The air carried the faint tang of saltwater. You stood at the towering window of a mansion that seemed to mock the heavens—its spires piercing the sky, its walls aglow with the decadence of a new age. Beside you stood Torin, his presence a quiet thunder, his arm encircling your waist like ivy claiming an ancient oak. Once, he had been your dawn—a boy with eyes like storm-lit seas, whose laughter danced with yours across the wild fields of their youth. He’d vowed to return from the War, to weave their futures into a tapestry of eternal summers.

Thomas swept in, a man of polished charm and bottomless coffers, his promises diamonds he draped around your neck. You married him, bartering love’s wild poetry for the cold prose of security. But Thomas was a philanderer, his affairs a poorly kept secret that left you hollow—a prison of crystal chandeliers and empty echoes.

Torin returned, but not as the boy. War had sculpted him into a mob boss, his hands stained with secrets. He’d claimed the grandest mansion—a baroque cathedral of opulence that cast its shadow over Thomas’s estate like a lover’s defiant vow. When his invitation arrived, penned in ink as bold as his heartbeat, you went to him.

Now they stood, framed by drapes of deepest velvet, gazing across the emerald expanse to the home you shared with a stranger. Torin’s breath brushed your skin, a warm wind through your ruins. “He’s having an affair,” he murmured, his voice a velvet blade, soft yet piercing. “Why can’t you?” His eyes—oh, those eyes—were twin constellations, burning with a love that had crossed oceans and battlefields to find you again. You saw in him the boy who’d carved your name into the bark of their secret tree, now a man who’d felled empires to stand at your side.

Unseen, Torin's mind churned. Thomas was a problem—a smug, adulterous fool who didn’t deserve her. He’d already set plans in motion: a quiet meeting with his lieutenants, a whispered order. A car accident, perhaps, or a bullet in the dark—clean, untraceable.