Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 73365 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73365 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
I’m to be married. It should be a time of joy, but all I feel is dread as I walk down the aisle toward a man who only wants me for my family ties. But my walk is cut short when Mateo Milani enters the cathedral, murders my groom, and takes me for himself.
Mateo is cold, violent, and vicious beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. The devil with a handsome face and eyes that haunt my dreaming and waking moments. There’s no escaping his grasp, and even if I could run, Mateo would find me and drag me right back to hell. He wants to possess me, stealing pieces of my soul with his cruel words and heated touches.
His motives are sinister, his methods calculated.
I hate him in ways I’ve never hated anyone in my life.
But the part of this nightmare that scares me the most is the way he makes me forget my hatred, the way he commands my pleasure, and the way I crave him when I should want him dead.
TW: This is a dark romance with equally dark themes, language, and situations.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
LUCRETIA
A white dress. A full cathedral. Hundreds of people turning to stare at the bride. At me.
My stomach churns, bile rising at the back of my throat as I force my feet to carry me forward. My father holds my arm in a death grip as my mother watches me with thin lips and narrowed eyes from the front row.
I won’t run, no matter how badly I want to. There’s nowhere for me to go. Nowhere that could shelter me from the hell I’d unleash if I tried to escape this narrow path to damnation.
This wasn’t supposed to be my fate. I was free of my family’s grasp. I’d finally made it out into the wide world beyond the confines of my last name.
Until I was pulled back in, forced into the role I’d tried so hard to avoid.
I’m walking back into it right now, one crystal-encrusted heel after another, crushing the white rose petals that were hastily thrown down by a distant cousin with her hair in ringlets and a skip in her step, one who will likely someday meet my same fate: a forced marriage for political and monetary gain.
The acid in my stomach tries to force its way into my mouth and onto the bruised petals. I swallow it back, barely.
I sway when I get halfway, the entire cathedral crawling with black dots. No, it’s my veil—like dozens of ants on the white fabric, ready to sting and bite. My mother’s lips somehow grow even thinner, her disapproval eating through me. I have to keep moving.
This is it. This is the end of what was supposed to be my life. Now it will belong to someone else.
“He won’t hurt you,” my father whispers over the drone of the organ and pulls my arm even tighter, making my shoulder ache from the pressure. “He gave me his word.”
My heart pounds so loudly I’m surprised no one else can hear it. It’s like a drum in my ears, a funeral dirge of incessant percussion that beats discordantly against the light melody floating through the cathedral.
When I let my gaze rise, I find my intended. Horatio Manchello. He’s young, his eyes bright as he surveys his bride. Even through the veil, I can see the way he stares, his eyes traveling up and down my form as his face breaks into a wide smile.
I’ve never met him, never so much as shook his hand, and he’s looking at me as if I’m his next meal. Dread pools in my gut and sweat begins to bead along my forehead. I sway again, the black ants crawling closer and promising pain.
“Keep it together,” my father hisses.
I can’t. I try to stop walking, but my father pulls me along, our steps halting as he half drags me to the altar.
My mother pins me with a disapproving glare, and I wonder how long it will be before she backhands me again. Even now, I feel the dull ache along my jaw, a bruise probably growing right beside the one she gave me a week ago. Or the healed one I got a month ago when this nightmare began.
“You must do your duty to this family!” Her voice echoes in my mind along with the crack her hand made when she hit me. It had been years since she’d struck me. Ferdinand had put a stop to it when he was old enough to challenge her and my father.
Ferdinand.
The thought of my brother is like a lead weight in my throat, and I have to banish him from my mind. If I don’t, I’m going to collapse right here in front of everyone and beg the priest to stop this from happening to me.