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Seven Years Later…
Life has a plan for us.
It’s predestined, like an arranged marriage without the ceremony. It binds you to an invisible contract with different terms that shape your fate.
Sometimes I wonder if my own contract was written on old paper with a smeared signature at the bottom, all shaky and forced.
Maybe that’s why I’ve been living in hell for the past seven years.
I never asked for this gilded cage with thorns wrapped around each bar. I never asked to be stolen from the warmth of my mother’s arm at ten years old and thrust into a world that tries to break my spirit at every turn. Ripped apart from all I knew because she had displeased the mighty and terrible Cian O’Sullivan somehow.
I never asked for this brutal criminal captain in my life, nor his insistence on me calling him ‘father’ when his love is rotten and full of maggots. A man I hate with all my heart, so much so, that even as I’m sitting at his dining table and eating his food, I’m daydreaming about picking up my dinner knife and stabbing him in the chest with it, just so I can watch his blood pour fast and hot all over his roasted lamb.
I may call him ‘father’ to his face, but in my head, he’ll always be a stealer of dreams. The happiness thief.
“Ada,” he roars suddenly, his mocking Irish brogue thundering down the table at me. “Stop staring at your fucking food and eat it!”
Dutifully, I start cutting up my lamb into neat slivers, keeping my eyes cast low in the way he expects from all the female members of his so-called family.
I know my role here. I don’t speak, even when I’m spoken to. Unless he commands it. I exist purely to pay a debt and to give him future business leverage, while he exists purely to subjugate and conquer what little remains of the girl I used to be.
He’s the true definition of a bully. A person who “seeks to harm or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable.” I looked it up in the library once after he broke my arm for talking back to him not long after I arrived.
I was just a child then. My vulnerability was still a living breathing thing. But with time comes concessions. Vulnerability turns to survival. These days, I’m more obedient than his perma-snarling bulldogs that are slobbering at his feet under the table and begging for scraps of meat.
“Easy, Cian,” I hear Kirill Semenov purr, his strong Russian accent less intimidating but no less dangerous. “In my world, women are only considered beautiful when their hearts and bones are exposed. You should be encouraging her to eat less food, not more.”
I eye the fork in my other hand, resisting the urge to stab my second most detested man with it and make it a murder buffet tonight instead of a sit-down endurance.
Kirill Semenov is thepakhanof the Bratva chapter in London and a close business associate of O’Sullivan’s. He’s also the man I’m betrothed to—a killer who plans to wed me on my eighteenth birthday, which is only four weeks from now.
Four weeks.
O’Sullivan’s wife, Roisin, loves to tell me that I’m nothing better than the spoils of war. That I’ve been raised like prized cattle, only to be slaughtered at the altar of O’Sullivan’s ambition.
She’s wrong.
I’m aprisonerof war, and all I desire is my freedom.
The hush after Kirill’s casual rebuke stretches into minutes. Cutlery is discarded, and the lamb forgotten. My ‘father’ has the kind of temper that murders on a whim, as well as breaking the arms of innocent ten-year-old girls.
“Bones, eh?” He lets out a rare bark of laughter and bangs his huge fist down on the table, making all the plates jump. “Orla,” he thunders at the sour-faced housekeeper hovering by the door. “Take Ada’s dinner away. She won’t be eating anything else tonight. Bread and water only for the next few days.”
I sit very still, not betraying a single emotion, all the while feeling the heat of the Russian’s stare as my plate is whisked away. It’s as if he’s daring me to lift my eyes to him—to challenge him for making my existence even more miserable—just so he can take up the mantle of my punisher four weeks ahead of schedule.
I imagine him licking his lips at my cowering submission while he thinks up even more brutal ways to hurt me once he takes possession of my name and my body. My maid, Anika, is Russian. She told me all about men like him. Bratva soldiers only know how to take and take until there’s nothing left to give.
He makes my skin crawl.
He looks like a giant slug with his big bald head and no neck. The rest of him is just a straight column of hard muscle and tattoos, and there are things crawling behind his jet-black irises that make me cower and flinch.
When I look at them, I don’t see an escape from O’Sullivan’s house…
I see a darker brand of pain in my future.
CHAPTER 4
ADA
