**Chapter Eight: His Wife?**

**Sam's POV**

A man stood a few feet away, even from that distance I could feel something shift in the air around him, just enough to make room for whatever he was.

Only then did I notice the men positioned around us. Some near the entrance, others waiting farther back in the dark, all of them stood in a way like they'd done this a hundred times before and knew precisely how it would end.

My throat went dry the second I recognized him.

It was the same man from the clinic hallway. The one I'd bumped into months ago, the one who'd caught my arm before I could hit the floor. The same cold eyes. The same dangerous stillness that had made me glance back at him even after I'd walked away.

*Was he the one who'd pulled me out of the river?*

He took a step forward.

Then another.

By the time he stopped, he was standing right in front of me, close enough that I suddenly forgot how to breathe properly.

A sharp jaw, dark hair, eyes that looked at me like I was already something he owned rather than someone he was meeting for the second time. He was dangerously attractive in a way that felt almost wrong to notice, the kind of good-looking that came with a warning label, like staring too long could genuinely get you killed.

"Can you just kill me?" I asked. My voice shook harder than I wanted it to. "Right now."

His expression didn't change at all.

He just looked at me, steady, like he was waiting to see whether I actually meant it or whether it was just my fear talking.

"Just kill me already," I whispered, and for one brief second the fear underneath everything twisted itself into anger instead. "Or else I'll—"

The words died somewhere in my throat as his hand closed around my waist, firm and sudden, and my chest collided with his before I'd even registered him moving. I could feel the heat coming off his body through the thin fabric between us.

"Or fucking what, Celine?"

*Celine*

He knew my name.

My lips parted, but nothing came out. Not a single word.

"I…"

What could I even say to that? What could I possibly do, standing here in the dark on an island I couldn't leave, held against a man who apparently knew exactly who I used to be?

I just stood there and stared at him while a hundred questions crashed through my head all at once.

Who was he, really? How did he know my name? Why had he pulled me out of that river only to keep me locked in a room afterward? Why wasn't he letting go of me now?

He reached up slowly and brushed a loose strand of hair away from my face. The gesture should have felt gentle. Instead it sent my pulse racing with something closer to fear than anything else.

Before I could make sense of any of it, his hand tightened at my waist. His other hand came up under my chin, tilting my face toward his. His eyes held mine for what felt like an impossibly long stretch of time.

Then he leaned in.

His lips met mine.

It was slow. Deliberate. His mouth moved against mine with a quiet, controlled intensity that made my knees go weak underneath me. For one impossible second, every question, every fear, every thought crowding my head simply went silent. The world narrowed down to nothing but the heat of him, the firmness of his grip, the way his mouth demanded everything from me without ever bothering to ask permission first.

Then reality slammed back into me all at once.

I shoved him with everything I had left in me. It was clumsy, weak, more instinct than actual strength, but it was enough to knock myself backward a step. My hand came up before I'd even decided to move, and my palm landed hard across his face.

"Fuck!"

Something shifted behind his eyes.

I understood, almost immediately, that I'd crossed some line I hadn't known existed until I was already on the wrong side of it.

"Take her inside." he ordered.

Two guards moved before I could even process the words. One caught my arm, the other my shoulder, I tried to jerk free, but they barely seemed to notice the effort.

"Let go of me!"

He walked ahead of us without looking back, hands in his pockets, calm as anything, as if nothing at all had just happened between us.

The doors opened.

Instead of taking me upstairs, they led me somewhere else entirely —a large kitchen, gleaming and immaculate. The moment we stepped through the doorway, every member of staff inside stopped what they were doing and filed out quietly, the way people do when they already know better than to be witnesses to whatever's coming next.

The guards brought me to the center of the room and finally let go. My heart was racing hard enough that I could feel it in my ears. I looked around wildly for some way out, some door, some window I could reach before anyone stopped me.

There wasn't one.

Just walls, locked doors, and guards who looked away the second my eyes found theirs. Then I heard his footsteps behind me — slow, unhurried, steady — and that frightened me more than anything else so far. A man who was genuinely furious would have rushed. He walked into the kitchen, and without a word, he reached for two long kitchen knives resting on the counter beside him. He picked one up, then the other, and the metal scraped together with a slow, deliberate sound that seemed to echo far louder than it should have.

"Do it," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. "What are you waiting for? Just kill me."

I had already looked death in the face once. I had already woken up wearing a totally different face. Whatever fear I should have felt standing here had already been spent somewhere on a bridge months ago.

The blade stopped against the side of my neck. The cold of it pressed into my skin, sharp enough that I felt every millimeter of contact. I looked straight at him and held perfectly still.

A small sound broke the silence between us.

The weight I'd stopped noticing around my neck disappeared.

My eyes dropped. A little silver pendant — my wedding pendant, the one I'd worn every day for three years without ever really thinking about it, slid down my chest and hit the marble floor.

"No."

I reached for it instinctively, but one of his men caught my arm before I could get close.

The pendant slipped from his fingers instead and disappeared into an open fireplace at the far end of the kitchen. For one terrible second I could still see it glinting in the firelight, then the flames swallowed it whole.

"That was mine!"

The scream tore out of me before I could stop it. The guard's grip loosened just enough that I stumbled forward, staring helplessly into the fire, at the exact spot where the pendant had already stopped being anything but ash.

It was gone.

The last piece of my old life, and it was simply gone.

"Celine Salvatore died weeks ago."

His voice finally broke the silence, flat and certain. I turned slowly to face him. He nodded once to a guard standing near the door, and the guard stepped forward and set a black folder down on the marble island between us.

"You want your answers… read it."

My hands shook as I reached for the folder and flipped it open. The first thing I saw was a photograph — the same face I'd been wearing for a while now, looking back up at me from glossy paper.

I turned the page. A birth certificate.

Another page. A passport.

Another. A national identification card.

Medical records. Bank documents, page after page, every single one stamped with that same photograph.

SAMANTHA DELA CRUZ.

Dela Cruz?

The Dela Cruz family.

No.

They weren't just another name on the long list of families running this city — they sat at the very top of Varezia, the family everyone else measured their own fear against. They move quietly, and controlled things from somewhere behind the scenes, people said crossing them was the last mistake anyone ever got the chance to make.

"Why…" My voice came out shaking. "Why does the name end with Dela Cruz?"

"Because you're my wife."

His wife?

I stared at him. The words refused to arrange themselves into anything that made sense.

"I already have a husband."

"You had one," He set the knives down on the counter, slow and deliberate, and his eyes never left mine while he did it. “You belong to me now.”

And at that moment, standing there in a kitchen full of people too afraid to even glance in our direction, I finally understood something I should have realized the second we walked in.

No one in that room was afraid of the knives.

They were afraid of the man who'd been holding them.

Adrian Dela Cruz.

The son of the Dela Cruz family.

"What do you want?"