Page 1 of Saved By the Rogue

Chapter One – Star

If I had just walked away from that door, none of this would have happened.

I had been making my way from my room down to the kitchen of the enormous mansion that my family called home – planning to sneak a few more chips before bed, even though I knew my mom would have warned me they’d make me fat. The camera added ten pounds, she always told me, and, with my father’s new campaign coming up, I didn’t want to look chubby in the pictures, right?

On the way down to the kitchen, I’d heard my name from my father’s office. It wasn’t as though he could have been talking about anyone else – who else was called Star? I paused as soon as I caught wind of the fact he was talking about me, shifting my weight so I didn’t creak the old floorboard beneath me, and pressed my ear to the door.

Too nosy for my own good, that was my problem. I could never just let things lie.

"You think she’d agree to it?" My mother asked. My father let out a sigh.

"It doesn’t matter whether she’d agree to it or not," he replied. "It’s not a matter of love. It’s a matter of politics. When we explain that to her, she’ll understand how important this is for my career."

Love? I froze to the spot. What were they talking about love for? Let alone my love life – or lack thereof. My whole life, I had been kept away from getting involved with anything serious. There had been a few dalliances with boys in high school, but that was years ago now – and, ever since, my father had kept me locked up, hidden away from the rest of the world, making sure I wasn’t going to get caught up in anything he didn’t completely approve of.

I chewed my lip. I didn’t like the sound of this. I shifted a little closer and listened to what they were saying about me.

"Yes, but a man of that age?" my mother shot back. "There’s no way she’ll go along with it. And no way she won’t put up a fight. Getting her down the aisle for a man like Viktor Lombardi..."

My heart all but stopped in my chest when I heard that name. Lombardi? It rang a bell at once. How could it not? I had met the Lombardi family a few times at the fundraisers my father held for his city councilor campaigns – they might have been on the darker side of this city, but they had money and influence, and my father was never one to turn his back on the chance to make a little more. He’d been in politics his whole life, and he knew you couldn’t get picky about who your friends were. Like the saying goes, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” That’s what he always told me, anyway, as a way to explain why he kept a man like Lombardi around.

Lombardi was not just a criminal, but one of the biggest names in this city. At nearly fifty, he was more than twice my age, but beyond that, he was a psycho. I had seen that look in his eyes when he glanced around the room at the people supporting my father’s campaign like he was silently figuring out exactly how he could take them all out if he needed to. My father might have trusted him, but I hated being around him.

And now...and now, I was finding out that they were going to...what, marry me off to him? There was no way I could have been hearing that right, no way in hell. I must have been misreading the situation in some way. I refused to believe that my dad would do something like that. He might have been power-hungry, but he would never use me, his only daughter, to consolidate that...

Would he?

Cold dread washed through my body. I didn’t want to believe it, of course I didn’t, but I knew my father too well to rule it out of the equation. He would have done anything to make sure he got what he wanted. Marrying me off to someone like Lombardi, though...

"Why do you think we’ve been keeping her here all this time?" he continued, clearly impatient with how my mother was reacting to this. "We’ve been saving her. And now, Lombardi wants a wife. And a mother for his children."

I sucked in a sharp breath. A mother to his children? No, I couldn’t have heard that right. I couldn’t. But, deep down, I knew there was no way out of it. Lombardi wasn’t going to settle for some chaste little wife he could show off at public events. He wanted...he would want more. I’d heard his reputation with women, whispers of it, how he treated them, and the thought of being on the other end of that was enough to make my stomach curdle in a sickly mess.

"There must be some other way to keep his support," my mother suggested. I heard my father rise from his seat and begin to pace.

"If there was, I would have done it already," he replied. "We need his money to continue the campaign. This is a small price to pay to keep him on our side. The last thing I want is for him to flip on us and throw his support behind someone else – someone who’s able to get him what he wants."

I pressed my hand against the wall next to me, trying to keep my legs from giving out beneath me. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I couldn’t take it in. It felt like a nightmare like I might blink, and snap awake in my bed, in that princess canopy that I’d had since I was six – the light filtering through the window as it had every morning for the last twenty-two years.

But it didn’t. I stood there, outside my father’s office, and listened to him talk about handing me off to this man, and I knew, deep down in my soul, that he wouldn’t back down.

"We at least need to talk to her about it," my mother conceded. She knew as well as I did that there would be no way to change my father’s mind once it was made up. But did she think there was some way she could spin this to me that I would agree to it? Some way that I would just...just nod and go along with it? I’d done a lot to help my father’s campaign, don’t get me wrong – I was well aware that the comfortable life my brothers and I had lived was due to the power he had accrued over the course of his political career, and it was my job to help him maintain that – but this? This was too far.

But there was no way I could change his mind now. No way I would be able to get out of this.

I turned on my heel and raced back to my room, pulling the door shut behind me as my mind reeled with the new information I was trying to take in. What did I do? What the hell did I do? And more importantly, what in the hell am I going to do?

I paced back and forth in my room, my head spinning. My mother would come talk to me soon, and I knew just how she would try to spin this to me. She would tell me this was a good idea, that it was better for me to just go along with it and accept that this was the best thing for me – that my father would be eternally grateful, and didn’t I want to help the family? That Lombardi wasn’t all that bad, and when I got to know him, I would feel differently about this...

And the worst part was, I knew I would start to believe her. I would start to trust that she knew what she was talking about. And I knew I couldn’t let that happen, I couldn’t risk that, not in a million years. I couldn’t let go of this feeling, this certainty in my chest –the sureness that I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t marry that man. I couldn’t let my first time, the first time I really gave myself to someone, be with someone like Lombardi...

I sprang to my feet. I had a few minutes before my mom came to talk to me. I had to be gone by then.

I had to get out.

I moved on autopilot around my room, digging out my old school backpack and cramming it with a handful of clothes and toiletries – I didn’t have much in the way of money, but maybe I could sell some of my stuff to make ends’ meet. I didn’t know what I was going to do, I hadn’t come up with a plan yet, but I knew I needed to get out. I needed to put as much distance between myself and this place as possible, before...

Before my parents sold me off to some psycho just so my father’s campaign didn’t fall apart.

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