Chapter 3 The Changed Adria

Chapter 3

ADRIA

The hot water scalded my skin, turning it pink and raw, but I didn't move to adjust the temperature. I stood under the shower spray until the bathroom filled with steam, until I could barely see my own hand in front of my face, until every trace of that soup-and his touch-had been washed down the drain.

My phone buzzed on the bathroom counter, the sound cutting through the white noise of running water. I ignored it. Then it buzzed again. And again.

With a sigh, I turned off the shower and wrapped myself in a towel, my wet hair dripping onto the tile floor. The phone screen lit up with a new message, and I already knew who it was from before I picked it up.

**Damien: Don't bother coming back to the club. Your presence and that horrible soup you made have made Adina sick. I won't be coming home tonight either.**

I stared at the message, waiting for the familiar ache in my chest, the desperate need to fix things, to apologize, to beg him to reconsider. I waited for the tears that usually came so easily, for the crushing weight of failure that had become my constant companion.

Nothing came.

I felt nothing but a distant, clinical observation of the words on the screen. Adina was sick. Of course she was. Probably from laughing too hard at my humiliation. And Damien wouldn't be coming home-meaning he'd be spending the night with her, or Amber, or whoever else caught his fancy.

A month ago, I would have called him. Begged him to come home. Promised to make it right. Waited up all night in case he changed his mind, sitting by the door like a dog waiting for its master.

I rolled my eyes and dropped the phone on the counter without responding.

The silence that followed felt liberating.

I walked to my closet-the small, pathetic closet where I'd hung all the bland, modest clothes Damien preferred. Beiges and grays and navy blues. Nothing too bright, nothing too attention-grabbing, nothing that might embarrass him or make me stand out. I pushed past them all, reaching for the very back where I'd shoved everything from my old life into a single garment bag.

My fingers closed around soft fabric, and I pulled out a pair of black joggers and a faded gray sweatshirt from my alma mater-MIT, where I'd triple-majored in computer science, business, and engineering. The sweatshirt had paint stains on one sleeve from an art class I'd taken for fun, and a small burn hole from a late-night soldering accident in the robotics lab.

I pressed the fabric to my face and breathed in deeply. It smelled like storage and dust, but underneath that, I could almost catch traces of who I used to be.

Adriana Salvadore. Heiress. Genius. Fighter. Friend.

Not Adriana Chen, the pathetic, desperate wife who'd erased herself for a man who'd never wanted her in the first place.

I dressed quickly, my body remembering the comfort of clothes that actually fit properly, that didn't restrict my movement or make me feel like I was playing dress-up in someone else's life. I pulled my wet hair into a ponytail, grabbed my keys, and headed for the garage.

The Mercedes SUV Damien had bought me sat pristine and barely used-he preferred I take taxis so I wouldn't "embarrass him with my terrible driving." Next to it, covered with a tarp and gathering dust, was my baby: a matte black Ducati Panigale V4 that I'd customized myself. I'd told Damien it belonged to a friend who was storing it here.

I bypassed both vehicles and went for the BMW sedan I'd registered under a shell company-untraceable, unremarkable, perfect for disappearing.

The drive to the storage facility took forty minutes. I'd rented the unit three years ago, back when I was still myself, before I'd seen that necklace and lost my mind. It was located near the outskirts of the city, in a neighborhood that straddled the line between industrial and residential, the kind of place where no one asked questions and security cameras were more for show than function.

I parked in the empty lot and made my way to unit 247, punching in the code I'd memorized but never written down. The metal door rolled up with a screech of protest, revealing boxes stacked neatly against the walls, labeled in my own handwriting: **Books. Equipment. Clothes. Documents.**

And there, in a fireproof safe in the corner: **Identity.**

I pulled out the safe, entered the combination, and lifted the lid. Inside lay everything I'd locked away to become Damien's wife. My real driver's license. My credit cards linked to my actual accounts. My passport. My old phones-three of them, each serving different purposes.

I grabbed the primary one, a custom-built smartphone with encryption that would make the NSA weep, and powered it on.

The boot-up screen glowed in the dim light of the storage unit. I watched the loading bar inch forward, my heart rate picking up for the first time since I'd dropped that thermos upstairs at the club.

Then the notifications started.

The phone vibrated so violently it nearly jumped out of my hand. Messages flooded in, thousands of them, the notification counter climbing so fast it became a blur. Missed calls: 3,847. Text messages: 12,493. Emails: 28,756. Social media notifications: exceeded maximum count.

I scrolled through them with shaking fingers. My parents. My brothers-Adrian, Mikael, and Elijah. My sisters-Sophia and Isabella. My best friends from college-Maya, Jordan, and China. Messages from my martial arts master, Sifu Wong. Encrypted messages from my hacker collective, the ones I'd built security systems with for Fortune 500 companies. Emails from fellow CEOs I'd collaborated with on tech startups.

**Mom: Adriana, please call us. We're worried sick.**

**Adrian: This isn't funny anymore. Where the hell are you?**

**Maya: If you don't respond in 24 hours I'm filing a missing person report.**

**Sifu Wong: Your absence from the dojo speaks of either death or cowardice. I hope it's the former.**

That last one made me smile despite everything. Sifu Wong had never believed in coddling his students.

I opened Facebook-an account I'd abandoned eighteen months ago with over fifty thousand followers. My last post stared back at me: **Going ghost for a while. Don't worry, I'll be back when I've found what I'm looking for.**

The comments section had exploded. People asking if I was okay, if I'd been kidnapped, if I'd joined a cult. Conspiracy theories about my disappearance. Memorial posts from people who'd assumed I was dead.

I navigated to Instagram, where I had a hundred thousand followers from my photography hobby and tech reviews. Same story. TikTok, where my martial arts videos and coding tutorials had garnered two million followers. Same desperate messages, same concern, same assumption that something terrible had happened to me.

Something terrible had happened to me. I'd lost my mind over a borrowed necklace and a childhood fantasy.

My fingers moved across the keyboard, typing before I could second-guess myself:

**I'm back.**

I hit post simultaneously across all platforms.

The response was instantaneous. Likes flooded in faster than I could count. Comments exploded. Shares multiplied. My phone started ringing immediately, the screen lighting up with incoming calls from dozens of numbers.

But only one mattered.

**Adrian - Twin Brother**

I answered on the second ring.

"ADRIANA FUCKING SALVADORE, WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN?!"