The Scars He Left: A Second Chance At Happiness

"Fifty strikes," Floyd ordered, his voice devoid of warmth.

I knelt in the freezing snow, watching the man I had taken a bullet for five years ago stand beside his new fiancée, Jaylah.

Because Jaylah tore her engagement dress and blamed me, Floyd let his men beat me until my face was unrecognizable.

But that was just the beginning of my hell.

To save his alliance with Jaylah's family, he drained my blood to save her mother, ignoring my own fading pulse.

When Jaylah lied that I tried to burn her, Floyd forced me to thrust my hands—my architect's hands—into glowing coals until the flesh melted.

He stripped me of my name, my protection, and finally, my life.

"You are a liability," he said, pushing me into the freezing pool with a skimmer pole.

He watched me drown with the same detached interest he used to inspect firearms.

My lungs burned, and my heart turned to ice. I died hating him more than I ever loved him.

I thought it was the end.

But then, I gasped.

Air rushed into my lungs.

I wasn't in the water. I was sitting at a drafting table, five years before the nightmare began.

My hands were smooth. No scars. No burns.

And when Floyd Meyers approached me on the quad, smiling like the boy I used to love, I didn't smile back.

I ran.

Chapter 1

The first time Floyd Meyers looked at me with the eyes of an executioner instead of a guardian, I realized a terrifying truth: saving a monster's life five years ago didn't buy his love. It only purchased a front-row seat to my own destruction.

I was on my knees in the snow.

The iron gates of the Meyers estate loomed above me, black bars slicing against the slate-grey Chicago sky.

My knees were already numb, sinking into slush that had been churned into a dirty brown by the exhaust of the convoy that had just swept inside.

Floyd was the Capo.

He was the ghost who had decapitated the Russian syndicate in a single night last winter, the man whose mere whisper made grown men cross the street. He was the man who was supposed to be my husband.

Now, he stood on the other side of the gate.

He looked impeccable in his charcoal suit, the wool coat draped over his shoulders making him look like a king surveying a beggar at his doorstep.

Beside him stood Jaylah Ryan.

She was wrapped in white fur, her arm looped through his, her smile sharp enough to cut glass. At her feet lay a heap of emerald silk.

It was the engagement dress.

The dress that was supposed to symbolize the union between the Meyers and Ryan crime families. The dress she had just torn with her own manicured claws before accusing me of sabotage.

"Fifty," Floyd said.

His voice was a low rumble, devoid of the warmth that used to greet me when I brought him coffee