Once I am dressed, they tell me to wait, and I run my hands over the fabric, realizing it is silky and smooth and edged with lace.

After around fifteen minutes, Penny is leading me somewhere again.

“Careful of the steps,” she says, holding my arm.

Finally, I hear the words I have been waiting for.

“You may remove the blindfold,” the security guard says, and I pull it off quickly.

I gasp with horror. I’m wearing a wedding dress.

A fucking wedding dress. What the fuck.

My eyes dart left and right in absolute panic.

I’m standing at an altar, wearing a wedding dress.

The man who kidnapped me is walking towards me. There are security guards all around us.

The altar is beneath a beautiful archway decorated with roses and soft white fabric. It’s early evening, and there are fairy lights glittering around us.

If not for the shock, I might even say it was pretty.

But I can’t. I can’t seem to get any words to come out of my mouth. I am just staring in horror at the asshole who kidnapped me, now standing in front of me wearing a black suite with a flower in the front pocket that matches the flowers of the archway.

I do the only thing a girl should do in this situation.

I spin around, kick the altar with all my strength, and when it tips over, I run.

Luckily, the dress is not one of those princess dresses with a giant goofy skirt. It flows behind me in a white stream as I bolt across the garden, realizing I am in the same predicament that I was the first time I tried to escape.

I have nowhere to go.

It doesn’t take the asshole long to catch up with me this time, and when he does, he pins me against the wall along the side of the house and growls darkly, “If you don’t go along with this and marry me, I am going to kill your father. So, if I were you, I’d think very carefully about your next move.”

I bite my lip, thinking my next move is to kick him in the balls and try run away again. If he thinks threatening to kill my father is a bad thing, he doesn’t know me at all.

I don’t care if my father dies. I wish he was dead.

I gasp at my own thought.

Who am I to wish another person dead? I can’t believe I just thought that.

He grins down at me, thinking that I gasped because of his threat.

“I can assume, then, that you will marry me willingly?” he laughs darkly.

I don’t want to marry him, but it doesn’t look like I have a choice. Besides, what difference does it make? My life is a prison whether I am here or there. I have been in prison my entire life, and now it’s just a change of scenery.

However, instead of using this situation to keep my father safe, I want to make a different request.

“On one condition,” I say boldly, tilting my head up towards him and staring directly into his eyes.

“The condition is that I don’t kill your father. You don’t get to add more conditions.”

“Well, then, I want to change the condition of our agreement to something else.”

He pulls back a little, looking confused.