And now, what he found when he stepped out onto his own patio changed his life forever.
His beautiful, high-society wife, Chloe, was standing over Evelyn holding a pitcher of dirty, soapy water. Evelyn, frail and trembling in a faded dress, was on her hands and knees on the hard stone, trying to scrub a microscopic stain with a toothbrush. Next to Chloe’s designer heels was Evelyn’s antique sewing machine—the very machine that had kept Marcus from starving—smashed to pieces on the concrete.
“I told you to clean it, not cry over garbage!” Chloe shrieked, kicking the broken pieces of the sewing machine.
Marcus’s blood ran completely cold. He stepped out from the shadows, his voice a low, terrifying rumble. “What the hell is going on here?”
Chloe spun around, the color draining instantly from her perfectly contoured face.
The silence that descended upon the patio was deafening. The only sound was the jagged, panicked breathing of Evelyn as she desperately tried to gather the shattered metal and wood of her beloved sewing machine from the harsh stone floor.
