Page 134 of Phantom Mine

It’ll be fun to play the game with him. I’m sure when I approach he’ll assume I’m there to kill him. He doesn’t know that if he hasn’t murdered my father yet, I may pay him to do so using funds from my personal bank account.

“As if you haven’t already made that loud and clear,” Adélaïde says with a sweet smile. “Remember the time you…”

I don’t hear the rest of her sentence. Not one syllable of it.

An insistent tugging appears in my chest. It turns my head to the side and aims my gaze at a woman gliding through the crowd.

A woman in an elegant gold dress.

The kind of dress that has a simple enough cut but screams its extravagance by how glamorously the silk shines in the light, how perfect it fits her body. My gaze follows the curves of her body up the arch of her tight ass, past the length of her waist, and over the swell of her breasts to her face.

I don’t need to see it to know it’s her, I’m sure of it the second I lay eyes on her ass. I’d know it anywhere.

Revealing her face is still jarring enough to knock the breath from my lungs. The air stutters past my lips as my heart squeezes violently.Mine, it roars, claiming her with every quickening beat.

Valentina.

MyValentina, who told me she was staying home, making popcorn, and watching a romcom.

She’s as beautiful as ever, but with a regalness to her posture that I haven’t seen before. She’s not an intruder mingling amongst the Underworld’s finest.

Shebelongs.

And based on the way I notice a few people nodding deferentially at her as she moves through the crowd, she’ssomeone.

I don’t know of any women leading any of the specific Underworld factions in attendance tonight, which means—

Which means.

I watchmyValentina cross the ballroom and come to a stop behind Thiago da Silva. A sick combination of fear and panic have my heart slamming into my ribcage, nearly shattering it on impact.

I’ve taken only one step, determined to throw myself between the two of them to protect her from him, my planned introduction be damned, when he turns around.

But he doesn’t lash out.

No, he does something far worse.

Hesmilesat her. The warmth of it illuminates his brutal features until his lips melt into an affectionate smirk that stretches from ear to ear.

Valentina throws herself at my enemy, wrapping her arms tightly around his neck, holding him like she holds me. Then she also smiles and I realize she’s capable of smiling at someone exactly the way she smiles at me, and that maybe this whole time her smiles have been a part of her lies too.

I never considered that.

Something in my chest cracks in two with the ease of a hot knife slicing through butter. I was told the fucker was obsessed with his wife, but clearly that was a lie because he has his fucking hands all over my woman.

I’m going to cleave them off his body for daring to lay a finger on her.

Valentina lets him go, but keeps talking to him. Conversation flows naturally between them, speaking to an easy familiarity they have with each other.

The capillaries in my eyes must all burst simultaneously because my vision goes entirely red.

Blood red.

The betrayal burns me alive from the inside out. Unlike what Rocco did to me, it won’t leave a scar, but the damage is somehow far more devastating.

She isn’t mine, she never was.

She’s his, my enemy’s. Having a knife plunged in my heart would have been less painful than being subjected to watching this betrayal play out in front of me.

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