His Love Was My Executioner

While I was being tortured on a spinning wheel, my husband, Don Percival Tremaine, was introducing his new fiancée to the family.

His arm was wrapped around that nurse. “If I were to abandon a woman this good, I wouldn’t be fit to be the Don!”

"Liliana? She might as well be dead!"

My torturer plunged the knife into me. "One last chance. Are you going to call him or not?"

I gritted my teeth. "He doesn't want me anymore. What's the point?"

Ten days later, the FBI discovered a woman's badly decomposed body by the lake.

And the man who had wished me dead... lost his mind.

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1

When Percival Tremaine arrived at the scene, FBI agents were struggling to lift a corpse—crawling with maggots and gnawed by scavengers—onto the examination table.

After ten days under the scorching sun, it was little more than a putrid, stinking mess. Even the medical examiner stood to the side, shaking his head.

An agent, his face grimacing against the stench, handed Percival a sealed bag containing a tarnished cross necklace.

Percival glanced at it once and scoffed.

"This is definitely not hers. Don't waste my time."

With that, he turned to leave.

The agent, infuriated by his callousness, couldn't help but question him.

"And you consider identifying your wife's belongings a waste of time?"

"Are you even a man?"

Percival's steps halted abruptly, his fists clenched tightly.

"She is not my wife! She's a traitor who sold out the family for money! What right do you have to lay a guilt trip on me?"

"When I was diagnosed with cancer, when they told me I didn't have long to live, how did she treat me?"

"When I was going through chemo day and night, wasting away, my hair falling out in clumps, where was she?"

"When I was sobbing in agony every night, wondering why she abandoned me, did she feel even a shred of guilt?"

The agent stared, stunned, at the man unraveling before him.

Percival's nostrils flared, as if trying to wrestle down some raw, ugly part of himself.

"Sorry… I didn't know…"

The agent patted his shoulder in a silent, apologetic gesture.

What neither of them knew was that I was right there beside them, as light as air.

I waved my hands frantically, trying to make them see me.

"That's not what happened! It wasn't like that at all!"

I screamed until my throat was raw, desperate for them to hear.

"Percival, when you were getting cancer treatment, I was locked in an abandoned factory, being tortured."

"When you lost all your hair, mine was brutally shaved off too, a humiliation that cut deeper than any blade."

"When you couldn't understand why I had disappeared, I was in agony, praying with every fiber of my being that you would come and save me."

But.

He would never hear any of it.

Because I was now a soul with only a week of existence left, and I had used all my strength just to fly to his side.

Still, I couldn't tell him the truth.

I collapsed to the ground, helpless, as ethereal tears streamed down my face.

Almost in sync, the man's eyes reddened with unshed tears.

His broad shoulders slumped as he muttered to himself.

"When she left, she didn't take any of her jewelry."

"As if she'd already decided she was never coming back."

"So, Agent, don't call me again. There's no way she's dead, and there's absolutely no way this corpse is her."

With that, he turned and strode out of the medical examiner's office without a second glance.

Just as he walked out the door, the expression on a nearby forensic examiner’s face changed.

"Mr. Tremaine, wait a moment!"

At almost the same instant, Percival's phone rang. The hardness in his eyes melted, his voice turning gentle as he answered.

He didn't hear the examiner's call at all.

"Calista, did you have another nightmare? Don't be scared, I'm coming home right now."

"Do you still want that tiramisu from the Italian restaurant? I'll pick it up on the way."

He drove away with a smile on his lips, leaving the puzzled examiner to look at the agent.

"The test results just came in. The decedent's blood type is Rh-negative O."

"If I remember correctly, when his wife was injured and brought to the hospital, her records showed her blood type was also Rh-negative O, right?"

"She's the only person with that blood type in our Chicago database. Maybe you should try contacting him again."