Total pages in book: 60
Estimated words: 56201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 281(@200wpm)___ 225(@250wpm)___ 187(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 56201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 281(@200wpm)___ 225(@250wpm)___ 187(@300wpm)
I don’t think Papa is going to cook and eat Mama, but I think she must be like that chicken now, all still and lifeless, her blood in a red puddle around her. Papa said that could happen when my baby sister came out of her, and before I went to bed yesterday, I overheard Jeannette talking to our cook about what happened—something about placental abruption, Mama losing too much blood during an emergency C-section, and the baby needing to stay in the hospital until after the funeral.
I explain all this to Ruslan, and he starts crying. I want to cry too, but I swallow the burning sobs bubbling up my throat. Grabbing the book, I open it to the front page and begin to read to my brother, trying to sound as much like Mama as I can even though my voice keeps breaking.
Ruslan eventually stops crying and falls asleep, but I continue reading, my lips moving soundlessly, shaping the familiar words. I read until the choking, burning feeling in my throat fades and Mama’s screams no longer ring in my ears. Until the image of her, as still and lifeless as that chicken, is replaced by the picture in the book—the drawing of the beautiful black-haired princess.
A princess whose love I will win one day, no matter what it takes.
Chapter 1
Alina
For the second day in a row, I wake up to bright sunlight and the sound of ocean waves. This time, however, I know exactly where I am: on Alexei’s yacht, somewhere in the middle of the ocean. Which ocean, I don’t know, but now that my head is clearer, I can venture a guess. My brother’s mountain compound, from which Alexei stole me two days ago, is in Idaho, the western part of the United States, so unless my captor flew me all the way across the North American continent while I was drugged, this is more likely to be the Pacific.
Gingerly, I turn my head. I’m alone in bed, though the pillow next to me bears an indentation of Alexei’s head, and his scent lingers on the sheets. Pine and a hint of leather, overlaid with the salty tang of the sea and something that’s uniquely male and his.
It’s a scent I’m now intimately familiar with.
Heat suffuses my body as memories of yesterday flood in, and I jackknife to a sitting position, holding the blanket against my naked chest. Instantly, I wince. My inner thighs feel like I’ve attempted Olympic-level gymnastics, and I’m painfully sore deep inside. On instinct, I touch my head. My hair is still damp from last night’s shower. Alexei didn’t give me a chance to dry it before carrying me back to bed, where he wrapped his big, muscular body around me and promptly went to sleep, leaving me to stare numbly into the darkness, too tired to process the horror of his intentions but too wired to drift off.
At least he didn’t fuck me for the fourth time last night. Got to be grateful for small mercies.
Carefully, I slip out of bed, pull on a robe, and pad into the bathroom. My pulse is racing, last night’s numbness having fully worn off. On autopilot, I go through my morning routine—shower, brush my teeth, blow-dry my hair, apply my makeup—and the entire time, all I can think about is what my captor said last night.
A child. That’s what he wants from me. A child to replace the one my brother took away from his family—Slava, the boy Nikolai unknowingly fathered with Ksenia, Alexei’s recently deceased sister. Last night, Alexei fucked me three times without a condom, and he intends to do it over and over again, until he succeeds in tying me to him with a chain more unbreakable than any contract: a bond of blood.
It’s a cruel, utterly Machiavellian plan—and exactly what I should’ve expected from a man like Alexei Leonov, who manipulated my father into arranging our betrothal when I was barely fifteen.
That’s another revelation from last night. Alexei was the one responsible for that medieval contract, not our parents like I’d thought all those years. He wasn’t a victim of our fathers’ greed and hunger for the ultimate alliance, a nineteen-year-old boy who’d just gone along with his family’s wishes. Oh, no. He was always the mastermind behind it all, the puppet master pulling all the strings. If my father hadn’t agreed to the betrothal, Alexei would’ve stolen me from my family and kept me locked up like a princess in a tower until I was “old enough.”
His obsession with me goes far beyond anything I’d imagined, and I have no doubt he intends to keep his word about forcing a child on me. After all, this is the same man who’s killed every boy and man who’s so much as looked at me.