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I drag my eyes off the pretty, glittering diamond and stare into those dark chocolate orbs of his. He has the most earnest expression on his face, a combination of grave and…and…proud.
If there ever was a twilight zone, then I’ve fallen into it. I feel removed from the scene as if it’s not happening to me, as if I’m only an observer. Because it doesn’t feel real. It feels like a hazy blur has descended upon me. Everything is muted. The chintz sofa and heavy, dark wooden furniture falls away. Time slows down even more.
He plucks the ring from the box and slips the velvet cube back into his pocket. He reaches forward slowly, takes my hand, and gently slips it onto my finger. I gaze down at it. “What the fuck is happening right now?”
Waiting on one knee for an answer, Marku gazes up at me. I return his gaze. He inspects my face and whatever he sees there makes his face shutter in response.
“It’s a ring,” he says sarcastically. His eyes squeeze tightly for a moment. He snaps them open and speaks slowly, as if to a child. “For my future wife. That wife is you.”
And then everything comes rushing back to me. The past few slow, lumbering moments catch up to me in triple time and I’m bombarded with anger and shock. “No. I will never be your wife.”
“Fine. Fiancée, then.”
Panic sets in. The reality that they’re swooping around me like vultures, ready to feast on my entrails, settles into my gut. Clutching my hand as if it’s an alien thing, I take another step back and then another. “Not that either. I willnevermarry you.”
I yank the ring off, fling it across the room, and dash out of the house.
CHAPTER2
CRINA
Ilook out at the passing buildings from the moving car, seething with anger.
Married.
On my eighteenth birthday.
Married to a man I hate.
A bully, that’s what he is.
That’s what he’s always been. And if there had ever been a lingering doubt in my mind that he was anything but a bully, today completely swept it away.
Thoughts of cutting off his dick circle around in my head as the car glides down Forty-third Street to The Church of Saint Nicholas.
And asecretmarriage to boot.
I press my lips and swallow down the bile coming up. Instead of holding back, I should projectile vomit all over the black leather seats of this car. Let them see what I really think of the man I’m marrying in name only. I grit my teeth. And one would think my parents would be torn up with guilt over forcing me into this sham marriage.
Shame on them.
Taking me out of school in the middle of the day to dress me up in this,this—I flick at the delicate lace of my dress. An ugly, virginal dress to bind me for eternity to Marku Popescu. Another surge of acid roils in my tummy. Another wave of nausea surges through my core.
I wrench off the white tulle and lace veil decorating my head and thrust it down into the footwell of the limousine. I don’t care if his mom is my mother’s best friend. I don’t care if she’s like a second mother to me. I don’t care if they’ve had this marriage arranged since the day I was born. I donotcare.
My chest heaves in shallow breaths. I grab the handle above my head and suck in air as the car rolls around the corner to the ponderous edifice of the church. The meticulous brick façade is covered with gold-dipped icons on either side of and above the door. Topped with a cupola, this is the destination, the holy ground on which my greatest humiliation is about to be consecrated.
The car stops.
The door swings open.
As I place a toe onto the street in haughty disgust, a hand drops to help me out. I take it and instantly recoil from the sizzling heat that zaps through me.
A head dips down.
Marku.
Curly black hair and eyes so dark they could eclipse the sun. He may be only eighteen, but there’s nothing remotely boyish about this man. Not one trace of the person I’d spent endless hours with as a child, and before that as a baby. Hell, I probably heard his baby giggles from my mother’s womb.
