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The reality, though, was that my life was nothing more than fancy clothes, lunch with socialites, and galas with people who only cared about who had the biggest bank account.

No freedom, no choices, no aspirations.

From the minute I was born, my life had been mapped out for me: an education for no purpose other than to show people I was clever, an arranged marriage when I turned twenty-one, and a future serving my husband and raising as many children as he wanted.

It was the path my mother led, the same as her mother, and so on.

But I didn’t want that life.

I wanted more. I wanted to travel the world, discover new cultures, and experience different ways of living. I wanted to go to nightclubs with my friends and make out with random guys, just like most girls my age did. I wanted to have a career, one where I developed my creative skills and drew and painted until my hand hurt, and have people admire the art I had created.

It didn’t matter what I wanted, though. A curse of being born to parents who were part of the elite society and thought they had the right to control their children’s lives. Seriously, there were times when I often thought I’d been born in the seventeenth century, where women lived to serve men, rather than living in 2026.

11:59 pm.

I wondered what birthday present awaited me in the morning. Two weeks ago, my friend, Jenna, arrived at school in a shiny, new Jeep—a present for her eighteenth birthday. I wouldn’t be getting a car, not when I wasn’t permitted to drive.

Perhaps it would be more jewellery to show off how wealthy the Astor family was.

I was being ungrateful again, but I couldn’t help it. Life was becoming suffocating; every day, I was drowning under the weight of my parents‘ expectations of me to be their perfect, well-behaved daughter.

The chime from the Grandfather clock in our drawing room rang out, alerting me to the time. Midnight.

My birthday.

“One,” I whispered into my bedroom. “Two. Three…”

I counted each chime; the knot of anguish that lived perpetually in my stomach tightened with each resounding ding. Nothing would change, and yet, I couldn’t shake the feeling that everything was about to change.

That feeling had appeared one morning a few weeks after my seventeenth birthday, a feeling that I could never put a name to, and had grown stronger each time I did something my parents didn’t approve of. Not that there was much I could do to earn their disapproval; my leash wouldn’t allow it.

If there was something I said or did that they didn’t like, my mother often said it was because I was going through my rebellious streak. What she didn’t understand was that I was just a normal teenager, wanting to be free to live her life and make her own decisions.

As the chimes continued counting, I recalled an evening around ten months ago when I first discovered just how closely my parents watched me, making sure I didn’t bring disgrace to the family name.

It had been the annual dinner and dance at the mayor’s house, an evening where the richest folk of the city got together to brag about how important they were. I usually spent the evening nodding and smiling, and only speaking when I was spoken to, just as I had been taught.

At some point in the evening, I’d caught the eye of Elton Rothborne, a guy who went to my school and was in the year above me. With our parents distracted, we managed to sneak out, and after some heavy flirting, he leaned in to kiss me.

But the second before his lips pressed against mine, a suited man appeared as if out of thin air and grabbed Elton by the scruff of his shirt, dragging him away while ordering me to return to my parents.

I realized then that they had sent the man to trail me, and as Elton was dragged away, I was reminded of the words my mother had drilled into me from a young age. The only man you will ever be allowed to kiss, touch, or be intimate with will be your husband.

After that night, I often had the feeling that I was being watched, and on occasions, I caught suited men lingering in the distance, watching me like a hawk as if they were waiting to strike if I put a toe out of line.

I stupidly thought my mother and father would ease their control over me as I neared my eighteenth birthday, but of course, they hadn’t.

Two weeks ago, my parents flew to New York for a city break, and the only reason I’d been allowed to stay home was that I had school exams. Thinking that I was finally free of them, I took the opportunity to hang out with some friends.

I didn’t know, though, that hanging out with my friends actually turned out to be a small gathering where all kinds of drugs were being supplied in abundance. I didn’t have any interest in drugs, though; my interest had been on the group of people spray painting a wall with a variety of bright colors, creating an enormous mosaic of images.

Like a moth to a flame, I’d wandered over, and when someone offered me a spray can, I was only too happy to take it.

My parents didn’t entertain my love of the arts, claiming it was a waste of time, and had even gone as far as refusing to let me have paint supplies in the house so that I didn’t lose myself in ridiculous fantasies—my mother’s words.

So, when the opportunity arose to be creative for once, I grabbed it with both hands. Only, I’d been so engrossed in the piece I was creating that I didn’t know the cops had arrived until my friends ran away. And I didn’t know that the bag Jenson chucked at me as he scarpered was filled with several bags of weed.

Before I could protest my innocence about the drugs—I was bang to rights for the criminal damage—I was handcuffed and slung in the back of a cop car.