Page 1 of Princess Broken

Chapter One

Anastasia’s alive.

I can feel it.

I can smell her sweet scent in the air, perceive her flashing eyes in the moonlight, and detect her energy’s unique vibrations in my bones.

So many rumors of her survival have been proved untrue. And after a century it doesn’t seem possible, and yet my heart rejoices. I have no doubt. She is alive.

The demon wasn’t lying.

Over the decades, he’s grown crueler and crueler, tormenting the immortality he gave me with excruciating pain. Despite my pleas for mercy and for him to see logic, the demon continued to insist that she lived, inflicting pain for my failure to give him what I promised.

But he was right. Somehow, after being thought dead for more than a hundred years, my Anastasia lives. My heart swells as I sense her. She’s not near, and she’s changed, transformed into something not human, but it’s her. Wherever she is on this earth, I will find her.

"Pain slices into my mind and body. My back and neck arch and my spine nearly breaks, bending me until my head comes inches from the ground behind me.

The demon’s here. Back to torture me yet again.

“She’s no longer a maiden!” the demon’s voice shrieks in my head like a million hot spikes. “You promised me an unspoiled maiden!”

My spine snaps me forward, and I drop to my knees, sobbing. “She was a maiden when we made our deal.” I can’t control what’s happened over a century of not seeing her. He must see reason.

“The price of our bargain has risen!”

Renewed pain slices into me. But the demon’s claim she’s not a virgin could be a lie to further harass me. He’s hitting me with the one thing he knows will hurt most.

Then a different kind of agony enters my body—a searing, scraping pain that’s shredding my heart.

Someone is taking her. Someone is penetrating my love’s small body with his stiffness. Defiling her maidenhood. I can feel it. Feel her body reacting to the violation.

No! That right is mine! It has always been mine.

But I sense even more changes in the vibrations I feel from her. She’s feeling pleasure, discovering her sexuality, as an undeserving bastard jabs his rod inside places I long ago marked as my own—mine alone.

Rage builds alongside my infernal, unbearable pain.

Anastasia is mine. I charmed her parents, endured her dull sisters and, with the help of the demon, cast the occasional spell to stop her baby brother’s excessive bleeding, and every one of those things cost me dearly.

In exchange for his help, the demon forced me to do his bidding. But I gladly did all he asked, did it all because of her.

It’s true I found some amusement in cuckholding the Czar by defiling his wife, and I admit I took pleasure in ruining nearly every lady in St. Petersburg society behind their husbands’ backs, sometimes in front of them, but I did it all to get to her. It was all about her. Always about my Anastasia.

And the demon knows it.

I’ve endured over a hundred years of torture because I confessed the deepest truth in my heart in exchange for him letting me live, and then I failed to deliver her as promised. I failed to let the demon take her soul while I claimed her body.

I made many deals with the demon, first to give me powers to mesmerize the Czar and Czarina, and then to help her sickly brother so they’d continue to keep me near. But the costliest deals came to save me from death after each attempt on my life. Each time I offered the demon more—more and more of my humanity, of myself. Until I became part demon.

After my last assassination attempt, I was left floating in the near-frozen Neva river, drowning, poisoned and shot multiple times. It was then I confessed my true heart and promised the demon everything.

I promised him the only thing that ever truly mattered to me. The only thing I ever loved. In exchange for my life, I promised to give the demon my Ana.

And now that I’m sure she’s alive, my need to be with my love has turned desperate. A burning, insatiable need. I can only take her once, but for a brief moment I will make her truly mine before he claims her.

And after it’s done, he’ll finally release me. Even if that release will come at a great cost. I no longer care about the price.

A century of pain has taught me I have no way to trick him, and once I fulfill my end of the bargain, my torture will end.

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