs at the club. Then the notifications started. The phone vibrated so violently it nearly jumped out of my hand. Messages flooded in, thousands of them, the notification counter climbing so fast it became a blur. Missed calls: 3,847. Text messages: 12,493. Emails: 28,756. Social media notifications: exceeded maximum count. I scrolled through them with shaking fingers. My parents. My brothers—Adrian, Mikael, and Elijah. My sisters—Sophia and Isabella. My best friends from college—Maya, Jordan, and China. Messages from my martial arts master, Sifu Wong. Encrypted messages from my hacker collective, the ones I'd built security systems with for Fortune 500 companies. Emails from fellow CEOs I'd collaborated with on tech startups. **Mom: Adriana, please call us. We're worried sick.** **Adrian: This isn't funny anymore. Where the hell are you?** **Maya: If you don't respond in 24 hours I'm filing a missing person report.** **Sifu Wong: Your absence from the dojo speaks of either death or cowardice. I hope it's the former.** That last one made me smile despite everything. Sifu Wong had never believed in coddling his students. I opened Facebook—an account I'd abandoned eighteen months ago with over fifty thousand followers. My last post stared back at me: **Going ghost for a while. Don't worry, I'll be back when I've found what I'm looking for.** The comments section had exploded. People asking if I was okay, if I'd been kidnapped, if I'd joined a cult. Conspiracy theories about my disappearance. Memorial posts from people who'd assumed I was dead. I navigated to I*******m, where I had a hundred thousand followers from my photography hobby and tech reviews. Same story. TikTok, where my martial arts videos and coding tutorials had garnered two million followers. Same desperate messages, same concern, same assumption that something terrible had happened to me. Something terrible had happened to me. I'd lost my mind over a borrowed necklace and a childhood fantasy. My fingers moved across the keyboard, typing before I could second-guess myself: **I'm back.** I hit post simultaneously across all platforms. The response was instantaneous. Likes flooded in faster than I could count. Comments exploded. Shares multiplied. My phone started ringing immediately, the screen lighting up with incoming calls from dozens of numbers. But only one mattered. **Adrian - Twin Brother** I answered on the second ring. "ADRIANA FUCKING SALVADORE, WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN?!"
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His Tamed Wife, The Wild Heiress Chapter 193
Chapter 193MARCUSI sat in my sitting room with the phone in my hand and the television still showing Love Island on mute and the bag of crisps on the cushion beside me.I thought about Damien.Sixteen years of knowing him. Fifteen of them as the person he showed the world, the CEO, the strategist, the man who had built something significant and maintained it with the specific discipline of someone who understood exactly what he was maintaining it from.The one before that—the year I had known the other version, the one that had needed to negotiate a departure, the one that had required a specific kind of oversight commitment as the price of being allowed to leave—that year lived in its own compartment and had stayed there for fifteen years.Until today.I looked at the window.The woman with the dog was gone. The delivery vehicle was gone. The street was doing its ordinary things.They had Damien.The accountability concern was something I didn't have the access level to understand,
His Tamed Wife, The Wild Heiress Chapter 192
Chapter 192MARCUS"Or," Robert said, "the shot was for show. And the extraction was always the plan."I looked at him."The live stream," Robert said. "Hundreds of cameras. Everything going out in real time. If you shoot someone on a live stream and take them away, you've made a statement. Not just to the target. To everyone watching.""A message," Thomas said."A message to whoever might be considering—whatever the thing is that Damien was apparently supposed to be doing," Robert said.I sat with that.Robert was not wrong.I pressed both hands over my face briefly."The police," Thomas said. "They want to talk to family and friends. They're setting up interviews. We should go—even if it's just to support Adriana, we should be there.""Yes," I said. "We should go.""Do you know anything that you can tell them?" Thomas said. "About who might have—""No," I said.Thomas and Robert looked at each other."Marcus," Thomas said."I said no," I said. "And I mean it. There are things that i
His Tamed Wife, The Wild Heiress Chapter 191
Chapter 191MARCUSI had been watching Love Island for forty minutes before the knock came.This was not something I advertised. The version of Marcus Bellamy that existed in professional contexts—in boardrooms, at charity events, in the orbit of Damien Castellan's world—was not a version that watched reality television on a Wednesday afternoon with a bag of crisps and strong opinions about the authenticity of various contestants' emotional responses.The version at home was different."Zach is absolutely not straight," I said, to the television. "Look at him. Look at the way he looks at Bryce. That is not how straight men look at each other."The television did not respond."And Bryce is worse," I said. "At least Zach is trying. Bryce isn't even trying. Bryce is just—" I gestured at the screen. "He's just being Bryce, which is the most obviously gay thing anyone has done in the history of a show that is ostensibly about heterosexual coupling."The television continued to show Zach an
His Tamed Wife, The Wild Heiress Chapter 190
Chapter 190ADRIA"Yes," he said."We have more information than they think we have," I said. "Which is an advantage.""Yes," he said.I looked at Yusuf."I'm going to find him," I said.He looked at me for a long moment."Yes," he said. "I believe you."The police arrived at two fifteen.Three officers—two in uniform, one not, the one not wearing a suit that communicated detective. They moved through the hospital entrance with the specific purpose of people who had a location and were moving toward it, and they found us in the waiting area with the efficiency of people who had been given a description."We're looking for individuals who were present at the accident on Highway 7," the detective said. "We have information that several of you were at the scene."He looked at Kieran first. Then at Yusuf. Then at me."I was at the scene," Kieran said. "I was in the vehicle that was involved in the accident.""And the woman? The pregnant woman who was transported here?""She's being admitt
His Tamed Wife, The Wild Heiress Chapter 189
Chapter 189ADRIA"He turned around because he chose to," I said."Because I asked him to," Yusuf said."Yusuf," I said. "He made the decision. Whatever you said, whatever you asked—he made the decision."He looked at his hands."He told me to bring them here first," he said. "He said bring them to the hospital and come back for him. That's what he said. Come back for him." He looked at the entrance. "He was standing on a road waiting for me to come back.""I know," I said."Someone shot him while he was waiting," he said."I know," I said.Kieran was beside me and he was very quiet and the baby in his arms was making the soft, exploratory sounds of someone new in the world who had not yet understood that the world had sounds of its own that were more complicated."Who did this?" Kieran said. His voice was quiet. The specific quiet of something contained.I looked at Yusuf."Who could have done this?" I said.Yusuf looked up from his hands."He has enemies," he said. "That is not an u
His Tamed Wife, The Wild Heiress Chapter 188
Chapter 188ADRIAYusuf came through the hospital entrance first.He was moving with the specific urgency of a man who had somewhere to be immediately after delivering his current passengers—the forward-leaning efficiency of someone whose next task was already running in his mind while he completed the current one. He had his phone in his hand and he was looking at it with the focused attention of someone checking a route or a message.Behind him, Kieran.Kieran came through the automatic doors moving wrong. Not dramatically—he was upright, he was walking, he was holding the baby against his chest with both arms in the careful, absolute way of someone who had been given something fragile and had made a decision about it—but wrong in the specific way of a person managing multiple physical injuries through sheer decision. His left leg had a quality to it. His right arm moved with more care than the left. The bruising on his face that hadn't been there two days ago had been augmented by
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