Page 4 of Freed By Wrath

Daniel knows what’s best for us. He always has.

That’s what love is, isn’t it? Choosing each other every day, growing together, compromising. Accepting that happily ever afters aren’t built on stolen glances or fleeting crushes, but on trust, friendship, sacrifice, and the quiet certainty of someone choosing to stay every day.

At least, that’s what I’ve always believed and what I’ve spent eight years building.

So why does remembering one single Halloween feels more like coming home than every October that followed?

I shove the thought away before it has the chance to settle.

Tonight isn’t about old memories.

Maybe I’ve been looking at this evening all wrong.

Maybe Daniel and I just need a moment alone.

We used to steal kisses in crowded rooms because we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We’d disappear during family gatherings, lock ourselves inside spare bedrooms, and laugh every time someone walked past the door.

Maybe we could find a little of that tonight.

A quick escape. A reminder.

I smile to myself.

It’s worth a try.

I weave back through the crowd, slipping between conversations and bursts of laughter, past velvet banners embroidered with Wrath in shimmering gold. A woman dressed as a black cat sprays the perfume onto her wrist, inhales dramatically, then laughs at whatever her friend whispers in her ear.

The fragrance follows me as I pass.

Warm amber.

Dark spices.

Burnt vanilla.

I push open the front door and the music dulls the moment the door closes behind me, swallowed by walls that are thick and white and deliberately bare. Inside, the house is all clean lines and cold materials—polished concrete floors, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the garden, statement furniture in shades of black and charcoal. Serena’s decorators have done their best with the Halloween brief: black candles in architectural holders, a single enormous arrangement of dark dahlias and dried branches on the entrance console, spotlights catching the Wrath bottles displayed on a custom shelf like trophies. It looks expensive and deliberate, the way everything Serena touches does.

It doesn’t feel like Halloween. It feels like a mood board.

Quieter sounds replace the garden noise: glasses clinking in the dining room, muffled conversation drifting from the kitchen, footsteps crossing the polished hardwood upstairs.

The house feels calmer than the garden.

Almost intimate.

I move through it automatically, checking each room with the unconscious efficiency of someone who’s spent eight years learning exactly where her fiancé disappears to whenever a party becomes too crowded.

I pass a woman in a full wolf mask and a man dressed as Death itself, scythe and all, deep in conversation about aliens. A group near the kitchen is laughing at something on someone’s phone, all of them in costume—a vampire, two devils, a bride of Frankenstein with a martini. Halloween everywhere, and somehow I’m the only one who forgot to actually become something else.

“Hey.”

A man dressed as Dracula catches my attention near the staircase.

“You haven’t seen Serena, have you?”

I shake my head.

“No. She’s not outside.”