This washisfault!
He was the one who took me to that gala; he was the one who put me in harm’s way. Now I had to marry my kidnapper to be safe from his enemies, enemies I had nothing to do with.
How messed up was that!
I sat on the edge of the bed, my face buried in my hands. This wasn’t how I envisioned my life at twenty-one, and this man was hell-bent on ruining everything I had spent years building.
Because of him, my education was at a standstill, my mental state was a complete mess, and my life was being threatened. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he had to add marriage to the list.
Marriage!
What the hell was wrong with that man?
“Argh!” I fell back onto the mattress and covered my face with a pillow.
I hate him. I hate him. I hate him so much!
Karik was the definition of evil, and I despised him with every fiber of my being.
I tossed the pillow aside and stared at the ceiling, seething in silence. The wordmarriagekept resurfacing, no matter how hard I tried to push it down. And the worst part was that he left no room for argument.
Basically, I didn’t have a choice in this. My voice didn’t fuckin’ matter. He said this union was going to keep me safe. And maybe there was an iota of truth in that.
But it was also way too generous for a ruthless man like him. There was no way he’d decide to tie himself to a complete stranger forever just because he believed it was the only way to keep her alive.
It didn’t make sense at all.
What’s in it for him?
What did he stand to gain from this marriage?
Those questions and many more lingered on the fringes of my mind.
I spent the whole night thinking about my predicament, how quickly my situation had gone from bad to worse. There was no way out of this. I was trapped, stuck between marrying him and running away, where I would be killed.
How sure was I that his enemies were really watching me? What if it was just a made-up story meant to scare me?
But why would he lie about something like that and still not give me the option to walk away? Nothing was adding up. The more I thought about it, the more confusing it became.
Only two things were certain right now: my inability to escape because he’d tripled the security around the house, and the fact that I was going to be his wife whether I liked it or not.
The idea alone made my blood boil in ways I couldn’t explain. But despite how much I hated him, I wasn’t the least bit irritated by the thought of his touch. And Ishouldbe, because I loathed his guts. But I wasn’t.
Weird.
Veryweird.
I’d come back to this later. Right now, I needed to build more hatred for the man who was about to steal my future.
The next day, while lost in my own thoughts, the knock on my door snapped me back to the present.
At first, I thought it was him, Karik. But then I remembered the son of a bitch never knocked. He would just walk right in, like he did last night when he caught a glimpse of me naked.
Fuckin’ psycho!
Agata strolled in with two other women I didn’t recognize, both polished and elegantly dressed. One carried a measuring tape and a leather-bound notebook.
You gotta be kidding me.
