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I’m living in the eighteen hundreds. What’s next? Are they going to hang my blood-stained sheets out the window on my wedding night?
My stomach churns, hunger forgotten and replaced by a wave of nausea while I feel my world tilt on its axis. I have to get away from here. I step back and almost slip on the death floors from hell before I quickly slip my pumps off my feet with shaky hands.
I freeze when, through the crack, I see James’s head tilt as if listening for something. I wish it were the stinging slap of my hand against the traitorous fuck-wit’s earhole.
I wait, holding my breath and praying that my pounding heartbeat, which sounds like war drums, can’t be heard by James’s incredibly sharp ears.
I see James relax before I finally get to put my almost twenty-one years of survival skills my father drummed into me nearly every day of my life to good use as I stealthily slip away.
As I climb the sweeping stairs to my bedroom, I feel myself going numb, and the air around me grows heavy, making it hard to breathe as it squeezes in on me.
When I’m finally in the haven that is my bedroom, I lean against my bedroom door and slide to the floor, not caring about the ripping noise my tight skirt makes as I raise my knees to my chin.
I don’t give a shit about a ripped skirt when my life and heart have just been torn apart—I’m steel reeling from the news that I’ve been betrothed to someone since I was three years old!
Chapter 2
ISABELLA
“Isabella?” My father’s voice breaks into my foggy brain. “Honey, are you in there?”
I sit silent for a few seconds, hoping he’ll go away as I teeter between a seesaw of emotions, from wanting to smash everything I can pick up in front of me, to screaming or flinging myself on the bed like an eighteenth-century maiden and weep.
As my father is still living in that era, the last option would be the more fitting one. But I’m not a fucking swoony maiden. I’m a twenty-first-century puppet whose father’s been pulling her strings for twenty-one years.
My fingers touch the gold locket around my neck. It was my mother’s. My father gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday. I wonder if I’d still be engaged if she were alive.
“Princess, have you fallen asleep waiting for me?” My father tries the door handle and finds the door locked. His voice is a little more panicked now. “Honey? What’s going on?”
I quickly stand and move away from the door. “I’m getting dressed,” I lie and bend to look at the back of my skirt. Okay, so maybe not a lie. “Give me a minute.”
“Can you just throw your gown on, sweetheart?” my father calls through the door. “I need to talk to you, and I don’t have much time.”
About what, Dad? I quickly find my robe and pull it on. How did you betrothed me when I was still a toddler and keep me in a glass cage so I’m chaste for my betrothed?
I unlock and open it a crack, plastering a smile on my face, hoping I don’t look like one of those creepy clowns at the fair. It takes everything I have not to punch him in the face, and I settle for imagining it instead.
And thanks to my dad, I could probably kill him with one uppercut to the nose, but orange has never really been my color, and I have too much to do in my life to go to jail.
“Hey, Dad, what’s up?” I stick my head out. “Are you ready to go eat? I think my stomach is about to go find its own food.”
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart, but some urgent business has come up, and I have to leave for a few days.” My father gives me his apologetic smile. “I have to go to New York.”
“Oh!” I look at him, surprised. “What about my birthday on Saturday?”
“I’ll be back for that,” my father promises, leaning in to kiss my forehead. “It’s a very important day for my princess, who’s turning twenty-one.”
And who you’re marrying off to someone on the other end of a conference call’s son! I want to scream at him. But I don’t. As always, I hold my tongue and let my imagination berate him instead.
Never let your opponent see your hand, Isabella. Remain calm in a storm no matter what emotions are flowing through your veins. Remember, you can deal with them later. To do that, you need to stay alive, alert, and aloof.
This might not be life or death… although, if he’s marrying me off to one of his client’s sons, it more than likely will be the case. This was a matter of the rest of my fucking life, and the man standing in front of me, who I looked up to, who I thought loved me, and cared for me, had just shown me his hand!
And I’m going to take a huge, big fleshy bite out of it. Fuck you, Father; you just declared war, and you don’t even know it.
“Princess?” My father’s brow creases as he looks at me worriedly. “Honey, have you been using those sleeping pills the doctor gave you for your exam anxiety? You look tired!”
“James only collected the prescription for me this morning,” I tell him, an idea taking root in my vengeful brain. “But I’ll use them tonight, I promise.”
